Feast of All Saints
The Book of Revelation, written in 80AD on the island of Patmos, off the coast of Greece, was written to bolster the faith of persecuted Christians. In fact the author has been exiled there. This is a book for insiders, written in a coded language that only insiders would have understood. For example, the Great Beast devouring all is the Roman Empire. This scene, of multitudes of saints worshipping in heaven, tells the troubled Christians that their God is really the true God, and truly in charge in the long run.
In celebrating the feast of all saints, we not celebrating the achievements of the spiritual elite. We are celebrating the lives of men, women and children who stumbled towards God. John describes them as 'a huge number, impossible to count'. St. Paul was very conscious of the fact that the saints of God certainly included the living. He addressed his Letter to the Ephesians 'to all the saints who are at Ephesus'. Paul was not writing letters to the dead. He is addressing the living, those who have committed themselves to following the gospel in the world. For Paul, those who live that life are sanctified brethren, the saints. That is the life all of us have pledged ourselves to follow. When we celebrate the feast of all saints then, we are not celebrating aliens from another planet. We are rejoicing in our own people, everyone whose life reflects the love of Christ.
In today's gospel, we have the Charter of God's Kingdom, the list of qualities that characterise the saints. When we listen to them we can match faces to the virtues. We remember those people and we know them. The people whose simplicity shines like a light in a world of darkness; the gentle people whose energetic non-violence will never win medals; those who cry and mourn their loss because they have tasted the presence of love. The ones who hunger for what is right and who stay hungry until that right becomes a reality. Those who scandalise us with their mercy because they exclude no one from its embrace.
These people are among us. They are the same as the saints that Paul addressed, the faithful of Jesus Christ. They are the real people whose stories may never be told and whose goodness will never even be noticed.
The kingdom of God is not peopled by robots programmed to perform as their designer planned. The kingdom is peopled by those who have gone before us and among whom we now try to live out the Gospel. Goodness is not limited to any age or epoch; neither the past or the present has a monopoly on saints. We belong to a community that has a history of goodness and fidelity to the gospel. We are related to those who went before us, those who linked their belief to those who went before them. We are links in that chain of holiness, members of the communion of saints. We are but a small part of a marvellous company of believers who struggled into holiness.
But we are not abandoned to our own devises; we have our ancestors in faith who are blessed in heaven. Among them are counted people who know us and love us. The preface to today's Mass expresses our close bond with them as follows:
"Father, around your throne the saints, our brothers and sisters, sing your praise forever. Their glory fills us with joy, and their communion with us gives us inspiration and strength." Today we thank God for the saints we have known.