by CCW | 1 November 2026 10:00
“These are they which came out of great tribulation”
In the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, there is a gathering, the greatest of all gatherings. It is All Saints, the celebration of the Communion of Saints, the spiritual fellowship of all creation with God the Blessed Trinity. It is the gathering of all things back into unity in God from whom and for whom all things exist and have their being. It is the gathering of all gatherings, we might say. We have had the gathering of Harvest Thanksgiving, the gathering of national Thanksgivings, the gathering of St. Michael and All Angels, strong testaments to the spiritual nature of all reality. Those gatherings of nature, of the rational forms of our social and political lives, of the spiritual company of Angels, find their fulness of meaning in the greater spiritual harvest gathering and celebration of All Saints.
And yet, how challenging and even disturbing. It seems to turn the world on its head, an inversion of everything we take for granted. But that is the deeper point of religion and faith that at once shapes culture, to be sure, but even more profoundly, necessarily and constantly counters culture. Our readings in the last several months in the Offices from various books of the Hebrew Scriptures provide an endless and constant critique of human behaviour in our failure to attend to the Word and Spirit of God whether in the rise and fall of empires or in the ups and downs of the fortunes of Israel, but always in the form of a critique, noting the constant failures of Israel and the presumption and pride of other cultures; think of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel or Haman in the Book of Esther. Yet such readings are a constant reminder of what is ultimately true and salvific for us: our good as found in the endless love of God and in the divine restraintand compassion that constantly seeks our good in spite of ourselves and the vagaries of history. We learn precisely through the pride and pretensions of human sinfulness about the greater and transformative power and truth of God.
What we learn is the counter to all of the forms of reductive thinking about what it means to be truly human. Biology is not simply and completely our destiny. You are not merely some kind of algorithm, a mathematical formula; you are not some random collection of molecules or pathogens floating around in a meaningless void like cosmic orphans adrift in a meaningless universe. You are more though not less than such things including the things of human experience, the things of sin and evil, of suffering and loss. And all for one simple reason: none of these things capture the dignity of our humanity. All Saints’ Day signals the vocation of our humanity: we are called to be saints; to know ourselves as part of a greater community of spirit and fellowship grounded in nothing less than the life of God imagined as a city. How? Paradoxically and profoundly through suffering as the readings for this great festival make abundantly clear.
“These are they which have come out of great tribulation,” one of the elders in John’s Revelation explains. “Blessed are the poor in spirit … blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” the first and eighth Beatitude tells us. How strange and counter-culture in every way. The Beatitudes are the charter or programme of Christian life. They are quite rightly summed up in the philosopher Michel Henry’s phrase: “Blessed are those who suffer”! How and why? Because to suffer is to be alive and know that we are alive and to know that there is a purpose to our lives as lived to God, the God who creates and more wondrously restores our broken and wounded humanity.
We are broken and wounded because of ourselves, because of pride and sin, because of our pretense to be self-complete, thinking we are the masters of the universe, captive to all the false forms of domination over nature and one another; enthrall to the nostrums and delusions of autonomy that separate us and oppose us to everything and everyone; imprisoned in “the vain imaginations of our hearts” in the various systems and schemes of human devising; in short, empty and desolate, scattered not gathered. We forget who we are and what we are called to be, to which All Saints’recalls us.
“I met a traveller from an antique land/ Who said”, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet, Ozyamandias, begins. What did that traveller say? He said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,/Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,/And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,/ Tell that its sculptor well those passion read/Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things./The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The poem shifts from the octet to the ethical and moral teaching in the sestet: “And on the pedestal these words appear,” words that make explicit what is learned from these desert ruins. What are they? “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” exclamation mark, to boot! A boast of pretension and power that stands convicted of its folly and essential emptiness. (The kind of braggadocio and pretension with which we have become only too familiar in our global world, I am afraid). As the sestet concludes “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
A powerful poem that counters the pretensions of empire, it was written after the discovery of the statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II (1279-1213 BC) brought to the British Museum in London in 1818. It inspired Shelley’s poem who imagines its meaning by way of the words which “yet survive,” as he suggests, “stamped on these lifeless things.” But only if we read and are alive to what we read.
The poem contrasts with what we heard and read this morning in the poetic theology of John the Divine and in Matthew’s account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. They recall us to the community of spirit that defines and dignifies our humanity, not through pride and presumption but through humility and grace. The Beatitudes are the blessednesses, a far stronger form of happiness. Happiness for us is mostly subjective and personal, passive and accidental; the word has in it the element of happenstance or chance, of what is random and accidental.
