All Saints, Year C
Psalm 149
OT Reading: Daniel 7.1-3, 15-18
NT Reading: Ephesians 1.11-end
Gospel : Luke 6.20-31
Text: Jesus Christ … the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1.23)
This morning we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints, but to-day is also the first of the four Sundays before Advent, sometimes called the Kingdom Season, when our thoughts are directed to the Kingship of Christ, the culmination of all history in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. In our gospel reading Jesus commands us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who abuse us. That’s how we should behave under the kingship of Christ. Even the slightly less demanding command to do to others as we would have them do to us is more than we can manage. As we read about the war in Syria and Iraq, about our own country’s grudging response to the refugee crisis, or about the mean-spirited policies towards outsiders which are winning votes all over the developed world, we may very well feel that the Kingship of Christ is so far from being realised as to be at best a sad illusion, at worst a sick joke. In the face of such realities, how are we to maintain our faith in the overarching context of triumphant hope and love in which we, with all the saints, are supposed to live out our lives? It just doesn’t seem to add up.
And yet there is in the Bible a strong thread of faith in the loving purposes of God for his people, and in God’s power to fulfil his purposes for humanity by restoring the harmony which is constantly being broken by our acts of greed and selfishness. Our first reading from the book of Daniel was an example of this. The details of Daniel’s dream, which were omitted this morning, are more like a nightmare. He dreams of four great beasts as frightening as anything conceived in Hollywood, and they terrify him, but when he asks one of the attendants to interpret the dream, he is assured that there will be a happy ending. In the end ‘the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever and ever’. Our Bible concludes with more such apocalyptic visions both terrifying and reassuring in the book of Revelation.
But there is a difference between the apocalyptic hopes expressed in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and Paul draws it out for us in the vision of the ideal Christian community with which he begins his letter to the Ephesians. He begins with a characteristically Jewish affirmation of God’s blessing upon his people. Paul rejoices in his inheritance of the promise of salvation made to God’s people, and now extended to the new community of the people of God within the church. The promise of salvation, realised in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, is now extended in the church to all who have put their trust in him – Jews and Gentiles alike – all who have received the Holy Spirit. Paul thanks God that the fulfilment of God’s gracious promise in this radically inclusive way will redound to the praise of his glory.
Having acknowledged before God how blessed he is, and how blessed are his Ephesian readers to be, with him, the beneficiaries of God’s plan, Paul moves on to pray for them. The first part of his prayer is for wisdom, that wisdom which has its roots in the knowledge of God which is given to us when ‘the eyes of the heart’ (v 18) are opened and enlightened, as they are when by God’s grace we experience the gift of a personal relationship with God. In the context of such a relationship we discover not only how rich are the promises to which we have become heirs, but their power to transform our lives. As the eyes of our heart are enlightened, we discover the blessedness of which Jesus spoke, which relieves our poverty of spirit, which satisfies our hunger for righteousness. We find the balm which assuages our grief, the grace which gives us that quiet assurance of God’s love that enables us to respond to hatred, exclusion, revulsion and so on, without giving in to the urge to pay others back in the same evil coinage.
The second part of Paul’s prayer is about the Christian’s experience of this power in our lives. He begins by reminding us that this power was at work in Christ when he was raised from the dead to take his place ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’ at the right hand of God the Father. Picking up familiar Messianic references from the psalms, Paul goes on to assert not only that God has put all things under Christ’s rule, but that he ‘has made him the head over all things for the church which is his body’ (v22,23). It is Paul’s conviction that Jesus, who has fulfilled God’s purpose for humanity as the climax of all creation, Jesus who shares God’s sovereign power as great David’s greater son, is now head over all things for the church which is his body, his continuing presence in the world. We no longer need to fear those nameless forces, the great beasts of Daniel’s nightmares, which otherwise seem to hold such sway over human affairs. Rather, the church, the community of God’s people on earth can be ‘the fullness of him who fills all in all’. At this point Paul’s exalted rhetoric has so taken flight that it’s difficult to know quite what he means, but he is probably reflecting the ancient Jewish conviction that the spirit of God fills the whole cosmos, that Christ now embodies that fullness, and hence the church, as his body, now is – or should be – the place or rather the community of people in which God’s presence and his purpose for creation finds its clearest expression.
At this point we need to remind ourselves that Paul’s words are not a description of how things are. He goes on in the next chapter to remind the Ephesians of their failings. But he wants them – and us – to be strengthened and encouraged for the next stage of our Christian journey with an exalted vision of how we might be the church in this place, allowing the spirit of Jesus Christ, the fullness of him who fills all in all, to find overflowing expression in the church of all the saints to which we belong, the church which is his body.
Perhaps that is the high vision of what it means to be church which we should carry with us in our hearts this week, as we pray for God’s guidance in the selection of a new vicar to inspire and lead us.