NewCreation

Homily for All Saints RCL Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the Feast of All Saints. This is the feast as celebrated by those who follow the RCL, the Revised Common Lectionary, rather than the Catholic Lectionary. The Catholic Lectionary has the Beatitudes from Saint Matthew in all three years, but the Revised Common Lectionary in the year C, which is the year of Saint Luke, has Luke's Beatitudes. So hence there being two options for the homily today, depending on whether you follow the Revised Common Lectionary or the Catholic Lectionary. So in today's Gospel we have Jesus, having spent time up a mountain praying, then coming down to a plain — not like Saint Matthew, where a huge variety of people from all sorts of nations and places are gathered, amongst whom his disciples — and it's in the midst of them that he starts to speak. Now please notice that this is not accidental to what's going on. Notice the very first line in our Gospel today: "Then he looked up at his disciples." Not the very first word — the very first line. "Then he looked up at his disciples." That's remarkable. That suggests that they were all standing on the plain and he was sitting below them. Sitting would have been the place of the teacher — that would have been the Moses position — but it was below them, so he had to look up to them to speak. And furthermore, it already indicates that he is not making possible use of being on a higher place to enable his voice to carry further, so that more people could have heard him. He understands that this teaching, to be understood properly, is passed from underneath by word of mouth. If he's sitting and his disciples are around him and there are lots and lots of other people, there's no electronics, there's no loudspeaker system. The only way what he says is heard is insofar as it's transferred out. So he's saying something extremely important by his position — from where the voice that tells us what sanctity is like comes. In other words, the voice comes from beneath, from the place we don't expect it to come. It's not a stentorian voice. So this is what the voice from beneath is telling us. "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." That's how it starts. Now please remember that in Matthew's Gospel it also starts with the poor, but it's there "the poor in spirit." Lots of people have said, oh well, Matthew is somehow playing it down. I don't think so. I think that Luke has the two central parts of his blessings and woes — the first one, "blessed are you who are poor," and then the first woe, "but woe to you who are rich" — the suggestion is therefore that the other blessings and the other woes, if you like, are inner descriptions of the first. So this is much more radical than it seems. I suspect that's what Matthew means by "in spirit": that is to do with — we then work out what the spirit involved is. What does this actually mean? Well, "blessed are you who are poor" means "blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep now, blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man." Now here he's talking in the first instance of people, obviously, who are extremely precarious. Poor people are always precarious. Extremely poor people are very precarious. Life is a constant struggle for survival, for food, for dignity, for any of those things. Far too many people die young; far too little help is given for their friends and relatives when they die. It's a terrible reality. And of course, they're excluded, reviled and defamed. But in fact, of course, any scapegoat-building system works that way. Some people get to sacrifice the others, and the people who get to sacrifice the others get all the benefits of stability, good humor amongst themselves, a relative peace — whereas the precarious are the ones who bear the burden of this. So Jesus is presupposing that everyone lives in the kind of society which is dangerous and threatening, and that everybody is within, if you like, an ongoing game or dynamic or mechanism of trying to re-insure and hold society up, whereas in fact it's those who are on the downside, those who are the marginalized — the people whose precariousness is not simply a fact of nature, it's actually a constantly constructed and reconstructed human factor. And he's saying: blessed are the poor. To be poor is to be hungry, it's being in mourning, being at loss, being vulnerable, and of course it's being hated and excluded and reviled. All of those are people who are being sent away, locked out of survival, of earning their living. And then the flip side is: woe to you who are rich. Woe — and these woes, these… the words of the weeping ladies who would accompany funerals, and still do in the Middle East, with weeping — the phrases of the woes. And this is the sign of death. This is the announcement of death. "Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep." It's not just that — and "woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." In other words, Jesus exposes quite clearly and openly the structure of this world as an ongoing mechanism for making goodness, richness, contentment at the expense of driving people out, making them poor, making them vulnerable. And people then say, "Oh well, it seems very dark," and then we look around us at our world today and we say, "Oh my God, yes, this is exactly what's happening." We see exactly people who are rich and receiving their consolation, who are full and will be hungry, who are laughing now, and yet who are involved in the most completely self-destructive activities known to man, and of course who are spoken well of — why? Because of course when you're rich, well, everybody needs to speak well of you, as they might get a bit. But it means that no one is telling the truth. Whereas those who are on the flip side, they're the ones who are living the truth; they're the ones who are close to reality. So he says to them: "Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets." Okay, so rejoice — this is the central part, and this is why this, I suspect, is in the Gospel for the Feast of All Saints for the RCL. "Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets." Now, please note, he's not saying you will receive pie in the sky. But the very fact that you are able to be in that position — that you are able to be one of the people who are poor, who are hungry, who are weeping, who are hated, who are reviled, who are thrown out — the very fact that you're able to be that is a sign that your name is in heaven, that you are being held up by heaven, and that your reward is going to be very great, because you will have been helping bring creation into being. Whereas the others will have been muddling, obscuring, making shortcuts of everything, binding everything down, being exploitative — there's nothing to do with the creator's goodness bringing life into being in that picture. So we have this remarkable picture of what sanctity consists of. It consists of finding your post, your name — the name given to you in heaven. And actually beginning to see the signs: "Oh, if I'm going through