All Saints

All Saints

Many religious people are not recognizably saints because they never succeed in being themselves. They fall into the trap of accepting a pre-packed form of religious or moral observance which is at odds with the person God has created them to be. To be a saint you don’t have to be an ascetic, or look serious, or solemn; you don’t need to look like someone else. You have to be yourself, as well as you can be and with God’s help.

It is true that in the saints we can see human beings at their brightest and best; but they are more than just examples. We should avoid the besetting sin of modern life and try to copy the image without the content; try to be famous rather than good. The saints are teachers, friends and advocates. That last word, ‘advocate’, is the key: this feast, and All Souls, remind us that Christians who die are not ‘dead and gone’; we believe their lives are ‘changed not ended’ and they live, and pray for us, to God.

We are called, each of us, to be saints. That means to be ‘our own person’ but with a particular understanding of the person. We are to be that person, understanding that our personhood is from God. We are not asked to refuse life, nor to try and be someone else, but to grow from the seed of life within each of us. That is our journey home.

The beatitudes, the opening verses of Matthew 5, which we hear today as the gospel, are sometimes read as a prescription for sainthood. Especially in Matthew’s apparently more spiritualized version of the teaching (and the use of the churchy word ‘blessed’) they can seem like spiritual precepts.

But words in translation trip us up. This gospel isn’t a to-do list for someone who wants to be a saint. This is much more radical; it is Jesus’ own rhetoric, his take on the world, which proceeds by overturning lazy and comfortable ways of reading people. Several of the words which flow past as we hear this familiar passage are not quite what they seem.

The Greek word behind ‘Blessed’ is a notoriously difficult word to translate; a few 20th century translations tried ‘happy’ (‘happy are the poor in spirit, happy are the peacemakers’), but that was too weak and perhaps too druggy- sounding. ‘Fortunate’ may be better, because it draws out the paradoxes.

The first of these sentences in Luke’s version is famously simpler: Luke wrote just ‘blessed are the poor’, rather than the ‘poor in spirit’, as in Matthew. Turn that round to ‘the poor are fortunate’ and we’re getting somewhere: an odd and arresting statement. Another suggestion has been to catch Jesus’ sense of the urgency and immediacy of the kingdom and make this a prophetic proclamation: ‘good fortune now to the poor in spirit’!

And ‘poor in spirit’ doesn’t mean ‘feeble’; ‘poor in spirit’ means people who feel abandoned by God and cry out in frustration (as Jesus himself does on the cross) ‘why have you abandoned me’– now, Jesus says, they are to know they are God’s people.

Then the most overused and caricatured of the statements, ‘blessed are the meek’. In the Greek of the NT [Πραεις] this word does not mean ‘gentle’ or ‘mild’; on the contrary it means powerless (and probably angry about it); here the implication from Jesus is that God will come to their rescue.

I once heard an Evensong sermon on the beatitudes in which it dawned, horribly, on us all, after 10 minutes, that the preacher had so far dealt with only one beatitude and there were still eight to go. I’ll stop soon, because I think you’ve got the point. Just one more, though: ‘pure in heart’, again well know to us because of Keble’s famous hymn, ‘Blest are the pure in heart’: ‘pure in heart’ does not mean sugary sweet (or morally perfect). It brings us back to being who we are.

‘Pure in heart’ is an ancient way of saying ‘straightforward’: it’s the opposite of ‘double-tongued’ to use another Greek idiom. ‘Pure in heart’ indicates integrity and stands against deviousness. It is the only one of these statements that doesn’t explicitly address the needy, poor or powerless. But of course, for the oppressed and powerless, the temptations to integrity are huge. Which reminds me to say that we mustn’t use the beatitudes to romanticize poverty; it is a far from ennobling state. Jesus offers the opposite of a romantic view: the point of all these statements is to proclaim God’s bias to the genuinely grindingly poor and powerless, not to tell them to enjoy their poverty.

Also, ‘pure in heart’ doesn’t connote the obsessive introspection or searching for psychological motivation which sometimes characterizes religious neurosis: it isn’t about a tortured inner self or sense of guilt. Rather, it suggests that simplicity and straightforwardness in our dealings makes our relationship with

God easier to nurture – to paraphrase, ‘The person with integrity is fortunate because it is easy for them see God clearly too.’

In the end none of us can help ‘being our own person’. It should be a redundant statement for the Christian. It is unhealthy and counterproductive to repress who we are in service of pretending to be good (which is not being ‘pure in heart’, straightforward). In fact Paul would say to each of us: ‘you are all called as saints and your life’s work is to become what are.’

Fr Michael Bowie