For all the saints

All Saints Patronal festival

Hebrews 12:18-24. This soaring prose paints a picture of what awaits believers and is reminiscent of the west door of a gothic cathedral, with the angels, saints and prophets welcoming into heaven the church on earth. In the midst is God himself but with Jesus, not Moses as the mediator. A mediator whose blood calls for forgiveness unlike Abel’s blood which called for judgement. Lastly the author uses the phrase “we have come” to indicate that this vision is an experience of the present. 

Matthew 5: 1-12. The beatitudes have two halves; the statement that certain people are blessed, and the promise of their reward. In effect, all the promises are one promise, you receive all these gifts in the Kingdom of God. Likewise, the first halves refer to everyone who is entering the kingdom of God. All of us are poor, meek, mourning for the way things are in the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege, peacemakers and inevitably persecuted by those who oppose God’s rule. We can’t choose which ones we accept or reject.  

Hebrews makes a distinction between the God presented to Moses in Exodus 20 as a dangerous, frightening and inaccessible presence with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The author invites his readers to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. For in Christ we now have access to the true God and the great community surrounding Him.

The imagery that the author of Hebrews uses is reminiscent of what greets you at the grand entrance of a Gothic cathedral, a cavalcade of saints and angels and the spirits of the righteous made perfect, with Christ at the centre leading us into the presence of God.

This is not just a vision of a future hope, but Hebrews states that “you have come” to this. This is our present not just the future. This is the reality for all the saints.

And what is a Saint? Well that depends on whether you understand that term in its original Biblical meaning or the meaning it accrued later on when the church needed examples to inspire the faithful.

Whenever you read the word saint in the New Testament, that means you, any Christian from the first disciple to this present time.

Because a Saint means literally a witness, a witness to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God who died on a cross for our sins and was raised from the dead. This is what a Christian is; a witness to the gospel.

In early Christianity, a saint started to mean someone who died for the faith because the Greek word for saint is Martyrios from where we get the term – a Martyr.

That started a chain of events where saints began to be understood as a breed of super-Christians, a tradition we all recognise when we speak about saint this or saint that, but when you hear of the Saints in the Bible that is every single Christian witness – including every single one of us.

When we sing “For all the saints” or sing about the saints going marching in, we are a part of that crowd of witnesses.

When we accept that God loves us so much He died for us, and was raised for us, we accept the responsibility to change our ways and grow into a more perfect image of our creator. What that looks like is given to us by Jesus in the part of the sermon on the mount we call the beatitudes or the blessings.

Every saint, which is what we are, is characterised by being poor in spirit, meek, mourning for the state of the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege and to be peace-makers, for which as a whole we should expect persecution. 

We can’t choose one over another. They are the characteristics of a saint we must strive to nurture.

In a similar fashion, the promises are all one – the promises are all characteristics of the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of heaven as Matthew calls it.

God will comfort, fill, be merciful, and declare to us all that we are his children.

The eight main blessings are sandwiched between the same promise delivered twice in verses 3 & 10 – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And in this kingdom, God is still judge, but with Jesus, not Moses as the mediator.

Again, contrasting and comparing the old testament with the new covenant,

Hebrews compares the sacrifices of the temple with the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain, the blood that demanded vengeance from God and contrasts that with the shed blood of Jesus which demands forgiveness and mercy.

As in some other parts of the new testament, Christians are seen to stand between the times, already receiving the kingdom, but in expectation of its future revelation.

We stand at the great west door of that awe inspiring gothic cathedral, able to see and touch and marvel at the glory of it and know that we can go inside and one day we will forever.