Feast of All Saints
(Sunday 1st November 2015)
Jesus, make me your saint – (Matthew 5:1-12)
This coming Sunday is the Feast of All Saints, the feast in which we celebrate Christ’s victorious opening up of heaven for the many souls who would profess their faith in him and live out that faith in love. We honour all the saints that have been canonized by the Church but also those who were made into saints, by the Holy Spirit, “on the quiet.”
The Church has chosen a wonderful Gospel for this feast day; the passage is from the Gospel of Matthew and it is known as “The Beatitudes.” Beatitude means “perfect happiness” and this happiness is the reward of the saints in heaven. Every human being wants to be happy and the desire to be happy is natural and good. In fact, we will never find God unless we follow our desire to be truly happy. Our desires gives us the drive to seek God. St Augustine famously said: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find rest in you.” Only God can give us all that we need to be truly and deeply happy.
The next question, though, is “how to be happy?” and the world provides many different answers to this question and not all of them are wise. A better way of framing the question is “how can I be happy, not just in a fleeting way, but in a truly deep and ever-lasting way?” This is the question that the saints asked themselves and this is where the Beatitudes of Jesus provide us with a sure path to happiness. The Beatitudes offer us a “light” for our lives, a light that is at once challenging and attractive. We are challenged in this Sermon of Jesus because we are asked to be “poor in spirit” (detaching ourselves from money and material things); we are challenged to mourn (not just for those who have died, but to cry over the sins of the world); we are challenged to hunger to do what is right even if it makes us unpopular; we are challenged to be merciful to those who are unkind to us; we are challenged to be pure in heart living chaste lives treating our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit; we are challenged to make peace with our troublesome neighbours; we are challenged to declare our love for Christ in the public square. But these challenges are nothing compared to the what Jesus promises. For those who want to follow the light of Jesus, these are what is promised to them: “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven” “For they shall inherit the earth” “For they shall be satisfied” “For they shall obtain mercy” “For they shall see God” “For they shall be called sons of God”. Jesus does not make promises that he does not keep. His promises are the culmination of the promises that God had been making to his people throughout the story of salvation. God truly wants our happiness – time and again we forget this, thinking that God wants to make life hard for us. Yes, he gives us crosses, but he only gives us crosses that bring us to a share of the Resurrection of Jesus, which is our happiness. He wants us to be happy even more than we ourselves want to be happy.
The Eucharist too is a promise – it is a foretaste of the heavenly glory that awaits us and that the saints already enjoy. We can say that the Eucharist is “the Beatitudes” in sacramental form. Let us come before the Blessed Sacrament and say one thing to Jesus: Make me into your saint.
Fr. Eamon Roche