Feast of All Saints
Scripture:
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew: 5:1-12a
Reflection:
Today is the Feast of All Saints. This day our favorite saints may come readily to mind: Paul of the Cross, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Mary Magdalen, Clare, Francis Assisi, Anthony (forever finding lost objects for us), our name saints, etc.
This day commemorates too all those millions of saints who were never officially beatified or canonized by the church. And it includes also all those who responded to God’s great gift of holiness, making them like Himself/Herself, without ever having known or ever having heard of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The church has chosen to emphasize this somewhat overpowering truth in the first reading. John "heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, 144,000 … the children of Israel." But then he saw in a vision "a great multitude which no one could count." These would be the Christians who died in the Lord. But surely they include too the vast multitudes of the Gentiles both before and after Christ who knew nothing empirically about Jesus of Nazareth. These are the ones, Matthew tells us, who will say to the Lord at judgment, "When did we do these things for you, Lord? We didn’t even know you." And Jesus will reply, "When you did it to one of these least of my brethren, you did it to me." And we celebrate and rejoice in their company today.
This day too, I believe, asks us to celebrate those saints still living here on this earth. That means us. Perhaps we let our knowledge of our failings, our faults, our sins take too much of our attention – take too great a hold on us. We downplay or forget (and perhaps don’t believe) the truth that we are saints, "the holy ones" of God – a truth that the second reading emphasizes. God our Father (and Mother) loves us so much that "we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. …We are God’s children now."
Finally, in today’s gospel Matthew has Jesus call us to celebrate our holiness, our sanctity. For human as we are, we are also being divinized – made holy by God’s great love for us, in and through Jesus Christ. "Blessed – happy – are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven." Be happy, rejoice, for God’s Love dwells in us – we are Christ’s, and we are Christ himself, to each other and for each other. Be happy! We are among the saints, so let us have a rousing chorus, New Orleans style:
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.
Br. Peter A. Fitzpatrick, CFX, a Xaverian Brother, is a Passionist Associate at Ryken House, St. Xavier High School, across the creek from Sacred Heart Passionist Monastery in Louisville, KY.