Last sentence of tomorrow's gospel. Punchline, as we may call it. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away. We have reached the end of the ecclesiastical year and we realize our years and our days are turning to the end. Since it is time, let us mend our ways with the praise of Christ. Let the lamps be trimmed at Keating, for the Supreme Judge comes to judge the nations.

[01:17]

And the Church of Milan adds to this beautiful introit the jubilance. Empathic, hallelujah, hallelujah. We realize that as the psalm says, our years are passing like a sign. But we also know that God has delivered us from the power of darkness, and has transferred us to the kingdom of the sonless love, as the epistle of tomorrow says. As sons of God's love, we are reborn in the world that never passes away. Now, we know this, but perhaps by the way children

[02:20]

no lesson they have memorized to impress the teacher. It is true we know that we live in time, born in time and destined to die in time. This we know not only from the books, but through observation in others, And through our own experience, at least, then when the eight days of our bodily health have passed and we begin to feel the decline of our physical strength, that we are reborn as sons of God's love into eternal life, this we probably know mostly from the book and we accept it on faith.

[03:22]

And if we do, as we do, then one big question immediately arises, and that is of truly basic importance, how do we transfer from the time that is running out into the life that never passes away. Now, as you know that in all these considerations, these evenings, when we speak of time, we don't mean the clock time, the measure, but we mean what is being measured by it, and that is the existence. as we call the duration. And the duration which goes on in time, or better, constitutes time, is a kind of duration, existence, which is not its own perfect realization.

[04:43]

It's not pure reality. Pure reality would be something which knows no imperfection and therefore knows no change, neither for the better, what we call development, nor for the worse, what we call decay. Only the imperfect existence which is, begins in time, is continued from moment to moment. That's what we call time, existence of duality. Now as bodily creatures, and that is, as the Aristotle's approached, as bodily creatures we take part in this

[05:46]

duration, relaxed from moment to moment, because all matter is subject to corruption. And existence, the existence of matter, or existence in time, is a constant struggle, we may say, against corruption. And because we, as human beings, live in a body, are bound to this kind of duration, real life, it takes time for us to develop as well as to decay. But we are more than worldly creatures. We carry in our bodies God's image and likeness.

[06:49]

We are persons. And as such, we are free. And when we say, when we explain what we mean by freedom, we say we have a freedom of choice. Freedom of choice. When one mentions or speaks about this, or uses this expression, choice, in some way one gets a little uneasy. Because what is choice? What do we usually understand? A decision between two things. Usually a premise. of a better thing in relation to a not such a good thing, or a choice between two ways, two ways or methods of action.

[08:02]

But these are evidently this kind of choice. We think about it in this way. It's always choosing one thing or the other thing. But I think we speak about freedom of choice in relation to persons. Then we should consider that the choice for a person The characteristic basic choice for a person is certainly not between things. Daily life teaches that. The one goes into a store or they have a hard time choosing. It does this. A prudent housewife, you know, between quality and price and all these things. But she also noted that all this kind of choosing, as painful or difficult as it may be at the moment, that is not really the important choice which kind of shapes her life.

[09:25]

No, it is not a choice between things. One was deemed as being a little better than the other. But the choice of a person as an independent, free, highly, it is naturally done. This choice is not a matter of prudence, but it is a matter of love. I should better say it is what the Old Testament calls knowing. It is not good for man to be alone. The basic choice, therefore, of a human person is that of another person, of the thumb. And that is, I repeat it,

[10:29]

a matter of love. So what is freedom, that freedom of choice, the capacity to love? Adam's first choice was E. This is born of Bible and flesh of my flesh. A great, wonderful discovery. He knows her, loves her, faces her, is his helpmate. And then in their togetherness, having found one another, they rejoice in one another. They enrich one another. They serve and obey one another. And together, recognizing in one another their dignity as persons, as God's children, they naturally turn to their divine archetype in obedience and common training.

[11:46]

Nobody had, nowhere in my knowledge has this been expressed in a more beautiful way than in Haydn's creation. But what we describe there, and what we may listen to when we listen to Haydn, that is an existence, a duration. But it is not determined, made by, constituted by, the struggle against corruption. It is not essentially, I say essentially, a development, or certainly a decay. But it is fullness, this together. fullness, simplicity of purpose, contemplation, its union, and all this we call eternal life.

[12:59]

Thou must make another little consideration. Watch what happened in the beginning. when the two where Adam and Eve constituted in this togetherness in the garden that God's love had carefully as the gardener planted to their for their delight enjoyment involved Love was given from all these trees that are here you may eat. That is the divine largesse. That is the offer of abundance.

