This time after Easter is in the liturgy of the Church divided into various periods and the first after the resurrection is the description of the various manifestations of Christ to his disciples and to those whom he is close to as to Mary Magdalene. and then afterwards we enter into another period in which the sermon, really, of the sermons of our Lord, the Last Supper according to the Gospel of Saint John, is put before the faithful as the preparation to the coming of the Holy Spirit. This whole time after Easter is a time in which the Church rejoices continuously in that victory and in the joy and in the light which the Resurrection has given to us and she meditates upon this new life that she has received and naturally the great gift of the Risen Saviour to the Church is the Holy Spirit.

[01:25]

And so also in this Sunday, the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, we do just this. The Gospel is devoted to an explanation, or better we say, a meditation on the action of the Holy Spirit in the church. We can see that all these Sundays are a lift in the fullness of the spirit. The fifty days mark that ideal state, so to speak, which this great gift of our Lord has opened up to it, has made a reality for us. The song, the singing of the heart, the Alleluia, is the predominant, it characterizes the mood of this whole period. The Alleluia is, as we have said so often, the reflection of the glory of God in the hearts of men, in those who have seen the resurrection, who experienced the power of the resurrection.

[02:42]

It is that what is called also in this Mass tomorrow the great deeds that the Lord has done for me in the offertory. Shout with joy to God on the earth sing ye a psalm to his name, comment here, and I will tell you, all ye that fear God, what great things the Lord has done for my soul. Alleluia. That is the song of the risen Savior, and that song of the risen Savior is made ours. The church takes it upon her lips, and she sings it. at the moment in which she herself, under the guidance and the impulse of the Spirit of the risen Saviour, enters into the sacred action which culminates in the sacrifice of Christ, sacramentally renewed, and in that holy meal through which we are united to him in peace.

[03:50]

So the Alleluia Versicles, the offertories, as I just said, reflect just that spirit. And in the Gospel then the action of the Holy Spirit is explained to us in a way which calls our attention to the essential developments, decisions, attitudes in us. The Holy Spirit will con... It's difficult to translate it. ...convince the world or convict the world or expose to the world what sin is and what justice is and what judgment is. and that indeed, of course, are the decisive facts which determine our life in the spirit, is that we recognize sin and its true character, that we realize what justice, righteousness is,

[05:09]

Hence that we realize that judgment has taken place in the passion and the resurrection of Christ. Sin, righteousness, and judgment as the three basic verities around which and upon which our life as Christians centers. And indeed, we have seen that, we have spoken about it just in these last conferences also, for example, concerning sin. If we listen and look into the world, it is indeed that one of the great confusions in which the world finds itself. What is sin? Is there any sin? I think that today is one of the, to us, one of the greatest problems.

[06:17]

Is sin recognized at all? Do human beings know what sin is? What actions constitute a sin? But much more and much more important, what is the basic attitude? which constitutes man in a state of sin. We become numb, and we have spoken about that so often, the world is neutralised, the existence, the meaning of the life of man is considered to be a technique, a technique of success, or maybe, more and more, a technique of survival. The relations between nations are determined, the relation between man and man, and also the way man looks at himself.

[07:28]

It is in a neutral, neutralized way we consider things under the aspect of how useful they are to us. And when we ask useful for what? Usefulness for success. And we ask success for what? Then the question or the skepticism begins. And one simply says, now we are not going to ask any further and so the recognition of sin is so lacking in the world today and that's of course one of the greatest obstacles also to repentance to true repentance to the readiness to change one's mind

[08:30]

mind of most people and it seems that the majority of people think that they are alright and they consider any attempt say to lead them before the reality of sin either as an interference with their private affairs or as an absolute unfair judging from the outside nobody else is competent but myself decide over the value of my actions then the other one the justice righteousness what is justice and what is righteousness today and to how many misunderstandings the very word righteousness is exposed today. The word righteousness today, I mean, that is the way the devil arranges things in his attempts to darken the minds and the judgments of people

[09:46]

The very word righteousness already evokes the connotation of Phariseeism, and then Phariseeism is founded. and in that way the very idea or the value of righteousness is not seen, or one sees it and considers it as a kind of external correctness, whereas the fulfilment of certain prescriptions and rules, and then these rules are external or considered as external, and therefore there are limitations and obstacles to the free inner development of the inner person, the human person. So righteousness is considered as a kind of attempt on the part of the Pharisees, that means the least vital among human beings and the least imaginative or the least creative.

