Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for All Saints’/Trinity 21
“And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed…”
There is a nugget of truth in every form of nonsense, even a nugget in the nonsense of Halloween in our contemporary culture however far removed from its pagan and Christian origins. The nugget lies in the very idea of dressing up in masks and costumes which are about a kind of playful imagination about the self, about who you are. At the very least, it presupposes that you are a self, a person, a ‘you’ that is more than the forms of appearance that you might present. And as we saw last week, in considering the ways in which God calls us to account both in terms of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten and the story of Cain and Abel, we are taught the great lessons of an ethical understanding at the heart of which lies the insight that self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable and belong to the nature of our fraternity and life together in the body of Christ.
In that time of year when leaves lie scattered on the ground in heaps of burnished gold, and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, we are recalled to the wonderful vision of the unity of the spiritual community of our humanity. Who we are is seen in what we are called to be. We are called to the Communion of Saints, to who we are in the will of God. Here is the great redemptive vision of our humanity, the counter and the corrective to all of the fearful divisions and uncertainties of our confused world endlessly caught in division and animosity precisely through the assertions of diversity at the expense of unity.
Halloween means the Eve of All Hallows’, all the Saints, “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” as John the Divine tells us in his marvellous vision. We are part of that great company in and through our liturgy and life in Christ. This feast provides the true spiritual ground for our human freedoms and rights, our freedoms and rights as persons irrespective of the assertions of identities and particularities of race, religion, gender, whatever. Ultimately, there is a greater truth and unity to our humanity expressed in and through the diversities of personality but not because of the competing identity claims of contemporary culture. The true sense of self is found in our life in God and with one another in the communion of saints which includes those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ. In some places we have a visual reminder of this in churches situated in a churchyard. The original Christ Church, for instance, was placed within what is now known as the Old Parish Burying Ground. The churchyard reminds us of the greater community of spirit to which we belong.
The Feast of All Saints belongs to the ethical question about the good life, the Summum Bonum, the highest good for our humanity individually and collectively considered. The Summum Bonum is our ultimate happiness. As all of the great religions and philosophies teach, happiness is not found simply and alone in materialism or hedonism, the philosophy of sensual pleasure. It has to do with life lived in accord with a principle that is greater than ourselves without which we are not truly ourselves. It has to do with the character of our lives. Character implies a story. What is the story? It is about “living for a purpose that is greater than the self”, as James Davison Hunter suggests (The Death of Character).
That sense of what is greater than the self is what we are given to see in the marvellous vision and teaching of All Saints. It is the redemption of our humanity in its unity with God in praise and worship. That is what we are shown in John’s Revelation. It is a community united in praise and worship, not of ourselves, but of the Triune God, a community comprised of what has been learned in and through the story of God’s engagement with our humanity. This spiritual community embodies the radical truth of the whole of creation which exists for the praise of God.
That “great multitude” beyond human calculation is one with the whole of creation, with angels, and elders, and the four living creatures all standing “round about the throne” and “before the Lamb”. The elders are four and twenty, symbolizing the books of the Hebrew Scriptures; the four living creatures represent the four evangelists of the New Testament each in the symbols of their Gospels. Matthew’s symbol is a winged man indicating the humanity of Christ and human aspiration; Mark, a winged lion recalling the royal lineage of Christ; Luke, a winged ox emphasizing the sacrifice of Christ; John, the eagle on whose wings we soar in the contemplation of the divinity of Christ. All of these symbols are, in a way, sacramental: something divine and holy and good is made known through the sensibile realities of our world and day.
That great multitude is robed in white. “What are these?”, one of the elders asks John, rhetorically, it seems. For “he said unto me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Here is the wonderful paradox of redemption, the return of our humanity to God through the disorders of sin and evil in our betrayals of God. This is the greater story about the truth of ourselves in the truth of God.