this, this is probably a sign that…" I'm being brought into being rather than that I'm wedded to self-destruction. So yes, even with dodgy limbs, we can do the equivalent of leaping, rejoice in that day and leap for joy. Now this doesn't mean, as some have thought, look to be persecuted. On the contrary, looking to be persecuted is merely making use of the mechanism of the world to gain brownie points. It's no different from getting brownie points nowadays through being the sort of false prophet who is spoken against, so you say, "Oh, they're all against me, so I must be such a good and holy person." No, it's rubbish. This is something much more subtle. This is learning to stand outside the mechanisms of sacrifice and desire in the world that give us being and brownie points, and enable us to become daughters and sons of God, citizens of heaven. And so this is what Jesus then says. Of course, all of that is incomprehensible unless you have a notion of God who is so big, so generous, that you can actually relax into allowing yourself to be turned around in this way. "I say to you that listen: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Well, this is, if you like, the difficult commandment in the New Testament. It's the one that makes least sense to anybody. And yet it's absolutely central to the whole of Jesus's teaching and understanding. And of course, it's exactly what he himself went through. Jesus is God traversing human hostility and enmity, and this serves to show how much he loves us despite our sinfulness. It's what it looks like not to be over against anyone at all, which is the way the creator is towards us — not over against anyone at all — whereas we are constantly over against each other. So for us to learn to escape being over against each other, and be able to be towards each other without being run by each other's evil — that's what forgiveness is about. Forgiveness is not about being a dishcloth that people can walk across. It's not about allowing yourself to be a battered spouse. It's about not allowing yourself to be run by the evil that is done to you, which means therefore not being either in vengeance mode or even in rivalry mode, learning to be towards people as God is towards us. Incredibly difficult, but that's what the secret of sanctity is about. That's what All Saints is about. "If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt" — even your tunic, actually. And this may well be a reference to the events that happened to Jesus in the Passion, where he was struck on the cheeks and where his tunic was taken. But that's the model. It's not entering into rivalry. "Give to anyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask them again." Again, extremely difficult for us to think about, let alone practice. Our feeling of justice, our need for revenge is so high that it's incredibly difficult for any of us to let go of the me who is bound to the relationship of hatred that's produced when someone does that — even when they don't mean to, even when they're taking something that is not theirs by mistake, which can happen. And this is the complete turnaround: the positive version of the golden rule, which of course requires an extraordinary act of imagination. "Do to others as you would have them do to you." Be towards others as you would like to be treated by them. Can you imagine that? And thinking your way into how much God loves them, so as to be able to be towards them in the same way. Not necessarily expecting them to get it right, but knowing that in as far as you're able to do that, you are beginning to be brought into being as part of the new creation — are actually what God is creating — and you're taking part through God's generosity by being able to look completely the other way around. "Do to others as you would have them do to you." That's a positive command. It actually says: be creative in your imagination about what you'd like to do to them. It's not only the negative one. The negative version appears in a couple of places in the Hebrew Scriptures — "don't do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you" — but this is actually "do to others what you would have them do to you," requiring imagination. So these are the hints of sanctity that we're reminded of. This is what it actually looks like to be holy as God is holy, which is what we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints. And if we look at the Book of Daniel, which is the first reading today — one of the remarkable things about it is of course the vision of Daniel, the Ancient of Days coming into his throne. "And I saw one like a human being, like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him." "Presented before him" is usually — that's the kind of priestly language for sacrifice, which is why of course this passage is taken up in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is obviously presented as the lamb who was standing as one who was slain, who then takes his place. So this vision gets richer: "To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion and shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed." Okay, so that's who this son of man figure is. But as in our reading today, Daniel doesn't understand this and asks for an interpreter. "And the interpreter said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter. As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth, but the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever." Now please notice that the holy ones — the Son of Man figure — is a singular person, but then the interpreter says actually it's a collective person. This is, if you like, I suspect, what Jesus talks about when he refers to himself as the Son of Man. He's not really talking about himself, but himself and his body, which is us. In other words, what does sanctity look like? Sanctity looks like being someone who, in the midst of the great persecutions and all these kings with their terrible violence — and the accounts both in Daniel and then in the Book of Revelation, I'm quite clear about this — it's very much the topsy-turvy world with great interests of power and wars and rumors of wars and revolutions in which we live. And sanctity is those who are able to come like the Son of Man, be presented, are able to give themselves away before the Ancient of Days and find themselves actually constituting who the Son of Man is. So I think that is what we rejoice in today. We remember those who have been models to us, who have enabled us to do these things which seem utterly bizarre, who enabled us to love our enemies, who've shown how to live precariously without being in rivalry, without being over against, without falling back on victimary thinking or self-victimization or all the tricks which were about. That's the extraordinary sign of the Creator bringing things into being in the midst of the futile, self-destructive world in which we all live. And it's those whom we celebrate today — the named and the unnamed — we celebrate today in the great feast of All Saints. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Thank you.