SIMON’S REFLECTION FOR THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS
Reflection
In the church, we keep feast days for some of the special saints of church tradition; the household names that we all know. We have days for St Peter, St Luke, St Frances, St Andrew, Mary, mother of our Lord, St Margaret and many others.
All Saints’ Day was not originally a day to remember these well-known saints, but was for those saints who had no special saint’s day of their own. It was for “the rest of the saints.” On All Saints Day then, in a sense, we are remembering the unknown saints; “the great multitude that no-one could count” described in the Book of Revelation.
I find this very poignant on many levels. For one thing, since the Reformation, the Anglican tradition, recognises names of its more modern Christian heroes but has no mechanism for giving them the title “saint.” More than that though, it is good for us to remember that we do not know the names of many of our benefactors. There is an anonymous tide of good will and good deeds inspired by the Holy Spirit that has brought the Christian faith to us through the generations and from across the world.
There is a bit of a parallel in this with our thinking about our heroes of the past year. I wonder who your heroes were? Captain Tom raising all that money for the NHS. Joe Wicks putting us all through our paces with his daily workouts. There were many people who did great things to help others, some of whom became known and for example recognised in our honours lists. There were, however, also a mass of people like doctors, nurses, good neighbours, essential workers, care home staff and others from all walks of life, who behaved selflessly and sacrificially in their service of others. Some of them were recognised and honoured but many are unknown to us though we have cause to be grateful.
The idea of a mass of unknown saints brings the saints a bit closer to us. When you make a statue or a stained- glass window in someone’s image, they suddenly seem less human and seem more distant from our everyday experience and who we are. But the saints were human just like us. They didn’t have any power that we don’t have. That’s the point. Because of what Jesus has done for us, the power that was in Jesus, can be in ordinary women, men and children just like us.
It can also be at work in us alongside our human fallibilities and failings. As St Paul wrote: “We hold this treasure in clay vessels.”
If the gospel just stopped with the great saving deeds of Jesus, we might wonder how the world could be changed for the better but it doesn’t stop there. We read on in the Book of Acts, how the power that was at work in Jesus, was at work in the people of the early church. We read on beyond the words of the bible to see many lives since then that have pointed us back to Christ. Sometimes that has happened in an extraordinary way but also sometimes in a more ordinary every day, way through “little” acts of love and service in Jesus’ name.
The New Testament recognises this by using the word “saint” in two ways. It uses the word to denote the named ones, the known heroes of the faith but it also uses it to denote “the rest of us” as St Paul, for example, often uses the word to refer to all Christians.
Of course, the saints we revere were extraordinary in one sense. It was not that they were already perfect or sinless but their lives were so centred on God and they had such a passion for God that they became transparent to God in an extraordinary way. Paul Tillich wrote: “The saint is saint, not because he is “good” but because he is transparent from something that is more than himself.” What makes them particularly transparent to God and what makes them speak most powerfully to us is their shared humanity.
Our gospel reading today could be read as a sort of manifesto for discipleship. Jesus tells the crowds who it is who will be blessed in the age to come. I wonder if we were asked who we thought was blessed in our own age and society, would it look anything like Jesus list? Would we include the poor, the meek, those who mourn, the persecuted? I suspect not.
The saints learned to embrace a different set of values to the values of the world. With their ordinary humanity they embraced the values of Jesus rather than the values of the world.
A rich businessman once said to St Theresa of Calcutta: “I would not do what you do for a million dollars.” She replied: “No, neither would I.”
On all Saints Day, we remember the saints and we remember that we are called to be transparent to God just as they were and that we are called to be saints too and to allow in our hearts, the Holy Spirit’s work of transforming us to God’s ways of doing things and God’s way of being.
Pope John Paul once wrote: “We need heralds of the gospel who are experts in humanity, who know the depth of the human heart, who can share the joys and hopes, the agonies and distress of the people, but who are at the same time contemplatives who have fallen in love with God. For this we need saints today. Amen.