The Summum Bonum is our happiness. What does that mean? We have in the Gospel for All Saints the greatest of the ethical teachings of the Christian Faith. Our happiness is not found in ourselves alone but in our life with God and with one another. Our true happiness is found in the Beatitudes, the blessednesses which are at the heart of Christ’s great Sermon on the Mount. The teaching here belongs to the traditions of ethical understanding in pagan antiquity and in the other great religions of the world. The shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad depicts the city at war and the city at peace. Plato teaches that justice cannot be self-interest but necessarily belongs to the good of all. Aristotle teaches that happiness is found in the rational life lived in accord with virtue. The Upanishads of the Hindu tradition encapsulated in the Bhagavad Gita teach that the self achieves unity with ultimate reality through the threefold forms of yoga; the path of unity via action (karma yoga), thought (jnana yoga), and devotion (bhakti yoga). Buddhism teaches that serenity of mind is achieved through the Four Noble truths that underlie the eightfold ways of ‘rightfulness’. The Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions teach that our happiness is found in accord with the Word and Will of God.
Such things have to be taught. Here in the Beatitudes is the great ethical teaching of Christ. “He opened his mouth and taught them.” The Beatitudes from beginning to end challenge and counter our shallow and subjective assumptions about happiness. They call us to account in terms of our relation to the Summum Bonum. They are all about a certain character of soul, about the inner qualities that properly define and shape human personality and character. They turn the world on its head, we might say, at the same time as they reveal the redemption of the world in Christ.
The Beatitudes are eight in number but like the musical octave they comprise a unity of being in and through the diverse aspects of personality, like the notes of the octave itself resolved into unity. The first and last Beatitude frames the entire vision, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” it is said both of “the poor in spirit” and those “who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. This provides the interpretative key. Humility is our openness to the truth and goodness of God even when that is countered, denied and contradicted. The Good is greater than all and every form of evil. The poor in spirit are those who are not puffed up in the perverse presumption of themselves; the prevailing problem of pride. They are open to what is greater than themselves.
“Blessed are they that mourn” is the second Beatitude, “for they shall be comforted.” The blessed are “they which have come out of great tribulation,” John tells us. The sufferings and sorrows of life are not denied or dismissed. The point however is that you don’t have to be defined by sorrow and loss, by suffering and death. Something greater is learned in and through them. “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” God is our comfort and consolation. “Blessed are the meek.” This, too, is counter to all of the deceits about empowerment and self-esteem. The meek are not losers. They are the ones who are gentle in wisdom and know the profound truth that the world is God’s world. It is not the playground for human presumption, domination and destruction. To know the world in God is to inherit the earth as being for God.
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.” Righteousness belongs to God. It is not a human construct. It is about our lives as moved by the goodness and righteousness of God. The justitia Dei is about our life in Christ, himself the righteousness of God. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” It is about reciprocity. Mercy for mercy lies at the heart of the Lord’s prayer for forgiveness, the reciprocal relation of seeking forgiveness and being forgiving. Mercy is the highest form of justice, the justice which seeks the ultimate good of one another. And over and against the distractions and confusions of our minds, “the pure in heart” are precisely those who “see God.” Our liturgy begins with the prayer that God, “unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”, will “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts” that we may perfectly love him. The peace-makers are blessed because what moves in them is the peace of God. The peace which passes all understanding makes us the children of God. We are recalled in all of the Beatitudes to what it means to be made in the image of God but here explicitly.
The last Beatitude, as we have noted, complements the first. It is the strong teaching that human personality, the human self, is not defined by what happens to us but about what moves in us. There is and there will be persecution. At issue are not our own agendas but the constant seeking of the righteousness of God. The Beatitudes do not hide from view the forms of sin and evil which contribute to suffering and death. They provide us with a deeper insight into the inner qualities of soul which belong to human worth and dignity. Jesus drives this point home for each of us individually. “Blessed are ye” even in the face of derision and persecution and false representation. That can only be if we are committed to the ethical ideals which properly define us and are our highest good, our greatest happiness, the cause of our rejoicing; in short, our blessedness, come what may in our world and day. Such is the ethical understanding of our lives in Christ. It happens through what he teaches.
“And in opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed …”
Fr. David Curry
All Saints’, Trinity 21, 2020