[11:01]

among human beings to clip other people's wings. And the same with judgment. The idea of judgment, the idea that our human life is being lived at every single moment in responsibility, that means that somehow constantly it is being lived before a judge. And that human life receives really only by that, its depth, its decisiveness, its character and its value. The idea of a last judgment which would end or which would solve the knots of error and of sin, of injustice that rules and that twists and dangles all the affairs of man and of nations.

[12:24]

This is an idea which doesn't dawn on too many people. Life is finished with death, but afterwards we don't know, and what importance does it have if I would know? So it seems to me that just these three things are pointed out in tomorrow's Gospel as the three things in which the Holy Spirit convinces the world, or which the Holy Spirit exposes, through which the Holy Spirit exposes the world in its true spirit. These three things are really those that are most remote today from the public, plain of the general public actions, feelings and reactions of the human race, so that I think that tomorrow's Gospel has a real, very real and very actual meaning for us.

[13:43]

It is indeed vital to know what sin is and to learn and to have sin exposed by the power and the action of the Holy Spirit. And it is vital, vital to know what is righteousness. That means not only sin, it's the negative aspects, that danger which destroys the life of man. Righteousness is the positive aspect, is that which gives to the life of man its dignity and its splendour, its glory, its inner positive, inner value, its wholeness. And judgment, judgment is the way in which puts in order, so to speak, and dissolves the knot of guilt and of error in every individual human life and in the life of nations, of mankind as a whole.

[15:01]

Now that is what our Lord considers and explains to us as the great mission of the Holy Spirit, that He reveals to us those things, sin and justice and judgment. Now it is easy to see that sin concerns man. Justice, righteousness, concerns the Lord. Judgment concerns the adversary who has to bear judgment, that is, the prince of this world. Also, one can say that sin concerns the past. Righteousness concerns the present. Judgment concerns the future. In the fields, I said, of sin, man is the central person.

[16:05]

In the field of righteousness, Christ, the Son of God, the risen Savior, is the central person. In judgment, the object of judgment is the adversary, the prince of this world. So those would be, then, the cardinal elements which we learn is there under the direction, the inspiration, of the Holy Spirit. The position of man is determined by the fact that he is fallen. And there are then two powers which strive for mastery over him. One is Christ, He is the one who has risen to the throne of glory, and the other one is the prince of this world.

[17:09]

And that is, once man is convicted of sin, then two alternatives remain to him. either that he receives his justice from the outside, from the source of justice, the risen Saviour, or he is and has to bear judgment. These three elements are, therefore, the three elements which are revealed under the action of the Spirit. And that is what our Lord then explains. He says, first, the Spirit will convince the world of sin. And He will convince the world of sin because They believe not in me.

[18:15]

So the unbelief in Christ, the attitude of unbelief, is the revelation of the sin of man. From that we can see right away one important thing, and that is that, as I said before, the question of sin is not a question of casus conscientia, of certain rules of behavior which have not been observed, but the question of sin is a deeper one. It is the question of an attitude, And the only act which really counteracts, or one can say exposes sin, is the act of faith in Christ, faith in Christ. The Spirit exposes the sin of the world because they do not believe in me.

[19:23]

What is Christ? the Son of God. He is the one who completely surrendered to the will of God. He shows in his whole existence, he shows the majesty and holiness and sanctity of the law. He shows in the only the sanctity of the Lord, but he also shows that complete inner surrender to the will of the Father in his death. That means he shows the whole power of obedience. And then in his resurrection, he shows that the unity with God in glory, which is stronger than death and cannot be destroyed by any external power.

[20:38]

So in these three ways Christ shows to the world the absoluteness of sanctity, and therefore also reveals to man his sin. That is, if you read in the Gospel of St. John, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, there is that clash between Christ and the Pharisees. And the Pharisees, indeed are constantly shown as those who really do not know what sin is. They are not convicted. They are, on the contrary, they live in the firm conviction that they are the just ones, that they are the ones who stand on the side of God's sanctity.

