In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, that was a very forthright question. When the Pharisees asked our Lord when the reign of God would come. And in a word, he answers, the reign of God is already in your midst.
And then he warns his disciples about being on their guard against running about like chickens with their heads off. The text says excitedly, going from one place to another place to try to find the reign of God. Jesus says, the reign of God is already in your midst. Do we realize this? Do we take it to heart?
Does it mean anything in our daily living? Catholicism is an intellectual religion. Catholicism is a a religion which transcends emotions, passions, sentiments, feelings. We very calmly recite the creed. There is nothing very emotional.
There's not very much in the reciting the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed or any other creed that would that sends you, that makes you sit on the end of the pew, that makes you excited. And yet, when the chips are down, what counts is, do I believe or don't I believe? Now, when a Catholic uses that word belief, we are not talking as Lutherans. We are not using that word belief in the sense of trust and confidence. That is not the Catholic interpretation of faith.
Faith for us means an ascent of the mind to a truth on evidence, credibility. And when we talk about accepting the truth of the Catholic church, the authority that we appeal to, the motive of credibility is God himself. This is the simple fact of the matter. Now, there's nothing very emotional about any of that. This takes you back to the courtroom.
This takes you back to an analysis. This takes you back to definitions. This takes you back to using your God given intelligence. You see, Luther swept all of this away, and he made the concept of faith as he read it in Romans, Saint Paul's letter to the Romans, as a matter of trust or confidence. It's the feeling that I have that I am saved.
That the grace of God, like a great heat like a great beautiful white snowstorm has come and enveloped me. And once I have that conviction, I have it made. Because from then on, the truly religious man lives on a direct hotline between himself and the God, with an intermediary, if necessary, of the book of the of the gospels. So that beginning with the sixteenth century and the spread of Protestantism, you have that conception of faith as of trust, of confidence, of an inner conviction. Whereas, the the Catholic concept of faith was, is, and will be a concept of truth, not a feeling, not of not of my self persuasion, not of my own how do I feel about it?
Am I converted? Am I saved? I know I'm saved because I feel it. God has spoken to me, therefore I know I'm saved. Hallelujah.
And we can have people rolling in the aisles, and we call them holy rollers. Has never been the Catholic concept of faith at all. At all. It was never interpreted in the sense of confidence or trust. Now, of course, and trust will come along with it, and maybe it won't.
Jesus Christ on the cross, dying on the cross, absolutely in despair, he cried out, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? He didn't feel close to God. He felt they had been abandoned by his heavenly father. Don't ask me to explain this. It's a fact.
It's in the New Testament. So what good is feeling when the chips are down? Now you say, he's way off. He's way he's being in he's downright nonhuman. I am not.
Because an assent to faith comes from the person, not just from the intellect. And Neumann, Cardinal Neumann brings this out tremendously in his grammar of assent. The difference between what we call notional assent and real ascent. That's what he called. Today, we call it a gut reaction.
Now, our blessed Lord today said that the reign of God is in your midst. What in the heck does it mean? What does it mean? If the reign of God is in your midst, and it's not there nor is it there, and Christ says, don't go around running around excitedly. I translate that like chickens with their heads off.
If you've ever chopped a chicken's head off, you'll know how it runs around until it dies. It's not a beautiful figure, but it's a very fine figure of somebody running around looking for something headless. Headless. That's the way a lot of people are running around today as regards religion. You about this being reborn Christian.
What do they mean by being a reborn Christian? I've only had one or two opportunities and I didn't get very far. Now, I I know what they mean, and I'm not downgrading this. I'm not making any judgment at all about it except to say this, it is not enough. It is not enough to give me any kind of certitude about truth.
Plenty of people have been reborn to all kinds of things and have laid their lives down for it. You can't ask for a better expression of conviction than to give up your life or something. And yet people have given their lives up for all kinds of causes or for no cause. So what's it see, now that's not being cynical, that's simply being factual. When our blessed Lord says that the God is reign in your midst.
What does it mean? Now that can be interpreted and translated to all kinds of meanings. What does it mean to you in your daily living? Do you think you've got to run all over the the lot to try to find God? What is your conception of God, of his presence?
You see, the very fact that we say where is God shows how ignorant we are of any concept of God. Because there's there's no cut there's no meaning of the word where with a being has no space and time relations. What is our how what is our concept of living with God? I've mentioned many times that I went to the Christian brother's school for about seven or eight years, and the first thing we did, the very first class, the teacher appointed a monitor. And the the boy who was made the monitor was given a bell and a book.
And we began the class with a prayer. The monitor took over the prayer, praying for us. Now, midway in during the class, it was his job to watch the clock, ring the bell. And everything stopped no matter what. But he rang that bell and wham, things stopped.
He said, let us recall the presence of God. Then we continue class. Do we stop and think that we are in God's presence? That our lives are supposedly under the reign of God. We are his subjects.
We are trying to do his will. We are trying to obey his law. Not what the contemporary world says his law is, but what God through his living church says his law is. You see, do we believe that the reign of God is with us in the living in the living voice of his church? Do we believe it or don't we?
And if we believe it, how we can how can we pick and choose as is being done regularly? So let us not be like chickens without heads. God gave us our intelligence to use it, not to abuse it, but to use it. Not to not to say that intellect is everything, but it's just as bad to say that emotion and sentiment is are everything and feeling is everything. One extreme is as bad as the other because because you you see see the the human being is a complexity of the all.
We are all of these things, and we must deal with them. But we must deal with them as a human being. So, this message of our blessed Lord today that the reign of God is in your midst, that means you. And it is in where it is where you are. Make it real.
Name of the father, and of the son, and the spirit. Amen.