[14:05]

Except from one tree, or that, for me, you may not eat. And that is then the little, varied, what we may call, the light yoke of obedience. Given for what reason that the enjoyment may always be channeled in the right direction, that those who are instilled in the garden that god has planted may live there as lieutenants as those who are installed there to take care for and before the face of god the king their creator

[15:12]

I think when we speak about the mystery of time, of duration, I think that what becomes very basic consideration that we should not forget. And that is that to us Christians, duration as far as it is concerned and is realized in creatures who have their being not out of themselves, but have their being from the hands of the Creator. That means have their duration, their time, as given to them by God who preserves in this being from moment to moment through his love.

[16:20]

We should consider a time for us, created beings, the things that God has created. I hear this, oh, we can say heaven that, oh, exist, they endure, they have duration. Why? Because they are kept in the existence by the actual, constant, actual influence of God. Therefore, they owe their time to God. It is really God's time in which they, under this aspect, Let us keep that in mind. And then we also realize that naturally, man, who is the crown of this creation, also has received his own existence and his own life as a gift from God.

[17:33]

and then broods over all these things that, as the liturgy always say, are also gifts from God, is there what we call a servant. That means his time is not his time, but is God's time. But then if he would ever make it or proclaim it as his time, At that moment, of course, he would die because he has forfeited his existence, which is a gift, taking it as something over which he rules as his own unlimited and absolute possession. This, we should keep it in view. Now what happens in this garden where Adam and Eve in their togetherness and as servants rejoicing the gifts and rejoicing in one another and rendering homage to the archetype of their own essence as persons

[18:59]

are constituted, what happens? The serpent appears and talks, addressing himself to one only, not to the head of the two, but to him. And therefore, turning himself to one only, really in a divided way, right from the beginning, And then Eve answers by herself. So you see, the vis-a-vis is broken. She does not see her partner. She turns away to the thing, to the apple. And the more in this isolation she looks at this thing, the more beautiful it is to behold, and the more delicious it seems to be to her to eat.

[20:10]

You see, the vis-a-vis is dissolved, and the thing, it takes a hold of her, and then she eats, swallows it, and then remembers as a second thought, a better heart, and vaguely lets him share in her delight. Now this is the fourth. Here the simplicity of purpose is lost, that union is lost, the contemplation, the love is lost, and with it naturally the eternal life. We should keep that also in mind, that wherever then a person which receives his life from the archetype of God and is constituted by God in the specific dignities

[21:26]

of being the image of himself, of God, of being God's image and likeness. If this which makes the person is destroyed by the person through disobedience, then this person has lost all claim to duration. This person has taken, as it were, his own time for self. He, therefore, is in death. That is, wherever we have a person, and where a person decides a freedom of choice and makes then that basic choice, instead of turning to be thou, which really makes it a true I, which, if it turns away from this true thou, which is the source of his own I, being himself, then that is the end.

[22:45]

That's judgment and that's death. This person cannot exist anymore. That is important to realize, because that constitutes, then, I would say, the essence of the duration of a person. Maybe in the past we haven't, and also now, I'm kind of just You're not just trying to find your way into these mysteries which are so difficult to express, to realize them. But maybe we haven't seen that clearly enough, that really a person has a time which is completely different from the time or the existence of anything that is not created in God's image and likeness. This, a person created in God's image and likeness, turned to be thou, and they are actually, as it were, his time.

[23:58]

Turning away from it, it dies. He dies. And so he too, if you shall eat of the tree, dying you shall die. But now something happens, and that is right away a new phase. You see, man is now constituted, as I say, outside of the peace of God, outside of captives, not however killed. He lives on. So in some way already the first Our sentence that God pronounces against Adam and Eve is really a sentence of mercy. They don't die at the moment in which they have trespassed the law, in which they have acted against God's will.

[25:07]

They continue to exist. but naturally in a different way. As it says, in song. And as the Hebrew expression says, in renouncement. And the wife, subject to the man. Subject. So they lose in that one that integrity and fullness of peace They also lose of their independence. It is now divided. There is on one side the woman as, let us say, the archetype of the slave, and there is on the other hand stays the husband as the archetype of the tyrant. And that because then of human freedom, of the freedom of the person.