[21:51]

The way in which they serve God is that of the observance of the various prescriptions, rules, statutes of the law. But in that observance, which they then consider as their personal achievement, through this achievement, careful, correct observance of the law as their achievement puffs up their hearts and blinds them then to the figure that the glory to the holiness and sanctity of Christ the Lord, who eats with the sinners, for example. And by that,

[22:55]

trespasses the Lord, doesn't observe the rules. The one who heals the man born blind on the Sabbath, and therefore he reveals that he does not, again, not observe the rules. And because they, the fairies, observe it, they say, this man cannot be of God. The blind man says, but he has cured me, he has given light to my eyes. First, they don't want to believe it, and when they finally have to recognise the fact, they simply have no answer, throw him out of the synagogue. So, in that wonderful scene, which we read also during Lent, as you remember, the healing of the man born blind, Christ as the light, shows, you know, just clearly that blindness in which the Pharisees were involved.

[24:06]

But the Pharisees, I repeat again, are the just ones, or considered publicly by the world as the righteous ones. And it is they that do the They deliver Christ to death through condemnation. And that condemnation, one can say, that judgment, that reveals then the true meaning of sin. that sin is really an attitude and that this attitude of sin is essentially that selfishness which in some way tries to organize itself without God and therefore either relies on, one can say, on the power, innate power, of evil doing, like a tyrant, let us say, like Herod, or it is the reliance on the power of good works, so-called good works, which are understood as my achievement.

[25:23]

And that is, of course, as you know, that is one of the most really important and burning questions constantly also with us. We start out with the grace of God. We start out in humility. We start out every morning at Holy Manor. We start out with Confitio. I confess to Almighty God my mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, my guilt, my fault, my most grievous fault, And we go out, you know, and go in our ways, and before we know it, we have forgotten that all, and we are fine, you know, swimming in the nice, you know, this nice lake of our self-righteousness, of our achievements, and we look down into these waters, and we see they are our face, and we think it's all wonderful, and everybody swims around in that lake like a swarm.

[26:31]

That's a thing that constantly and constantly occurs to us again. And there is the action of the spirit to expose that, to expose sin. As this basic attitude of self-righteousness, of trusting in one's own achievements, And the exposing of this self-righteousness is done by the life and the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ who is the divine charity, that surrender, that absolute sacrifice, this charity that does not seek her own, That is really the exposing or the judgment over sin.

[27:34]

Sin or the sin of man has only one way to be exposed, and that is the selfless love in which the Son of God, in absolute obedience to the flower's will, descends to us and far from judging us in any external way, dies for us, and by this death for us really and truly hits, as it were, the centre of what is wrong in us, the sin of selfishness, that inner deep-rooted attitude of selfishness. So then is judgment, the Holy Spirit then reveals to man judgment. I would say this way, still in addition to that, you know, because our Lord says, he convinces the world of sin because they believe not in me.

[28:44]

Faith, therefore, is that way in which sin really and truly is conquered. Faith in Christ. What is Christ? Christ is Son of God who fulfills the loving will of the Father by giving himself and his own life and his own blood for our salvation. That faith in this Christ There is in us the victory over sin because who believes in Christ surrenders, as it were, to Christ. Who surrenders to Christ surrenders to the Son of God who fulfilled the Father's will in that absolute service. Then righteousness, justice, that's the other aspect. And justice is revealed to us how?

[29:47]

Because I go to the Father and you shall see me no longer. So that is righteousness. Righteousness is our Lord's going to the Father. His death as going to the Father. is death as the Father's last glorification. Instead, death as returning to the Father, which, what does it mean, I go to the Father? That means he enters again into the fullness of the glory which he had with the Father from the beginning. So that justice, therefore, is the fullness of the divine life and of the divine glory. that the Son has as the perfect image and the Son of the Father. And therefore this justice is revealed to us because the one who has died first goes to the Father.

[30:50]

as his dying for us is the revelation of our sin. As to look at the cross means that our hearts are pierced in compunction, so his going to the Father, his exaltation, gives us and shows us what justice is. and that the life of justice, again, as Eero must say, just as sin is not a transgression of certain paragraphs but is an attitude, the attitude of selfishness without God. So, also, justice is not simply observing or doing certain good things, being good to orphans and being good to widows. But justice is more. It is the fullness, the life of the divine life in us that we receive from Christ.

