A reading of the holy gospel. According to Saint John, our lord moved about within Galilee. That's the North country up by the lake. He had decided not to travel to Judea, that's down up in Jerusalem because some of the Jews were looking for a chance to kill him. The Jewish feast of booths drew near.
And once his brothers had gone up to the festival, that is up to Jerusalem, he too went up, but in secret and not for everybody to see him. Now some of the people of Jerusalem remarked when he got to Jerusalem and up in the temple area, is this not the one that they want to kill? Here he is speaking in public, and they don't say a word against him. Perhaps even the authorities have decided that this is the messiah. Yet, we know where this man comes from.
Comes from, whereas the Messiah, no one is supposed to know his origins at all. At this, our lord was teaching in the temple area cried out, so you know me and you know my origins? The truth is I have not come of myself. I was sent by one who has the right to send me, and him you do not know. I know him because it is from him that I come.
He sent me. At this, they tried to seize Jesus, but no one laid a finger on him because his hour had not yet come. And this is the gospel this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Since Monday, I have tried to present a number of talks all bearing on the virtue of chastity.
Well, there you have two words, virtue and chastity. I wanna try to sum up my remarks. You understand that what I tackled was a pretty big deal, but it has to be done. We've got to be good solid Christians, we've got to understand what we're doing. We can't act like a bunch of little kids.
The first thing that's of the utmost, absolutely utmost importance is this, that the god exists and we are destined for immortality. Absolute they are the absolute fundamental truths we begin with, that there's a god and that there's a an immortality for every human being. We are born into it. We're living we're living in eternity right now. As Dostoyevsky says, if there's no god and if there's no immortality, then anything and everything is right.
And, of course, if that's true, then anything and everything is also wrong because there's no right or wrong. And he wrote his great books, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov to prove that point empirically from experience. So we begin there that there's a god, there's immortality, that god created me to go back to himself. Actions which lead me back to god are good. That's virtue.
Actions which deflate me from god are are evil or sin. And I I, in the present state of affairs, cannot go back to god by myself. I needed a redeemer and and that's Jesus Christ, the son of god, whose incarnation we celebrated yesterday at the feast of the annunciation. Now the next little sub point was this. What these things that we call sin remember, sin never looks like sin when we wanna do it because we're not attracted to evil.
We never choose evil. We always choose something under the appearance of the good. Because if it's a thing, then it had to come from God and it certainly evil can come from God almighty. That's a so that this business of choosing evil, that's ridiculous. And yet you hear Catholics galore saying it.
We any any judgment we make we make under the appearance, we may be mistaken, we make we make under the appearance that it's good. The guy who steals the thousand dollars from the bank, he steals it because a thousand dollars are a good thing, and they are a good thing. There's nothing wrong with a thousand dollars. Only thing is he's violating a right. It's not the money that's wrong.
It's not his having the money that's wrong. It's not his spending the money for good causes that's wrong. What is evil is he made a choice for a good which he couldn't make the choice about. You follow that. But that's the now so the main thing here is that virtue is what we have to be committed to because our whole immortality, our whole destiny rests upon our practicing it.
It. One One of of the the virtues virtues is is chastity. Chastity. Now as I insisted in almost in one talk, the object of virtue can't be a negative. It can't be a no thing.
Virtue is very positive. It's gotta be a thing. It's gotta be reality. Remember, the Latin word for thing is res from which we get our word reality. Therefore, virtue can't be native And therefore, in our educational systems to to to say abstain from sex, abstain from drugs, abstain from this, don't do that, don't do that, that is all wrong.
If that's where you stop and if that's where you begin, you've gotta give these negatives have meaning only in so far as they are the primitive absence of a good. And it's the good that we should be pursuing. Saint Thomas makes a big deal out of this about religious taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Now as those three vows are phrased, they're usually negative. They renounce this, they renounce that, they renounce another thing.
But you see, if you stop there, you can be a maniac because there's no merit in mere negativeness. There's no merit in merely not doing something. The merit has to come because of why you're not doing it. In other words, I abstain from stealing the money because it's against my obligation to be just. That's a positive thing.
Abstaining is negative. This pulpit never stole any money. Is this pulpit virtuous? You see the you see the the inanity, the absurdity of negations. And that's what we're doing.
We're not talking about chastity. We're talking and you're hearing more about this that noticed I'll say, in preference to condoms and in preference to all kinds of other birth control systems, the main thing is abstinence. You think that's gonna convince any young person today? That's no good reason because I can I can argue against and say your reasons are all a bunch of baloney? And that above all, they're negative.
You can't act on a negative. You shouldn't. And so we come back to this little point that we should be talking out the about the virtue of chast just as we should be talking about the about the virtue of charity. Not love, but charity. Because these words chastity, the word charity, they all involve god almighty, and that's the heart of the thing.
I came from god. I must go back to god. That's why he created me. I need the grace and marriage of Jesus Christ to do it. And the actions that promote my career back to god, they are good actions and are obligatory.
And other choices of god's given creatures who are good, when I choose the wrong ones and they deflect me from my career back to god, then it's not that the things are wrong, it's that my choice is wrong. I made a wrong choice. I'm the sinner, not the things. Intercourse is a good thing. Sex is a good thing.
God gave it to us. Therefore, it should be used. There's nothing dirty or wrong or evil or unspeakable about it except this, it's a precious thing. It has to be used as god wants me to use it. And when I don't use it as god wants me to use it, then I am what?
I am using his creation to defeat himself. I'm making god's own creatures traitors to their creator. That's what I'm doing. The nature that god has given me, what nature means that it has a goal or a destiny or purpose, that that nature I am thwarting it. I'm separating god's creature from its creator.
That's what I'm doing. Now the point I wanna make is, don't you see how all this hangs together as a unit, consistent unit? I know this has a lot of roots in in Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. But let me tell you, there's nothing in Plato or Aristotle or any Greek philosopher that tells me about God, the father, and my immortality, nothing. All that Plato can tell me is here's the virtues and here's what you here's the way you should act, but they never tell me why I should do it, neither Plato nor Adam's Our lord tells us, god tells us in the old testament.
The second question that the Baltimore catechism tells you, why did god make you? Why did he make you? To know him, to love him, to serve him, so to be happy with him forever. There's not a negation in there. Not a negation.
It's all it has to be positive. You can't live for an oh, you can, but it's crazy. It's absurd. You can't live for a negation. You can't live for nothing and yet many of us do it because we're making the wrong decisions and that's my responsibility, my contribution.
So let's go back and think of God. Don't separate our Lord, his son and redeemer. We can't be anthropomorphic about Jesus Christ. He was born of a virgin woman and is absolutely completely man. You can't make more of a man than when he's a total man and that's Jesus Christ.
Yet there's just one person in him and that person came to show us the way, the truth, and the life. Notice they're all objective things and there's where we stand with Jesus trying to work our way back. So let's not exclude him. Let's talk about charity. Let's talk about chastity.
These are meaningful terms. They involve a whole world of creation, redemption, and my warfare. My warfare, my battle to get back to god from whom I came through the my daily living. With the grace of Jesus Christ, we all can do it. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.