A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. When John, that is the John the Baptist or following Ronald Knox, you might like to say John the baptizer. At lee anyway, when John caught sight of Jesus coming toward him, John exclaimed, look there, the lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world. It is he of whom I said, after me is to come a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me. I confess I did not recognize him.
This is John speaking now. Though the very reason I came baptizing water was that he might be revealed to Israel. Then John gave this testimony. I saw the spirit descend like a dove from the sky, and it came to rest upon him. But I did not recognize it.
Notice he repeats them. The one who came to me to baptize with water said to me, when you see the spirit descend and rest on someone, it is he who is to baptize with the Holy Spirit. Now I have seen for myself and have testified this is God's chosen one, and this is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Sunday, notice notice how John says, I didn't recognize it, and he repeats that. Sunday, we have the feast of Mary, the mother of god. Now it wasn't proclaimed the feast of 1931. But this great question about Mary being the mother of god goes all the way back to the earliest centuries of the church. And it's not so much about Mary as it's about Jesus.
Who is Jesus Christ? And if you say his god, how do you fit all this together? If you also say his man now that's I'm just right at putting the problem to you. But this is what concerned the people in the fourth, fifth third, fourth, and fifth centuries. How do you make sense out of what seems to be an absurdity of the first water?
That a woman became the mother of God. Well, my well chose remarks, Sonny, were devoted to answering that as best you can in the way the church answers it. And it's still a mystery, but it's not a muddle. Today, I wanna emphasize god. Because in the last few weeks, you know, people get a little bit more religion around Christmas and Easter than they do during the rest of the year, so, you know, you get to hear things.
The one thing that's staggering to me, how people who apparently are interested in religion have so little thought of God. And yet the only actually, the only sensible, common sense explanation or justification of religion is God, not me. If all you can say about religion, that it brings peace to my soul, that it helps me to carry through the whips and the scorns of outrageous fashion, if that's all you can say about religion, I say you'll get the same thing out of a good fifth of Scotch, with a lot less trouble and lot less expense. Scotch will do all that for you very quickly, too. You mustn't go to excess, of course.
As a good friend of mine who died a really God fearing alcoholic said, There's nothing in my life that a fifth of Scotch won't cure. So if that's all you're looking for, put your money where where you get the best returns. Look at the bottom line. Why is it today that look. Just think of this.
In the fourth, fifth, and the sixth centuries, with the councils of Nicaea and Ephesus and Constantinople and Chalcedon, here you had the best minds of all of Europe. I it was mostly Mid Middle East. All these councils were in what we call Asia Minor, which is now Turkey. Their concentration was on such enormous ideas as god. How do you talk about god and man without neglecting God or neglecting his humanity?
How do you put all this together? Now most of our so called religion starts at the navel and goes down. Why is it that people talk about I'm not comfortable in going to church? I don't get anything out of church. I don't like the these laws which the church makes because they interfere with my freedom.
That's and I'm not exaggerating this. This is the temple of of people who are looking for something. I don't know what they're looking for. If you ask them, I guess they say, well, they might have a problem look answering the question too. But the first thing about religion isn't me or you or my being comfortable in this world.
It's God. It's God. As Saint Augustine says in the opening paragraph of his confession now notice, this is he he was born in March and died in 04/30. He wasn't born yesterday. But here's one of us, Saint Augustine the Dippel, here's one of us.
What does he say in that very first opening paragraph? Thou, O God, hast made before thyself, and our hearts will not be at rest until they rest in you. There you have a whole philosophy of life, but you don't begin with me. You begin with god. Thou, oh god, has created me, and I will not be at rest until I rest in you.
In other words, I come from god, I go back to god, and the whole of life is to help me to do just that. And if I may dare quote my late friend Friedrich Nietzsche, he says, if you have the why of life or to live, you can bear almost any how. Nietzsche said that, believe it or not. And that is so true. And yet today, everybody is concerned well, almost almost everybody is concerned with the how.
And yet the most important thing is the why. Because that the answer to that is god. And the answer to is what is life all about? Very it's absolutely simple. All of life is about me getting to god because that's where I came from and that's where I'm going.
And everything falls into place if we keep that very simple truth in mind. It's very simple truth, but it ain't simple to live. Because the problem is to keep that truth dominant, effectual, operational in my life. O God, you have made me for yourself, and my heart will not be at rest until it rests in you. In the name of the father, of the son, of holy spirit.
Amen.