[26:11]

So this, the whole existence of the sinner has changed. He is loved. What does he live on? He lives only, and that must be absolutely clear to us, only on the constantly renewed mercy of God. The constant, a constant act of I wouldn't say at this moment, I wouldn't say forgiveness, but a constant delay of the end. A delay of the end. It is, as Holy Scripture says, the end, the last word, the sentence is delayed. That is the essence of the time of man as a sinner. It is a delay which is granted to him.

[27:15]

But a delay which is, as Holy Scripture says, room for bets. Room for bets. Now that is then the situation into which now enters the new Adam. The new Adam. The kingdom of God, as realized in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word made man. He is the song. He is the servant. He is the peace. He is the recapitulation of all things. He comes into this mode. And he says, do penance, because the kingdom of God is right here.

[28:18]

Do penance, because the kingdom of God is right here. And with that, he begins what he himself then calls the year of Jubilee, the year of forgiveness, the year of grace, The acceptable time. And then, as naturally as you know, that is the time in which we live. What is this acceptable time? It is what we call God's time. With our Lord Jesus Christ, this whole period of God waiting, of God delaying, of God, let us say, not interfering with this last and decisive word. That time is ended. Now the time of God's time has stopped.

[29:25]

The acceptable year of the Lord. The acceptable time of the Lord. Now there is the key. There is the new Adam. There is our Lord Jesus Christ, the servant. The glory of God, fulfilling the will of God, God's Son, he is God's time. His existence, his entire life is eternal life. Life in, pleasing to God. And now he goes, and now this new Adam looks for his wife to cleave to her. And so this new Adam then does, as you know, the opposite. While Eve, the lower woman, the one that by law and right was subject to Adam, had the

[30:33]

taken her own initiative, had made her own plans, had acted in her own time, and therefore had destroyed. The time that was given to man in paradise and the death sentence which was there was only, through the mercy of God, delayed. But now Christ the Lord comes and he goes the opposite way. He comes as the Son of God, fulfilling the will of God and looking for his bride. And what does he say? Do penance because the kingdom of God is at hand. So the way in which he finds, as it were, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, he, the son of man, son of God, made man, the world made flesh, the world made flesh.

[31:45]

He who seeks his bride in order to cling to her and in order to constitute her that pure and without wrinkles, he then dies for her. He dies for her. And in that way, by dying for her, taking upon herself an end, fulfilling the sentence, then he leads her into the eternity of paradise. There he appears as the gardener in the Easter glory, and there he breathes his spirit, and there he says, Peace be to you, and there he, in that way, constitutes the church as his imaginary prophet. So if we don't think how we, us,

[32:50]

from that cosmic time of heaven and earth that pass away into that eternity, then naturally what we have to do is to go the way of the words that never passes away. Incorporated into the word of God made man by taking part in his death and his resurrection in baptism. celebrating his Passover at Holy Mass, where he dies for us and where he dies for us. And where, in Holy Communion, that peace and that fullness and that togetherness and that face-to-face is restored again, in which one person here on earth looks at the other, faces the other, together with the other, serves and obeys and loves in fraternal charity, the perfect bond.

[34:02]

United in that perfect bond, we, as human persons, as children of God, transferred from the powers of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God's love. And there then, together in fullness, praising in the unity of the Holy Spirit, through Christ, through Adam, our Heavenly Father, that is our passing from time into eternity. So it is really the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ as we present it and celebrate it again in the mystery of Holy Mass, through which, as it were, man passes from death into life, in which man conquers time. We conquer time not by trying to make a monument for our death,

[35:11]

by attempting to have human beings remember us as long as possible, all that we realize is futility. All that are illusions. All that is the way of sin, the way that, as the psalm says, peed us out into nothing, disappears. The way of life is different. It is the gathering together in the spirit of changing our hearts, that means in the spirit of repentance, in that struggle and in that realization that the death sentence is upon us, and rightly so. In the deep realization that we are not the lords of our time, but that we live merely through God's mercy who delays the sin.

[36:19]

In this inner common realization, and with the urgency which is inspiring to us, we work and gather together on the Sunday, the Lord's Day, Resurrection Day, here in the chapel. in order then to celebrate with one another. In fraternal charity, passing with the following the Prince of Life through death into that communion which is celebrated in our common being. And in this way, we pass from time to time into eternity. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words, my words shall never pass away. And then we can really say that our years and our days are turning to their end.

[37:27]

Since it is time, let us mend our ways unto the praise of Christ, Let the lambs be trimmed and kindled for the supreme judge comes to judge the nations. Alleluia, alleluia.

[37:47]

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