A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. As our lord was leaving Jericho, that's down in the valley, not far from the Dead Sea, very hot, and a sizable crowd, there was a blind beggar, Bartimaeus, which means son of Timaeus, sitting by the road side. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth that was passing by, he began to call out, Jesus, son of David, have pity on me. Many people were scolding the man to keep him quiet, but he shouted out all the louder, son of David, have pity on me. Jesus stopped and said to the man or said to those around him, call the man over.
So they called the blind man over, telling him, as they brought him to Jesus, you have nothing whatsoever to fear from him. Get up. He is calling you. Bartimaeus threw aside his cloak, jumped up, and came to Jesus. Our lord asked him, what do you want me to do for you?
What a silly question, isn't it? Raboni, the blind man, said, I want to see. Jesus said in reply, be on your way. Your faith has healed you. Immediately, Bartimaeus received his sight and started to follow Jesus up the road.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. That's a wonderful, wonderful event in our lord's life. There's so much to imagine.
Our lord asked him, what do you want me to do for you? Now our lord does not remember his god. Just keep that his god. And here's a blind man comes to him. After some trouble.
Notice the blind man took the initiative. He doesn't didn't just sit on his sit and, wait for somebody to do something. He did something. He's he knew about Jesus apparently. He knew he was son of David.
Anyway, when he comes over, our lord says to him, what do you want me to do for you? That's a very interesting thing our lord asked. In other words, he wanted Bartimaeus to ask, to tell him what he wanted done. That that's amazing to me, you know. And and that's the son of god speaking.
Now I could go on, but I wanna pre come to the man that we are honoring today with these vestments. A martyr. He died for the faith. We're called upon to live for it, and that may be even harder. Believe me.
Now this man, Justin Martyr, died in January. January. Little over a hundred years after our lord's death. And he died in Rome. Notice Rome.
He was Greek speaking. He comes from Samaria over in what we call the Holy Land. He came from a town now called Neplus, which is about midway between the Lake Of Galilee and Jerusalem. He was born of Greek parents. He was a pagan.
Now let me tell you, the word pagan has a very unfortunate connotation because pagans believed in God. They believed in gods. They weren't satisfied with one. They wanted a lot of them. But they believed in something more than in them themselves.
They believed in something more than man's mighty powers. They were not men of the enlightenment. Anyway, he was born. We don't know the date or so. A a good first, honest to gods pagan.
Now he got acquainted with a Greek philosopher named Plato. He was, that is Justin, was a philosopher. That's what he assumed and called himself. As we are told, he he began wearing the cloak of a philosopher. But he was devoted to Plato.
Plato, the teacher of Aristotle. But notice, Aristotle wasn't even mentioned. It's Plato. Because Justin recognized in Plato a thinker that seemed to have a good grasp on the immensity of God, of God's immensity. And he became convinced this is before he became a Christian.
He became convinced that Plato sometime had read Moses. This is not an uncommon view. And Justin Martyr, remember he dies in January, a martyr in Rome, all the way from Palestine through Ephesus in the Southwest corner of what we call Asia Minor, Turkey, and then on to Rome. And he dies in Rome, January, a martyr. Now he looked upon Plato as a transition to Christianity.
Not that Plato knew Christ, but that Plato had a very clear conception of God. Certainly a heck of a lot better than Aristotle ever had. He was firmly convinced after he read the Old Testament that the the best of the Greek philosophers had a hold on the truth. The word is truth, which is a naughty word today, you know, because there there are no blacks or whites. There are just grays.
See? Nobody dies for the truth today. But these dummies, they thought it was truth, and they were prepared to die for it, and Justin became a martyr for the truth. Now he didn't change in a certain sense. He did not change in when he went from paganism and being a Platonist and became a Christian.
He looked upon himself as merely following a due sequence, a flow which brought him logically and historically from the old into the new. Now we have some documents, first grade. Not all the stuff attributed to him is authentic, but we have some authentic manuscript documents from Justin Martyr who died in January in Rome, a Greek speaking Christian who died for the faith of Jesus Christ. Now this is astounding. And here we are in Garrett Park on this morning of the June 1, and we are remembering this man.
Because I wanna say again, we are one with him, and I hope he is one with us. That is an open question. That really is. Now the two things that brought him to Christ, the first given in the New Catholic Encyclopedia is when he saw people dying for the faith. Notice, not a lot of not a philosopher Not a theologian.
The word that wasn't used then. That's something new. He when he saw these people in Rome dying for what they held to be the truth of Jesus Christ, that convinced him there was something more than Plato operating there. And the second thing was his grasp of the truth as he had gotten it from Plato and other Greek philosophers and some Romans, but mostly Greek. Now this is significant for our times when today today we have such a I say we, I mean in general USA, when we have such a general not only disregard for truth, not only an attitude of ignoring the truth, but an attitude of saying truth doesn't exist.
There are there is no absolute. There are no absolutes. We are told time and time again. Our so called leaders, our so called best thinkers, these are notice, the word liberal has a very favorable atmosphere around it. Whereas my dear old friend, GK Chesterton, says, the idea of having an open mind, which is, of course, the great shibboleth of liberalism, is to close it on something.
On something. Today, we say we want an open mind. Nonsense. So that we have so that we have good, sensible people who are trying to live good lives, raise their families, and who have no difficulty in saying I'm a good Catholic and yet rejecting some of the explicit teachings of the Catholic church. Now I'm not I'm not at all make passing judgment on the persons.
It's one thing to say, I'm an adulterer, and I beg God to forgive me. I'm a fornicator, and I beg God to forgive me. I act unjustly, but I beg God forgive me. That's one thing. But it's another thing to say, I am an adulterer, and there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm a fornicator, and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm unjust, and there's nothing wrong with it. There Those two points of view are absolutely you cannot possibly bring them together. And yet, good, so called sensible people are doing it without any intellectual problem. They have no problem.
You get into an argument with a good practicing Catholic and you ask, why do you believe that? And your answer is, that's my opinion. In other words, truth is just a matter of the individual's opinion. This is the world we're living in. This is not the world Justin died of martyr.
Yet all the same, he died for the truth. Now remember, many martyrs died for very abstract truth, and they died for it. Whereas today, we deny. Notice, not ignore, deny that there's such a thing as an absolute truth, which means ringing the last analysis is gone. That's what it amounts to.
And so I say, when the church brings Justin Martyr before your eyes with these vestments, the church is not bringing up of just a memory. Keep this in The Catholic church is not a memory. It's not a graveyard. It's not an antique shop. It's not a museum.
We look upon the past because in many ways the past is the present. We live in the company of the saints, and Justin is one of them. And may he pray for us at the throne of god. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.