A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Now I again remind you that this is a continuation of this famous chapter 16. And the best thing I can say to any of you is to take up your New Testament and read this chapter in its entirety at one reading. It'll take you just a few minutes because otherwise, you do not get the impact of it, breaking it up and shattering it in these little excerpts every morning. Anyway, our lord continued this discourse.
He says, I tell you truly, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. There you have that contradiction between the world of Christ and the world of man. And you can't put the two together, believe me. You can try. It's fun.
You will grieve for a time, but your grief will be turned into joy. When a woman is in labor, she is sad that her time has come. But when she has born her child, she no longer remembers the pain for joy that a boy has been born into the world. In the same way, you are sad for a time, but I shall see you again. Then your hearts will rejoice with a joy that nobody can take from you.
On that day, you will have no gospel, the good news of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. The world in which we are living is a world that is claiming much more than it deserves. And in many ways, we can't escape from this world.
We're in it. But as our blessed lord said, you cannot be of it. Now the great thrust in the twentieth century, it goes all the way back to the period of enlightenment. But the great thrust is that god and his son, Jesus Christ, were wrong. We can make this, they tell us, a good, a happy, a pleasant world, a utopia.
Well, just remember that the that the utopia means nowhere. Saint Thomas More coined the word. It means there's no place, and he was right. The old man Marx comes along at the end of the nineteenth century, and he gives us a further thrust. And we, in the Catholic church, are have become dyed with the red of it.
I don't you call it liberation theology. Call it anything you want, but it's a complete change of focus. Instead of looking at god, we're looking at man. We we have become anthropomorphic, turning towards man instead of being theocentric, centered on god. Now the one thing that Jesus Christ says is you've got to be centered on god.
That's first. Now there are other other interests that you must have. What the first the next one being yourself, personal salvation, heaven. And third is your neighbor, that you must love your neighbor not merely as you love yourself. Heaven forbid, most of us seem to have little love for ourselves, way we act.
But Christ said, love your neighbor as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. Not merely loving neighbor. Plenty of people have loved their neighbor. But Christ says, you must love your neighbor not merely as you love yourself, but as I have loved you.
Remember, that's third place. God's first. Now the whole idea of Christianity is that this world is a preparation for the next and that it is no picnic. Now, of course, we're trying to prove god wrong. We're show we'll show him.
We'll show him that we can make this world a very beautiful paradise regained. Oh, yeah. We will. You can see what we're doing. You can see what we're doing.
You cannot you cannot beat god almighty. You really can't. He's running the show, and he's told us how he wants it run. He's told us very plainly. And the trouble is we get our values so mixed up because we're trying to serve two masters.
Masters. We're trying to to eat our cake and to have it at the same time. Which when one word would say, god, I know by baptism, I was dedicated to you and that even as I was baptized, I was told that I must carry that garment as immaculate and carry that light of truth through the world that when I die, then this is to a little baby back there in that fountain. Then I will be truly myself when I see you face to face. And as we are told this morning, I will have no more questions.
I will see god face to face. That's my destiny. That's my heaven. But we have one foot in the mud of the world. And I said mud because the way god made the world was pretty good.
It's man who's changed. It's this it's this world that Newman talks about or as our blessed lord talks about so often. It's not the world that came from the creative hand of god. God certainly can't make anything evil. And I'm not saying that the world is evil either, only in so far as man uses it in an evil way.
I'm no manicky. Believe me. And so when we read these beautiful words of Saint John, a lot of it, I I'm far from understanding. Believe me. Saint John is not one of my favorites.
But the point is we can't escape the message here that god is god. Jesus Christ is his son. He came on this Earth. He suffered and died. That was his life.
Then we call ourselves Christians, but we expect ours to be totally different. We expect in some way that it won't be carrying a cross. Now there's nothing wrong in running away from the cross. Our blessed lord did his best to escape the cross. Think keep that in mind.
But the last, he said, but not my will, but thine be done. There's the Christian. There's the whole story of the Christian life right in a nutshell. It's that simple unless we try to make it complex by trying to serve two masters, and it cannot be done. As our lord said, either you will hate the one and love the other or you will love the one and hate the other.
That's what he said. And he's the son of god. He's not kidding. In the name of the father, of the son, holy spirit. Amen.