A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Our lord said to his disciples, do not be no. Rather, do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in god and faith in me. In my father's house, they are two marvelous lines.
Write them down in your heart. The one the going's tough and it's all darkness. Just remember these words. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in god.
Have faith in me, said our lord. In my father's house, there are many dwelling places. Otherwise, how could I have told you that I was going to prepare a place for you? I am indeed going to prepare a place for you, and then I shall come back to take you with me. That where I am, you also may be.
You know the way that leads where I go. Then Thomas spoke up. Lord, he said, we don't know where you're going. How can we know the way? And then our lord replied, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the father except through me. If you really knew me, you would also know the father. From this point on, you know him. You have seen him. Philip then said to Jesus, Lord, show us the father and that will be enough for us.
Our lord replied, Philip, after I have been with you all this time, you still don't know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the father. How then can you say show us father? Don't you believe that I am in the father and the father is in me? The words that I speak are not spoken of myself.
It is the father who lives in me accomplishing his works. Believe me that I am in the father and the father is in me. Or if you don't believe that, believe because of the works I do. I solemnly assure you, the man who has faith in me will do the works that I do and greater even than these. And why?
Because I go to the father. The gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I wanna take as my text and the focus of my well chosen remarks, the communion antiphon of today's mass. It's from the antiphon is taken from Saint John chapter the fifteenth verse the fifth, and it goes like this.
I, our lord is speaking. I am the vine, and you, speaking to his disciples, you are the branches, says the lord. He who lives in me and I in him will bear much fruit. As I say there are the lord's words taken from the fifteenth chapter of Saint John, but which is the communion of today's mass. Now before I get into the matter of what I want to chiefly speak about, I wanted to just say a few words about this business of the grapevine and grapes.
And, of course, the whole point of having grapevines and getting good grapes was to have wine. The Israel the Israelites Israel, Jews of the of the Old Testament and of the New were extremely fond of of wine, and they actually produced a pretty good one. It was nothing but red, no whites. There's no mention of white wine in the New Testament. Wine is mentioned very over a 100 and some times and it was the great drink of the of Israel.
So if you wanted good wine, you had to have good vines. And if you had a good vines, if you wanted good vines, you had to work on them. Hard toil. Because following the author I read, their vines were creeping vines. They planted them about 12 feet apart and they would even climb trellises.
I can remember when we used to have grape arbors back in the, you know, coming out of the kitchen door, you walked under the grape arbor to be stung by the bees so that you could trellis these things. And some of the people had the the vines over their doorways. Now the point I'm making is this, that the branches could be pretty far away from the best and the heaviest and the thickest and the deepest roots. They could be feet many feet away. And they depended on their life, not exclusively.
They took a lot of the things they need out of the air, but they had to be attached to the vine, to the roots. Otherwise, they withered. And another point that was made by this author, there were two kinds of branches. Those that bore grapes and those that didn't. And those that didn't, for whatever reason, they had to be pruned and they pruned the word he uses, they pruned severely, severely.
And you know how often our lord refers to that business of pruning the vine branches. And the wood, the grape that they got from that vine, it could be thick, but it was very soft as some of you know if you've had any experience with grapevines, the kind I'm talking about, this trellis pine. And all it was good for was to throw into a bonfire and burn it up. Our lord often used that parable, meaning that those were who who were pruned, who didn't produce fruit, they're only fit to be burned. See, you don't get that on your Easter card.
Now just another little point about this grapevine. The point is is that it was extremely familiar to our lord's hearers. It meant a great they all knew about growing grapes. They were grown all over Palestine. And above all, when they entered the temple, that glorious temple, which only now you know is the walls, the weeping walls, whatever, which was not part of the temple, They had a huge golden grapevine with golden bunches of grapes.
And the wealthy were privileged to be allowed to contribute a bunch of gold grapes. Grapes. If you couldn't do that, you could contribute just one gold grape. Now all of this I'm saying is to is to bring home that our lord was using a figure of speech which had great meaning for his peers. Great meaning, much more than for us.
I know that many number of you out there are not well acquainted with vines and making wine. You may have never made any wine. I don't during prohibition, everybody was doing it, and I'm from that era. Only thing is we well, enough said. But anyway, the this was something extremely familiar to them.
And by pruning, I mean pruning. I've seen it over there. And that wood was piled high. If it didn't produce fruit, cut it off. That was the only way you could get good branches which gave good fruit, which gave good wine.
And our lord is saying, I'm the vine and you are the branches. Now right away, I wanna lay before you what am I what I'm driving at this morning. We already have had it. I know most of you didn't notice it. Did you notice what you heard in that second reading from first letter of Saint Peter?
Well, let me just read it to you again. Saint Peter is talking to baptized Christians. Now listen. This is what Calvin made a great deal of. You, he says, are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people that god claims for his own to proclaim the glorious works of the one who called you from darkness into his own marvelous light.
Did you catch that? You are a royal priesthood. You are that and that's what I want to select. How many Catholics sitting in those pews as I'm up here in the pulpit, you say, I'm a priest. Have you ever thought of yourself, I'm a priest?
