When the first students of New College in Oxford entered their brand new buildings in 1386 they found the latest thing in collegiate design. One of the most curious features of their founder’s plan for the college is the fact that the chapel and the dining hall are situated back to back. The high altar and the high table are on opposite sides of the same wall. Similarly, behind the numerous statues of prophets and saints on the wall above the altar, are the paintings of former wardens and distinguished old members, hung above high table. While not meaning to insult these college worthies we might almost say that we see there saints and sinners back to back. And that perhaps is the key to our relationship with the saints. The way in which we are to keep company with the people we celebrate today is to live back to back with them.
And what might it mean to live back to back with the saints? Well it doesn’t necessarily mean knowing a lot about them. The saints we celebrate today are the innumerable company of men, women and children who down the centuries have lived Christ-like lives. Even so their names are not known or else they were not sufficiently distinguished to merit a day of their own on which to be remembered. And that points to the first thing to be noted about sanctity today it doesn’t necessarily make you famous or memorable. Real sanctity can be heroically ordinary goodness.
And the fact there are so many saints also points to the great variety of forms sanctity can take. Opponents of Christianity have often accused us of inventing pie in the sky when you die. As one scientist said, “Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.” But such a notion is all wrong. If you think about it heaven would be impossible to invent on the scale with which the Church has described it. For the Church has down the ages peopled heaven with such an extraordinary crowd of saints that no human institution could possibly contain them all without breaking down in total confusion. If we were to invent a heaven, we would of course people it with those whom we admired, respected, and above all agreed with. Our invented heaven would never contain the possibility of being totally astonished by another person’s presence.
The beatitudes in our Gospel reading hint at this diversity. There are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the rebels with a passion for justice, the people who will be joining our Bishop at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday to lobby for fairer trade with the poorest nations of the world. Such people are hardly likely to be very meek, and might not make very good peace makers. There may also be some tension between purity and mercy. To be merciful you have to know your own need for mercy, your own potential for impurity. And yet all these virtues in tension are blessed.
You may find going to Church difficult sometimes because of the other people there, because of their personalities, or interests, or accents or beliefs. Speaking as a clergyman I often find it impossibly difficult to worship in another church because I don’t like the way things are done and don’t agree with the sermon. Nevertheless, if we find the Church on earth difficult to fit into, our fit in the Church in heaven is going to be even more surprising. The communion of saints will be a shock because sanctity is so amazingly diverse and unpredictable. It is only sin which is boringly predictable.
Which is perhaps why another feature of the lives of the saints is their awareness of their own sinfulness and their unawareness of their own goodness. Goodness is invariably unselfconscious, we do not see it in ourselves, though others may see it in us. The saints are always honest. They always find themselves out, long before anyone else does. They know themselves as sinners not because they are hung up on some kind of guilt neurosis but because they always have before them the ideal of goodness, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And before that ideal the saints will always know themselves to be falling short; but that is not a cause for depression or crippling guilt. Faced with the love of God in Christ the saints have no fear of admitting their sinfulness because they know the sole purpose of God’s love is to draw them to itself. Freely admitting their sinfulness, enables the Saints to open up a space in their lives for amazing grace to produce unexpected results. For what makes a saint in this life is not how good he or she is, but the way in which he or she allows God’s grace to work with his or her weaknesses, sins and failures. What makes a saint is not an absence of fear or guilt, of emotional scars and painful memories. What makes a saint is the acceptance of the painfulness and muddle of life so as to be compassionate with those in pain. In the companionship of woundedness the love of God is made available. The saints are those who have come to terms with their humanity, and so have learnt how to be unexpectedly good in a “well-I’ll- be-damned’ sort of way. It is the saints who are the poor in spirit because they know their need of God.
So living back to back with the saints provides a defence against both the fear of failure and the danger of complacency. The saints show us what the grace of God can do in us and they keep us humble. Being part of the body of Christ means that behind every Christian there is a saint so that each of us can at least bask in the glow of someone else’s halo. Amen.
Stephen Tucker