A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus looked up to heaven and said, father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son that your son may give glory to you in as much as you have given him authority over all mankind that he may bestow eternal life on those you gave him. Eternal life is this, to know you, the only true god, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ. I have given you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do.
Do you now, father, give me glory at your side, a glory I had with you before the world began. I have made known your name to those you gave me out of this world. These men you gave me were yours, and they have kept your word. Now they realize that all that you gave me comes from yourself. I entrusted to them the message that you entrusted to me, and they have received it.
They have known that in truth, I came from you. They had believed it was you who sent me. For these, I pray, not for the world, but for these you have given me, for they are really really yours. Just as all that belongs to me is yours, so all that belongs to you is mine. It is in them that I have been glorified.
I am in the world no more, but these are in the world as I come to you. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Further to my well chosen remarks of yesterday morning, vividly remembered, of course, but which I dare to recall in capsule form was simply this, that god made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. It's that simple and that infinitely complex, but it is that simple.
And that little tiny truth that our kids used to learn, they don't do it anymore, but they used to learn in their first grade has not been improved upon by the wisest men who have lived. All they have been able to do is to echo it, to desert it, and then to think they have discovered something when they go back to it, a few of them, and rediscover it. They reinvent the wheel. Now, what I tried to say yesterday was that this what what I said, that is a call to holiness. And I don't care what words you use, but I can't find a better one than that.
We're called to salvation. That means holiness. And I said there's no such thing as collective holiness or community holiness or societal holiness Except in the sense that you speak of a collectivity of individuals, irreplaceable human beings. Individual human beings. We forget this that the only reality is the individual human being, community, society, the state, the nation.
These are abstractions. They're ideas with a foundation in the actuality. What is the actuality? Individual beings. As our holy father said, irreplaceable.
Every single one individual. Now a better text to further my well chosen remarks of yesterday could not have been improved upon with this quotation from Saint Paul. Now I'm wearing red vestments again today. You know what that means? Martyrs.
Blood spilled. Blood spilled for the faith. That's important. Plenty of blood has been spilled for plenty of causes. Just Saturday morning, a ship goes down off of Bermuda, and I don't know how many men are lost.
They gave their lives for something or other. People give their lives for all kinds of things. There's nothing special about that. But we're talking about martyrs. We're talking about human beings who individually made a decision for Christ and died for it and died for it.
This was the big problem with the Jesuit martyrs. Did they die for their faith? That's the essence of martyrdom, not that you died. Now listen at this line from Saint Paul that was so well read to you, but I'd like repeat it. Paul says now notice he's speaking.
This is this is this is very close to getting emotional as Paul as Saint Paul ever got. But he says, I put no value on my life if only I can finish my race. He doesn't say the race, my race, my individual. I don't run your race. You don't run mine.
So Paul says, I don't value my life if, if if if only I can finish my race and complete the service to which I have been assigned by the lord Jesus Christ, bearing witness to the gospel, the good news of God's grace. There's the message I want you to get into your hearts. Don't be put off by the thought, would I ever have the guts to stand up and be and offer my life in cold blood for the faith? Would I? That scares the dickens out of me, and the word dickens isn't what came to my mind.
I I don't know what I'm called to. Saint Paul says, I'm going up to Jerusalem. I have a feeling that change and imprisonment wake me, but I don't know, but I'm going. And I only pray that I will finish my race, that I will do the job that God has assigned to me. What's that job?
Being a martyr? I don't know. I won't know until the day comes. You won't know until the day comes, but you are called upon to complete, to finish your race. And you don't know the future.
You don't know that future. All you know is today to some extent. And that's these are tremendous words of Saint Paul. Tremendous man. Here's a man speaking from his heart.
He said, I'll never see your faces again. He has an adumbration of what's going to tragedy, if you want to call it that, but it's not a tragedy. You cannot I don't care what successes you have in life, You cannot be successful unless you complete your race, unless you complete the job assigned to you by God almighty. This is point that the John Henry Cardinal Newman makes tremendously. He says, and he his magnificent and eloquent way goes on and repeats it to fully to a page almost, that God has assigned a work to me, and it won't get done unless I do it.
What is that work? To be a martyr with shedding my blood? Very rarely. And when the day comes, god's grace will be sufficient. What I have to face is today, to run my race today, not tomorrow.
And I may have flopped yesterday, but I'm not gonna flop today. Today's the day of the race. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year, not next month, not in the next century. Today. Today is your first day in eternity.
These are take them to heart. No. You are here, these vestments represent Saint Bob's and 30 Martyrs, the first bishop of Germany. He he died around 07/1950, was a Benedictine monk. Notice how we're tied into this.
We're speaking of it today as it happened as if it happened yesterday. And we rightly think of that. That's present tense. Saint Boniface in a certain sense is present tense. He's not history alone exclusively.
And so when we put all this together, we come out with our daily lives. We're called upon to serve God and God alone. Notice that. We're not supposed to have a mixed devotion. You know, Christ said you cannot serve two masters.
But we try to prove him wrong all the time. We try to straddle a fence. That used to be a very significant metaphor. People don't know what a fence is anymore except some kind of a galvanized iron fence. But in the days when we had those fine old wooden fences and you tried to straddle them, you knew you were in trouble.
But Christ said, you can't do that. You can't serve two masters. You've got to serve God and God alone. That's your Jerusalem. You don't know why that's going to carry you, and you don't have any right to know.
No one said you were going to know. All that Christ said is come follow me. If you do that, my grace is sufficient for you. You'll make it. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit.
Amen.