The proper place of the Saints in the life of the Church is one of those totemic issues that has divided Catholic and Reformed Christians. Protestants have contended that veneration of the saints can easily tip over into idol worship or the creation of intermediaries between us and God, a role which only Christ should play. Why ask the saints to pray for you when we can pray for ourselves thank you very much? And Catholics in their turn have argued that to ignore all the faithful witnesses to Christ that have lived in the last 2000 years would be to cut ourselves off from some of the richness of God’s story and have the effect of making us rather self-absorbed in the Church today. And if these very holy people are enjoying the beatific vision with not much else to do, then what’s the harm in asking for their prayers?
I often feel that the effect of both of these perspectives is, to some way, externalise our understanding of sainthood, either as irrelevant to us or as a kind of spiritual “A team” to which we can struggle in vain to measure up. But what I think All Saints Day should really be about is what I want to call the immanence of holiness – the fact through Jesus Christ, God is forming ordinary lives into extraordinary lives of holiness. That has happened in the past and it continues to happen today. And what we are celebrating is that fact as much as honouring those who have lived particularly good lives.
In the Apostles Creed we say that we believe in the Communion of Saints and that Latin phrase communio sanctorum can have two literal meanings, both of which bring to mind some of this sense of the immanence of holiness.
The first meaning is “the sharing between holy people”. The Communion of Saints isn’t an elite of A list Christian celebrities disconnected from us. Of course, part of what today is about is honouring those whose lives (and often deaths) have demonstrated really extraordinary witness to Christ. But their holiness is something which, through our baptism, we all have a share in and can all grow in. We are all in the business of seeking to live out these beatitudes and the rest of Jesus’ teaching in our lives. We are all being empowered by the Spirit, through our failings, to turn the other cheek, to pray for our enemies, to do to others as we would have them do to us. We honour the saints because they inspire us in our shared task of being faithful to Jesus. That is why St Paul calls the Christians of his day “the Saints” because they have all been adopted by God into a shared life of holiness. And because the Church, visible and invisible, is a praying community, the saints of the past don’t just inspire us with an heroic example, but they support us today in our discipleship with their intercession to the Father, just as we support one another. Because holiness is a shared enterprise.
And that brings us to the second definition of communio sanctorum which is “the sharing of holy things”. Jesus has given the Church the gift of sacramental practices as vehicles of his grace. And just as we share a common life with the saints through the waters of baptism, so in the sharing of the Eucharist we are built up in this holy living. At every Eucharist we are reminded that we gather around the altar with all the company of heaven to share God’s holy gifts with God’s holy people. The great saints of the Church were made holy by the gifts of bread and wine that they shared, and so are we made holy as we share those gifts in their company today. We are brought closer to all who share them, living and departed, with us in this place tonight and in every nation on earth, particularly those Christians whose experience of the poverty, hunger and sorrow of the beatitudes is very real.
So on All Saints Day we are confronted with the immanence of holiness. A holiness which we can’t banish into heroes of the past or a present day spiritual elite because it is a holiness that we share through faith in Christ and are called to be a witness to in our shared discipleship. Jesus Christ is the source and zenith of holiness and he shares that holiness with all his holy people in the waters of baptism and in the gifts of the Eucharist.
So as we approach this altar again tonight may we say of the Saints in light and of one another here:
“O holy ones, companions on our pilgrimage, pray for us brothers and sisters in the Faith.”
Amen