[31:52]

In Christ, the one who ascends to the right hand of the Father, there justice stands before us. There we can see what justice is, ruling, reigning with the Father, sending out the Spirit to this world. sending out the Spirit as the sharing of his life, as the sharing of his joy, as the sharing of his holiness, of his sanctity, as the sharing of his glory. And then is the beauty that you see here also, I would say, anybody who really and truly lives these 50 days after Easter, who lets and gives the texts and the actions of the church during these 50 days after Easter, a chance to enter into his heart the one who is able to sing the new canticle of which the introit speaks tomorrow, that new song,

[32:56]

He has the taste of what justice, what righteousness really is. It's that absolute health, goodness, the splendor of Christ's charity, of the divine life in us. That is justice. And there we have that tremendous obligation as Christians to give as instruments of the Holy Spirit to serve as those who reveal to men, justice, righteousness. But we don't do it with sour faces. We don't do it with any spirit of rebellion, of criticism, of anger, of all these things that the epistle describes so beautiful tomorrow. But we do it in the way in which just this epistle describes it, that we are born by the word of truth which is implanted into our hearts and therefore let every man be swift to hear but slow to speak and slow to anger the end of man worketh not the justice of god and that is what we are supposed

[34:19]

show the justice of God in our actions. And what is it? It is, as the Apostle here says, therefore casting away all uncleanness and all that abundance of naughtiness with meekness, receive the engrafted Word which is able to save your souls. So it's that meekness, that absolute goodness, that long suffering, that patience, all these virtues which are so many rays of sunshine around us and into the hearts of men. So let us think of these things tomorrow and let us think of these things in this present situation. We know that The other day when Oral Root spoke to us about the dark possibilities of which we are all aware, maybe we were at the very moment not conscious how close we really are to these things.

[35:31]

Only the last days have brought it closer in what a tremendous, at the edge of what abyss we are really living. And just if we see that we live in a critical situation, it is nothing to, let us say, only frighten us. And it is nothing that so simply and only depress us. And we should not live in this situation and say, oh, it's too bad. I wish I had lived some hundred years ago. Father Albert always said he thought he had missed, you know, his time. He wanted to live in the 17th century and everything was so nice and all the princes and they had all their courts and he always thought he would be warden, you know, a nice court official or something like that. Fine, you know. One would live, you know, in an elegant way, and things were also sacred.

[36:32]

Now, for us, things are not sacred. And that's simply the will of God for us. But we should not look at it, you know, like the child that stands before the fragments, you know, of a glass that he has thrown on the floor and says, it's too bad, I wish I would live in some other time. That's no solution. The solution is that we live in this critical time and use it also in our own consideration, our own reactions, as a preparation, as a means, and that's the reason why God puts us into this time. to use it as a means to be in a more radical way exposed to that action of the Holy Spirit, which, and I would say at this very moment, and in this critical moment more than any time before, exposes to the world what sin is, also reveals to the world what justice is,

[37:42]

And thank God also teaches us that the prince of this world has already been judged. Because you know that very much. Isn't everybody in the same boat? Are we not all thinking the same way? We are faced by a tremendous power which with that whole ruthlessness of organization in many ways seemingly so far superior to us. As far as determination goes, as far as planning goes, as far as organization goes, as far as government goes, people begin to think, why is the democracy in our day still able to to meet such an organised crystallisation or constellation of power, all these things, and we get kind of, even, let us say, on a human level, we get kind of insecure, we are not sure, we think, perhaps this whole capitalistic business is not the solution of all the problems in the world, and maybe, perhaps,

[38:57]

communism is better, you know. And then we all, you know, we get all mixed up. I don't want to paint the picture in the universe. But the main thing is, you know, the main thing is, that's what we can learn from this gospel so well, you know, the decisive thing is sin and righteousness and judgment. And the prince of this world has already been judged. Therefore, as far as my spiritual survival goes, as far as my heart goes, as far as my eternal, deepest, divine self goes, as far as I am concerned who has been brought forth, engendered by the word of truth, which descends from the Father of light, as far as that goes, judgment has already been made and I am safe.

[40:04]

Why? Because I believe in the Son of God and I'm willing to carry with him and take upon myself in obedience the cross and death. because I know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither nakedness, nor hunger, nor thirst, nor war, nor defeat, nothing can separate me from the love of Christ. And therefore, in that love of Christ, the devil has been judged, and in that same love of Christ, I have.

[40:45]

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