Homily – All Saints 2024 – Fr. Lawrence
Dear Brothers and Sisters: Today we celebrate the feast of all saints. Each of us
probably has our own favourite saint or saints, saints whose lives we identify with or
wish to emulate. We love saints who have struggled with the same things we struggle
with, who reach out in their writings and their example and touch us across the
centuries, as though they were standing beside us, walking with us, speaking to us,
providing counsel and comfort. Our favourite saints are very much alive for us,
companions, even friends.
So what makes a saint? The Church is careful about whom it declares to be
definitely in heaven, someone who has lived a life of heroic virtue, with several proven
miracles after their death, and so on. But the Church has never claimed that those it
declares as saints are the only saints. We certainly hope that there are many others in
that “great multitude . . . from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” whom St. John
the Divine talks about in our first reading today. Probably many of us can think of people
we have known who in our opinion qualify. I personally can think of a few of our brothers
now at rest in our cemetery who might very well have skipped purgatory and gotten a
free pass into heaven. Br. Frank, Br. Norbert, among others, faithful and humble monks
who suffered in patience and died peacefully. You probably have your own list.
In the banner behind us, you will see Abraham Heschel, a Jewish writer, and
Mahatma Ghandi, a Hindu, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a protestant theologian, standing or
sitting beside Francis of Assisi and Theresa of Avila. Although they were not Catholic, or
in some cases not even Christian, these people certainly lived lives of heroic virtue.
Now, to be sure, just because they are on our banner here, doesn’t mean that we are
declaring that they are in heaven, who knows, but the main point is that we do not know
the depth and reach of God’s love for all humanity with its broad diversity of religious
expression. We, with our tiny scrap of understanding, cannot possibly know God’s will,
or God’s mercy.
We do, however, have some clues. What does Jesus say? In a passage toward
the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats.
He says that those who feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care
for the sick, and visit those in prison will inherit the kingdom. Of course there are many,
many Christians who practise some or all of these excellent works, but there are also
many who are not Christians who would equally qualify under these criteria for entrance
into the kingdom. Jesus both exemplified and preached compassion tirelessly, declaring
over and over again that it is through love of our neighbour, through active compassion
for others, that we join the kingdom of God. And, as in the parable of the good
Samaritan, Jesus seems to explicitly downplay religious affiliation and practice as
qualifications in and of themselves. The tax collector, in another parable, an objectively
sinful man, goes away justified, while the Pharisee, who is objectively quite virtuous,
does not.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus even gives us an extensive list, in what we call the
Beatitudes. It is no coincidence that we call the process of the canonization of saints
“beatification,” that is, “making blessed.” So what are some of Jesus’s own criteria for
those whom we would call saints?
Homily – All Saints 2024 – Fr. Lawrence
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The poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, peacemakers, the persecuted and the
insulted. Not really what ambitious members of our society normally aspire to, or the
models held up to us in school, aside from maybe the clean of heart and peacemakers.
I don’t think any of us when we were kids said, when I grow up, I want to be meek, or
that very many of us wish they could be a mourner, or look forward to being persecuted
and insulted.
Jesus overturns what we normally consider desirable traits, something to strive
for. Notice that he doesn’t say, “the righteous,” for example. Instead he says, “those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness,” that is, those who have not yet attained
righteousness, but long for it, who are on the path to virtue, rather than having already
acquired it. He refers to “the poor in spirit,” rather than those who are filled with the
spirit, because the poor in spirit lack something, “they who mourn” rather than “they who
rejoice,” because mourners need comfort. When he mentions “the merciful,” it’s not
because they have reached some high level of virtue, but because they themselves will
need mercy shown to them.
In other words, Jesus treasures the imperfect, the broken, the rejected, those on
the way, rather than those who have reached some sort of perfection. He treasures
those who need God’s help and who know they need God’s help. And those who know
their own weaknesses and poverty of spirit can then feel compassion for the stranger,
the hungry, the naked, the sick, and so on. These are the inhabitants of the kingdom,
the small, the ignored, the imperfect. And Jesus’s compassion for them gives us hope
that we too, the small, the ordinary, the obscure, the imperfect, have some hope for that
same kingdom.