The Revelation to St John the Divine 7.9-end
1 John 3.1-3
St Matthews’s Gospel 5.1-12
Today is the feast of All Saints. But what makes a Saint?
Maybe it’s just me, but the language of ‘purity’ has never really connected with me. St John uses it in today’s epistle. The Evangelist says that the saints ‘purify themselves’ as God ‘is pure’. Maybe it is just me, but ‘purity’ either seems neurotic, or mean. There’s a coldness, even a fakeness, about much that I associate with purity language; never mind the unhealthy gender stuff it has so often reflected.
But my hang ups and associations don’t apply here because we are talking, St John is talking, about Jesus. Who is not cold or fake or mean: He’s God - all love and goodness.
So what am I to do with my hangup?
Well, first i might realise that it is not my purity, it never was. Likewise it is not my righteousness, it never is. It’s Christ’s, given to us as a free gift of grace. We’ll come back to that…
To return to our question: what makes a Saint? Today we celebrate those who the Church is confident to say have made it home - Ss Giles, Mary, Luke, Theresa of Kolkata, Edward the Confessor, Carlo Acutis. Twenty centuries of our Christian family crossing the valley of the shadow of death, and coming out into the light on the other side.
By contrast, this evening at 4pm we will celebrate our Requiem Eucharist for All Souls - when we love and pray for those who are still on that journey home, as it were. It is tricky using the language of time and space (journey) for this stuff, because eternity is not administered in time; but we are, so Holy Mother Church uses journey, time, space language, as the best tool we have even if it’s not straightforward.
Anyway, the souls of the departed are on their way (that’s what All Souls is about) and the Saints (as in All Saints this morning) are looking back from the finish line and cheering them, and us, on.
And (to pick up where we left off) they are pure and righteous as they do so. Except of course they weren’t. Many Saints owned slaves, shouted at their kids, stole staplers from the stationery cupboard at work, they had proud and mean thoughts, they skipped church, they did all the stuff that people do. Some were very deeply flawed indeed. And yet, there they are all ‘haloed up’ at the wedding banquet of the lamb? Well, yes, because (of course) their saintliness like ours, isn’t theirs at all, it is Jesus’, given to them.
Our hopes of sanctity don’t come from the meagre bag of ingredients I or you bring to this party we call life; it comes from being with, in Jesus. Being part of Jesus - as we are thanks to our baptism, members (part) of Christ. So when we die and God looks at us (so to speak) God sees not me, but Christ who died in my place. When we pray for our loved ones at 4pm, we entrust them to Christ, who stands in their place at the judgment seat. And God sees in them, in you, Christ’s purity and righteousness, which is of course God’s own purity and righteousness, a gift of Father to Son and Son to Father in the Trinitarian dance of love. And today we rejoice in the saints who have already joined that great eternal conga line dance of the Trinity, and all creation being drawn into that dance.
It is images such as these for judgement and heaven that Scripture and our ancient traditions of the Church give us.
Purity (with which we began) then, is Jesus’ not mine. But because it is His, it is mine, because you Christ’s and He is yours. Baptised into His body, you are His Body by eating His Body in Holy Communion, ‘through Him and with Him and in Him’.
What makes a Saint? Purity and righteousness are not ours by right or virtue, but a matter of who we are with, who we are in, and we are in God.
So All Saints helps us calibrate all of this. It’s not actually about us, it’s about Him. His purity, or we might say His wholeness, that is given to His Saints, and to us, as the Saints cheer us on to join them in eternity, just as Revelation describes today.
And in the meantime, we live in that space between, one foot in heaven, one foot on earth. It is a Beatitude space in fact. With our hopes set, wisely, in eternity, not just in the here and now. Our timescale isn’t just what i can get now, but who we will be forever. And Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel holds us there. Look again at these astonishing words.
They are so fresh they could have been said yesterday.
You could spend your life mediating on them, and not a moment would be wasted.
They are hopeful, they are radical.
They are inherently communal.
They are idealistic and practical.
They are political but not in a party way.
They are loving and tough.
They are better than whole libraries full of self-help or political philosophy, all rolled into one.
Take one Beatitude each day this week and really chew it over. Live with the tension, the difficulty; perhaps write it on a big piece of paper and put it somewhere you keep tripping over it at home, or set an alarm on your phone that every coupe of hours reminds you of that day’s Beatitude. Whatever works for you.
The Beatitudes are our road-map to sanctity. The saints lived this, patchily and imperfectly; like us. We’ve said that purity and perfection are not ours, but God’s gift, God’s life in us; and we receive that gift by putting one clay foot in front of another on the Beatitude road of life.
When God judges us, He will see not our shortcomings, but Himself, Christ, who gives Himself for us on the cross and in this Eucharist.
And we for our part, as we journey home, are called to see Christ, ourselves and each other through these Beatitudes. All of that is what makes a Saint.
God be praised in His Angels and in His Saints. May they pray for us, and cheer us on, and, Jesus, bring us all home to the dance of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, from this altar table, to your eternal banquet on high. Amen.