Yet for Aristotle, in his ethical treatises, happiness is objective and substantial. It means living in accord with virtue. It is the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with the qualities of human excellence. Its highest form, he argues, is contemplation which is at once intellectual and ethical because the life of the mind seeks what is everlasting and complete as distinct from what decays and passes away. Contemplation is the highest form of happiness, distinct from utility and pleasure because it approximates the life of the gods; a happiness that “resembles the divine activity.” But the word he uses is makarios, the same word Jesus uses in the Beatitudes, blessedness. Yet blessedness now belongs entirely to human suffering as embraced by Christ, the Word and Son of God made man. That makes all the difference. The Beatitudes encapsulate the whole project and meaning of the Scriptures as encompassed and embodied in Christ’s sacrifice.
But that is our difficulty. Sacrifice for us is something negative and destructive, as if it means death or loss, a giving up of things. That is the antithesis of the religious, and, especially, the Christian understanding. Fr. Benson (SSC) notes that “suffering in its truth means life – rejoicing in the life of God … it is the gift of ourselves to God,” a gift which itself comes from God through “the free gift of sonship.” Only so, he says, can “the creature partake of the glory of God, and by losing its natural infirmities in the Divine welcome, find its truest supernatural triumph in the Divine glory.” That sense of the supernatural is the mystery of grace that perfects our humanity. Our human will “has perfection by the grace of Christ.” It is what the Beatitudes are all about. Blessed are those that suffer.
“The poor in spirit” are blessed because they are not puffed up with self-importance; they are the opposite of Ozymandias. Their reward is not the barren emptiness of the desert sands but “the kingdom of heaven.” They have sacrificed their will to the will of God and thus have found their good in his heavenly mercies and kingdom. Those who mourn can hardly be said to be happy but they can be said to be blessed because they are comforted or strengthened. How, we might ask? Exactly what we have seen in Christ’s encounter with our humanity in matters of grief. His compassion and words show us that there is something more and greater than loss and death; they have been changed. What about “the meek”? Losers, we might think? But “they shall inherit the earth.” What can that possibly mean? Only that in their gentleness of spirit and wisdom they know that the world is God’s world and that the earth itself exists for his glory and manifests his goodness.
Are not the sufferings of our world and day about injustice and evil, the inhumanity of our humanity towards one another, the world, and God? To be sure. Thus there is a blessedness properly speaking to those who “hunger and thirst after righteousness” if that desire is the righteousness of God and not merely our human substitutes which at best are incomplete and partial. “They shall be filled.” With what? Nothing less than the justicia dei, the justice of God which underlies all things.
How wonderful that the beatitude which follows the desire for righteousness is the beatitude of mercy. The merciful get exactly what they seek, mercy. Mercy is the highest form of divine justice. It is the good which God seeks for us through Christ’s sacrifice. “The pure in heart shall see God.” Is this not what our liturgy and the disciplines of prayer and praise, of repentance and prayer, seek? Namely our purification, our being made “pure and prepared,” as Dante says, “to leap up into the stars” of heaven.
“Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God,” the God of all peace. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” Jesus says, “not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” The peace that passes understanding overcomes the walls of division and hatred through the blood of Christ. Through his death and resurrection we are made the children of God in baptism. It is the peace of simple trust and humility in the face of the world’s animosities.
And if the parade of blessedness through suffering was not clear enough, in the eighth Beatitude, Jesus says, “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;” just like the poor in spirit. Persecution comes with the territory of faith and witness over and against the false comforts and conformities to the world and its agendas.
To drive it all home to our souls, Jesus concludes, “blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” The Beatitudes sum up the whole pageant of Scriptural revelation. It is all about the radical meaning of the blessedness of suffering because all suffering now belongs inescapably to the sufferings of Christ. He “went not up to joy before he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified.” That sets the path before us “that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.”
The Beatitudes as the blessedness of suffering complement Revelation’s vision. Those who “came out of great tribulation have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.” It is a clear reference to Christ’s Passion and to our participation in it as belonging to the communion of saints, to our life together in the city of God. Not in the empty aloneness of autonomy that leaves us like ruins in the desert sand, unless we can learn to read from those ruins. “For here we have no continuing city” (Heb. 1214), only an unreal city, a desert, empty and desolate. We learn through suffering and sacrifice, learning, as T.S. Eliot puts it, “the joyful communion of saints,” the city of redeemed humanity.
“These are they which came out of great tribulation”
Fr. David Curry
All Saints’ Day, 2026
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