Have you ever thought about that? Have you really? You know, I didn't. Do you know that it's only in the last few years that this text has come home to me? That by baptism, by that font of water, we say you have become a new creature.
These are not my words. These are the words taken from the right. These are the words that you will see from Vatican 2. Baptism makes us a new creation, and part of that is to that we are made priests of Jesus Christ, all of us, by baptism. You individually are a new creation.
You individually belong to the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ. You are another Christ, altar Christus. As I said last Sunday, that word altra means the other, not another. That's the alios. Now you'd say, his up there.
That's hyperbole. My friends, this is these are the solemn words of Vatican 2. Simply quoting Peter first Peter. This is the doctrine of the Catholic church. But we don't think enough.
All this talk about the people wanting everybody wants to be a priest today. If you're baptized, you are a priest of Jesus Christ. Now, so much for first Peter, his letter. You'd say, well, that was who knows? After all, it was written in Greek.
How do translate you it? Is it authentic? You know, all that stuff. Well, now Vatican two, in its document Lumen Gentium, that's the document on the church of Jesus Christ, which was just, of course, as you know, in the sixties. And now what I'm going to do practically, everything I'm going to go read is from that document.
It's they're not my words and there's no problem translation here. Of course, there's always a problem with translation. You know, translation is always treason. Never forget it. But this Latin is very simple, and it it there's no there's really no linguistic problems.
Now Vatican two, practically everything I'm going to read to you are the very words in English. Of course, the the original is Latin. Having to do with the people of God, it's chapter two of Lumen Gentium. Chapter two. And it's one of the most, I think, one of the most inspiring documents of the whole council.
It says you are a people of god. You are the branches of Christ the vine. You are a new people. You are a kingdom of priests. You can't miss I mean, you can't mistranslate that.
You are a kingdom of priests. You are incorporated into the church, the mystical body of Christ. Christ the lord made the new people a kingdom of priests to the father. It re it repeats it. They are consecrated to be a holy priesthood.
Have you thought anything about that? I mean, seriously thought about it. That you talk about lack of self respect. You'll never get respect for yourself from looking in a mirror. And all this talk about building up self esteem for people, what are they offering them?
This is what our lord offers us by baptism or the equivalent. Don't forget or the equivalent. You are a royal priesthood. You have even been incorporated into Christ. You are other Christs.
Isn't that a basis of esteem? Isn't that a basis for respecting yourself? Remember, if you don't have self respect, you're not gonna have anybody else. Can you think of anything more sublime than that? Can you?
Anything more solid? Anything more permanent and stable and vivifying and vitalizing than this? You saw that full page advertisement last week in the Washington Post in defense of virginity, a little bit of virginity. Now there I'm all in favor of it. But you see, they equate they equate virginity with abstinence.
And abstinence is a negative, and a virtue can never be negative. If all that matters is that this that you don't commit adultery, you don't steal, you don't do this, you don't do that, look at this pulpit and it's a saint. That shows the absurdity of pursuing negatives. We are born and reborn by baptism to be a to participate in in the body of Christ. We to be incorporated into his church to be a royal priesthood.
That's what we are, every baptized person. We are temples of the holy ghost. But above all this morning, what I want to insist upon is this concept and it's absolutely biblical. It is completely the teaching of the Catholic church that by baptism or its its equivalent that we are incorporated into other Christ, and they even use the word divine in the baptismal rite. But what I wanna insist this morning is that idea of being priests, each and every one of us is.
Now having said that as clearly and as forcefully, as emphatically as I can, and as clearly, there's nothing great and mysterious about that. Well, of course, in a sense, it's utterly mysterious. But but it is it's graspable. We can understand something because we ought to know something about Christ. Christ.
I've tried this on my bended knees to beg you to buy a new testament and read it. We sold about eight or 10 of them, which is pretty good. But you you how do you know about Christ? How do you know about his priesthood? Not by just reading in the air or trying to live at 35 on some kind of remembered doctrine that you heard back in your grammar school, perhaps.
But if you're if you're in your thirties, you didn't hear it at all. Not in catechism as it was and is mostly now being taught. These things are not being taught because they say people can't understand it. That's absurd. That's arrogance.
Our blessed lord talked to people who are just as low brow as they could be. Who was Peter? And yet he he knew all about this that we are you are a royal priesthood. You are other Christs. You have divine life.
You are incorporated into his church, his mystical body. You, individual you, with your faults and with your goodness and your perfections and your good intentions and your failures. Take it all together. You are human, but you have been incorporated in something way above the superhuman, the supernatural. Every single one.
And when I say immediately, fast in the mind, I've heard this before, down in Cartagena, a an old woman rolling in the street. I mean this literally, demented, rolling in the street. Saint Teresa would pick her up and see god. I couldn't. I'm not a Saint Teresa or Mother Teresa.
But these are the facts. Because I and this tied us in with abortion. So when you talk about a basis for for self esteem and we have every right. But we have a terrific responsibility to know who we are and to act that part in so far as we can.