Article
- Date:
- Sunday 30th October 2022
Year C, All Saints' Day - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Isaiah 65.17-30
Hebrews 11.32-12.2
Some time ago i looked at the Readings for the Sunday in the middle of August and asked my then Incumbent if there was any particular reason why we were not celebrating the Feast Day of Our Lady's Assumption into Heaven to which the terse reply was that it isn't in the Bible. Then I had that common experience, you know the kind of thing, where the right reply only comes to mind hours later: "So is she the only Saint who isn't in heaven?"
We don't need to go deeply into the Roman Catholic Dogma of the Assumption proclaimed in 1950, to the horror of many devout Protestants, to be clear that when it comes to Saints we are in a right muddle.
What the Roman Catholic Church was saying, in accordance with the Greek Orthodox Church - remembering that the great Cathedral in the Kremlin is named for the Assumption - is that if Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Theotokos, was without sin, then it followed logically that she was fit for Heaven; not a very controversial statement in view of the fact that the Church since its birth has assigned thousands of saints and Martyrs to the Heavenly realm even though, in spite of their heroic witness, they were sinners.
There are three elements to this problem which all get tangled up and need to be separated. First, even if you deny that Mary was born and thereafter lived without sin, it has to be admitted that, after Jesus, by virtue of her marriage to the Spirit and her bearing of the Son in obedience to the Father, she is the most remarkable human being there has ever been so that if she isn't a saint then nobody can be one. What gets in the way is the late Medieval adoration of Mary which made up to some extent for the rarification of the Eucharist whose consecration took place out of the view of the people. It isn't the actual sanctity of Mary that's at stake so much as the imagery of Assumption.
Secondly, there is a quite strong heretical gnostic streak in Western Christianity, particularly in stricter forms of Protestantism, which ranks the spiritual above the physical and consequently thinks of the body as corrupt and, in turn therefore, cannot come to terms with the Credal idea of the Resurrection of the Body; such a heresy then resorts to the idea that it is our souls that are saved, which isn't what the Creeds say.
Then, thirdly, if we believe in the Resurrection of the body, what happens to all the bodies that die before the day of Resurrection arrives? We really don't know how this works but the nearest we get is the idea in Matthew's Gospel that many long buried corpses were temporarily resurrected after the death of Jesus. So our bodies will go through their natural corruption or be burned but that will not stop our bodies being Resurrected on the day when God's realm and our Realm are united in one kingdom.
That does not rule out the idea that in Heavenly timelessness the Saints of all the ages are already with God, more likely including the real Mary than the rather shadowy George, for here we come up against the incommensurability of earthly time with divine timelessness.
But don't worry: all this is richly speculative theology. What matters is that we learn from the example of and try to imitate the Saints as prominent figures in our two thousand years of bearing witness to the importance of the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus within the economy of the Holy Spirit.
There are two good reasons why this is both important and helpful: first, except for Mary, the Saints are human beings like us so they tell us that what they said and did is possible for us; secondly, they have lived throughout Christian time so that we can learn from their example in a more precise, imaginable way, than we can learn, say, from Saint Peter or Paul whose condition can only be vaguely imagined. We can imagine the terrible deaths undergone by Protestants and Catholics in the English 16th Century religious struggles. We can imagine Saint Francis rejecting wealth and caring for the poor; we can imagine the potential saints being persecuted today in all parts of the world. And we need go no further than the end of our noses to observe the virtuous and the pious being rubbished by the rich and powerful as "woke".
And here I make my own stand by saying that it is standing out as well as being outstanding that is the making of a saint. As Jesus often remarks through his Evangelists, it isn't very difficult to get on with the people we like and with whom we agree; what is difficult is drawing a line that we will not cross, setting a standard that we will not compromise, making it absolutely clear what we will not tolerate.
And today there are many lines to be drawn, many standards to be upheld and much behaviour not to be tolerated, so there is plenty of room for us all to be saints. Some of us may be fitted for the grand gesture, for the painful sacrifice, for the long, thankless haul; but more likely we are fitted for the timely intervention, the signing of a petition, the writing of a letter, the gentle admonition when speech in our hearing crosses a line from fair comment into prejudice and hate.
But to do those things effectively we need to see our world through the eyes of the Saints, not to be misled by the hard faces behind the soft words, not to be lulled into silence by the narcotic of conformity, not to be disarmed by casuistic cleverness. Very often the Saints were punished for straight talking; at least we should be willing to follow them in that, if in nothing else.