by CCW | 7 November 2021 08:00
When “golden October decline[s] into sombre November” bringing us ultimately through these times of endings to new beginnings in Advent, then, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, “who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the Saints at All Hallows, remembered the martyrs and saints who wait?” Somehow there is a significance about the Octave of All Saints that is meant to remain with us. Yet we so easily forget the glory of All Saints and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. The Octave of All Saints is the strong reminder to us of our true citizenship in heaven which is the pattern of our lives in faith.
“For here have we no continuing city”, Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14) and in the Octave’s commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (BCP, p. 302), the powerful lesson from Hebrews about the community of faith reminds us that “they”, reaching back to the saints of the Old Testament, we might say, as well as the great pageant of souls over the centuries who have gone before us, “seek a country”, indeed, “they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Paul, building upon such an understanding reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven”.
But that does not mean a flight from the world nor does it mean its contrary, collapsing the things of God into our world. It is more about how we participate now in heavenly things through our desire and longing for what is everlasting. November, in all of the fading glory of nature, reminds us of what does not pass away. All Saints’ recalls us to who we are with God in the Communion of Saints. Such is the true dignity and freedom of our souls. We are freed to God.
That freedom does not mean ignoring the constraints and laws that belong to the various forms of the human community; constraints, laws and regulations which are often arbitrary, annoying, inconsistent, questionable and even prejudicial. There are and have always been bad laws. There can be no doubt about the anti-Christian bias in some sectors of our country. But we don’t get to be anti-nominians, those who reject law. Rather it means tolerating all manner of things precisely because they are limited and finite. To put it in the language of today’s Gospel, Caesar is not God; worldly powers are not omnipotent however much they presume to such pretensions. Jesus says to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem at the time of his capture and passion and in response to such pretensions to absolute power that “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn 19.11).
Our prayers for those in authority over us is always that they not abuse their power in the overreach of authority or in the attempts to coerce our thinking. Our actions may be constrained out of some sense of the common good; that is one thing. It is quite another to require us to think only in a certain way, to try to compel our thinking by proscribing the use of language, and to demand not our toleration but our celebration of the agendas of identity politics and policies that are inherently divisive. That is intolerable and runs the risk of rendering unto Caesar the things of God.
There is a wonderful providence in the coincidence of Trinity 23 falling within the Octave of All Saints. It concentrates for us the deeper meaning of the Christian faith in the face of our current distresses. For here Jesus makes a distinction with a difference, a distinction between worldly power and the power of God. We render unto Caesar what is due to worldly powers – paying taxes and an outward conformity to reasonable practises, for instance, even if we disagree about the extent of the former and the reasoning behind the latter. The simple point is that the powers of the Caesars of the world are always limited, partial, and incomplete and always changing and inconsistent. And so too our judgements about the opinions of one another.
This contrasts with God and with the radical idea of our being made in the image of God. Jesus does what All Saints’ does, namely, recalls us to who we are in the sight of God. He uses a coin impressed with the image of Caesar to ask us the telling question which cuts through all of the fog of opinions that swirl about us in our confusions and judgements about ourselves and one another. “Whose is this image and superscription?” What do we see and read on the coin? The image of Caesar. This touches upon a pressing issue in our own day, an ancient question about the relationship between the political and the economic. But even more, from a theological perspective, this question reminds us about who we are. Whose image are we and what words are not only written over us but in us? The question and context recalls us to our being made in the image of God.
The struggle of our lives is to understand more fully what that means and to act out of that understanding in our lives. Jesus is being put to the test by the Pharisees about his loyalty to God via the Mosaic law. They are seeking to “entangle him in his talk”, to catch him out, as it were, about his fundamental convictions, to reveal him either as a traitor to God or to Caesar. And so, too, with us. But Jesus points out the false dichotomy in their argument, the false opposition between Caesar and God. They are not equal powers who stand in opposition requiring our obeisance to either one or the other. There are proper distinctions to be made about what is owed to temporal powers and what is owed to spiritual powers, to use a later language of discourse. What Jesus says here becomes the basis for a long-standing debate about the relation between church and state. But here it is much more basic. It is not about church and state but about human power and God’s power.
One of my favourite All Saints’ hymns, and to my mind, one of the greatest, is Peter Abelard’s 12th century hymn, O quanta, qualia. We know it in John Mason Neale’s 19th century translation, “O what their joy and their glory must be”. It is Hymn # 613 in our hymn book. It speaks about our blessedness, as in the Beatitudes, which is about a desire and a longing for the goodness of God in which we already participate through our longing and desire. The Beatitudes are the Gospel for All Saints. They belong to a long and profound tradition of ethical philosophy about our relation to the Good. We can only desire what is good. Plato in the Symposium argues that “love is the desire to have the good forever” and that it belongs to a process of education, the eros, passionate desire to know what that good truly is.
Aristotle in his ethical treatises uses the word makarios to speak of the happiness of the gods while using eudaimonia in relation to our happiness. Jesus uses the word makarios because he is the unity of God and man. Our human happiness is found in our life with God. One of the paradoxes of the Beatitudes is that through their profound inwardness they contribute to the understanding of our lives together as a community. The inwardness of the Beatitudes is about our being made in the image of God, not by our being defined by the outward circumstances of our world. “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. In Abelard’s hymn, that heavenly city or kingdom is named as Jerusalem. Vere Jerusalam est illa civitas. Truly Jerusalem is that city in which we find the perfection of our desires. “Vision of peace, that brings joy evermore;/ Wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er,/ Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.”
We participate in that community of spirit now and as such it strengthens us in this vale of tears. O quanta, qualia. Abelard’s words unite both the idea of quantity and quality fatally separated from one another in early modernity; Galileo’s so-called error, the root of the tensions between the arts and the sciences. But blessedness is both about what is more, a quantity, “a great multitude which no man could number” and about those qualities of the soul which belong to the grace and goodness of God at work in us despite the follies and uncertainties of our world and day. Such are the blessednesses which teach us about the true desire and longing of our souls for God and which give us the inner strength to deal with the things of Caesar.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 23, In the Octave of All Saints’, 2021
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/11/07/sermon-for-the-twenty-third-sunday-after-trinity-in-the-octave-of-all-saints/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.