Solemnity of All Saints

Today's Mass Readings

It is tempting, and matter of course in our culture, to think of “church” as something entirely different than the portrait that we get in today’s readings. It’s very difficult for us Americans to think of “church” as a reality that isn’t only a group of individuals who have chosen to join together. Sometimes we use “church” to designate a building, which indeed it does, but there’s more. Sometimes we use it to refer to bishops and priests, who are all indeed part of the Church, but there’s more. Sometimes we use it to refer simply to the group gathered in one place for Mass, which indeed is “Church” is a profound way, but there’s more. The readings for this Solemnity of All Saints give us a good sense of some aspects of that “more.” We learn that the Church has an important and distinctive continuity with the People of God, whose story we hear throughout the Old Testament. This is the people that God called to be his chosen ones. They didn’t choose Him, but He chose them. Ever faithful to His covenant, He led them out of Egypt and through the wilderness. In Jewish theology, though, a person could not see the face of God, lest they die. Yet, this people longs to see God’s face, longs to know God more intimately (Ps 24:6).

In a very real way, Christians claim that they have seen the face of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus makes God known to us a more intimate way, yet there is still a time ahead of us when we shall “be like [God] for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:3) in His full glory. On earth, though, because of God’s becoming human in Jesus, there are moments when we are privileged to get little glimpses of Heaven, little foretastes of what life with God in Heaven will be like. Today’s gospel reading from the Sermon on the Mount gives us plenty of examples of how to recognize Christ’s work on earth. The beatitudes are the Church’s work. It is how the Church continues Christ’s work, making God present, in glimpses, on earth.

In today’s first reading, we get a vision of the Church in Heaven, of that “great multitude” (Rv 7:9) that sees God face to face. It is an uncountable number “from every nation, race, people, and tongue” (Rv 7:10). It is in these saints that the Church is present in Heaven. The Church is not bound to our time and space. It does not cease after death. And the Church on earth joins with that Church in Heaven to praise God at every Eucharist.

The Church is both the people called by God who seek His face and the great multitude surrounding god in Heaven. It is not merely here on earth, but continues to be a privileged place of Christ’s presence to His people of this earth.

Today, in honor of the Solemnity of All Saints, let us take a moment to pray for the intercession of all of those holy people who rest in the vision of the face of God, that the Church may more closely embody the beatitudes as those Saints did during their earthly lives.

- Tim Gabrielli