Day: November 9, 2025

“But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

The reading from Hebrews appointed for the Octave of All Saints’ (BCP, p. 302) reminds us that “we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” Such is the Communion of Saints, a multitude beyond number comprising persons past, present, and future who are known and embraced in God’s eternal love. It is pictured as “an heavenly country,” indeed, a city, heavenly Jerusalem. It is an image of the true homeland of our humanity, the patria with God which defines the via to God, the end which orders the way. Hebrews reminds us that the conditions of our journeying belong to our participation in what Christ has accomplished for us and therefore in us.

At this point the readings for this Sunday come into play and help our thinking about what is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day, namely Remembrance Day. We endeavour to remember all those who sacrificed their lives for their country in the great, defining, and utterly devastating wars of the last century and beyond, the legacies of which remain with us in our world of endless wars. Far from a glorification of war and military power and might, it is really a remembrance of the horrors and cost of war, on the one hand, and of the dedication and sacrifice for the sake of others for what they took to be good and true, on the other hand. Timothy Findley’s classic Canadian anti-war novel, The Wars, reflects profoundly on the technology of war which destroys both the natural world and our humanity, turning what is life-giving into what is life-destroying. It is about us but the novel counsels against falling into the tragedy of victimhood which negates our agency and dignity; instead the challenge is “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived,” a life lesson for all of us in the face of the ugly spectacle of human sin and evil that bedevils us all.

We are asked to remember the many hundreds of thousands who went forth from our communities to fight and die in the World Wars in far away lands for what they thought was worth fighting for; in so doing we place them in the greater struggle for good over evil in our own hearts and lives. In other words, the real causes of the wars and conflicts of our world are ultimately spiritual. Thus Hebrews bids us “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” This is to transcend the divisions and animosities of countries and cultures but only by looking beyond ourselves to Christ Jesus, the alpha and omega of all creation and of our lives in faith. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews says, referring to the pageant of Old Testament figures, named and unnamed, who are gathered into the greater sacrifice of Christ.

It is all about faith which Hebrews defines as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Heb. 11.1). We are more not less than the material and economic circumstances of our lives that become so often the occasion for sin and violence. We go from last Sunday’s images of “putting off mortality” and “putting on immortality”, from being “knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ”, from the theme of the “wedding-garment”, emblematic of our participation in the marriage feast, to the powerful imagery of the panoply of war. “Put on the whole armour of God,” Paul bids us, “above all, taking the shield of faith.”

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