Feast of All Saints
First Reading: Rv 7:2-4, 9-14
Second Reading: 1 Jn 3:1-3
Gospel Reading: Mt 5:1-12a
This Sunday, normally the 31st Sunday in Ordinary (“numbered”) Time, the Church celebrates the Feast of All Saints.
In this context, “saints” means “those who have died and have gone before us marked with the sign of faith”; those already with God in heaven, canonized or not: those “who have come out of the great ordeal,” the First Reading says, who “have washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.”
They are God’s children, St. John says in the Second Reading. The “sign of faith” with which they are marked gives them a family likeness to God, their Father. They are our brothers and sisters, for we were marked with the same sign at our baptism. The Feast of All Saints is a family celebration!
By baptism, we are already God’s children, but our family likeness will be fulfilled only in the beatitude to which God calls us, which those in heaven already enjoy.
“Beatitude” comes from the Latin beatus, translated “blessed.” “To bless” means “to make happy or successful.” “Blessedness” means “happiness” or “enjoyment of divine favour.”
“Beatitude,” then, means the happiness that comes by God’s favour. The beatitudes, which we hear in the Gospel Reading, are so called because each one begins with “blessed,” meaning “favoured by God.”
(“Blessed” is used today to mean “holy,” but that is not its original meaning. When Mary said, “All generations will call me blessed,” she did not mean that she would be called holy, but rather that God had done “great things” for her.)
Jesus addressed the beatitudes to his disciples. In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict says that he must have been describing them, but, even more closely, himself: poor, suffering, meek, hungry for righteousness, merciful, pure of heart (single-hearted), a peacemaker, and persecuted for his righteousness. The beatitudes call us into communion with Christ, the Pope says; they apply to his disciples because they describe him.
The beatitudes are not the New Testament’s counterpart to the Ten Commandments, the Pope notes. “This approach totally misconstrues” Jesus’ words. The beatitudes are not worded like commands: Jesus was not ordering us to mourn or to seek persecution.
What are the beatitudes, then? They are paradoxes, the Pope says. As soon as we see things “in the right perspective,” in the light of God’s values, “the standards of the world are turned upside down.”
If you are poor, sad, persecuted, insulted, or slandered, the world will call you unfortunate, but you should consider yourself blest. If you are meek, merciful, or peaceable, the world will call you weak, timid, or lazy, but you should consider yourself blest. If you are hungry for righteousness or single-hearted in your devotion to God, the world will call you unrealistic and impractical, but you should consider yourself blest.
The beatitudes are also promises, the Pope says. Those whom the world pities and scorns have every reason to rejoice and exult in their sufferings.
The joy the beatitudes promise is not all postponed to the next world or to some remote future in this world, the Pope stresses. When we start seeing things from God’s perspective, we live by new standards, and something of the reality of heaven is already present: Jesus brings joy into affliction here and now.
Finally, the Pope says, the beatitudes are “directions for finding the right path”: not just “a road map for the Church,” but “directions” for every individual, even though we each follow them in different ways.
In everyone, the beatitudes provoke an “inner resistance,” the Pope notes, for they point opposite to our spontaneous hunger and thirst for life: they call for a U-turn.
That is what we should expect, he says, for love, by its nature, runs counter to self-seeking. It is an exodus out of ourselves, and yet precisely the way in which we find ourselves.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge. All the materials (video and print) are available online at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 9, “The Liturgical Year,” will be available Nov. 1.