All Souls

All Souls

Today’s commemoration of All Souls goes together with yesterday’s Feast of All Saints because they arose from a single celebration. As the church grew in its sense of sin and imperfection, sometimes rather too enthusiastically it must be admitted, there was felt to be a distinction between the whole group of Christians who had died and those who had arrived in the heavenly home promised them by the Lord in John 14.

Though originally saints were just Christian people, members of the Church, it came to be thought, presumably by a process of self-appraisal, that some of us were better at being saints in this life than others, though all Christians must be within reach of heaven. Prayer came to be offered for those who had died, in the belief that we continue to grow and journey towards God and that many, perhaps most, of us are not quite ready for God at the moment of death. Yet the Church on earth and the Church beyond the grave must be one. So, it was reasoned, there must be three states: the Church here on earth; an intermediate state, sometimes called purgatory (those in process of the journey, for whom prayer was needed to assist them on their way) and finally, the saints, proper, those who had arrived in their promised homeland with God.

We know that we receive freely, out of God’s generosity, all the good things which he gives to us and promises to us, the greatest of which being salvation, eternal life, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For each of us, that is enacted and given to us at the altar in every Eucharist, when we participate in the self-offering of Christ and receive the pledge and presence of that life in Holy Communion. Just as our life in the church differs from, say, politics or business, in that we don’t bargain for our place here or hereafter, so when we offer the Eucharist for the dead or pray for someone dear to us, we are always asking God to set all the relationships right, as Jesus tells us to do, not demanding something from him in return for what we have done. Anglicanism, affirms that members of the Church beyond the grave may benefit from our prayers: we affirm our belief in life beyond this one and the continuing mercy of God. And, from that position of orthodox faith, there is little difficulty in establishing the theological necessity and logic of an intermediate state after death. The classic biblical argument arises as the

answer to the question, ‘Where was Lazarus while he was waiting for Jesus to raise him from the dead?’ He wasn’t in heaven, but the gospel insists that he had died. The son of the widow of Nain is in the same category. We also have evidence from one of the books of the Maccabees that prayer for the dead was already Jewish practice before the time of Jesus.

This is why we celebrate a Requiem today and why it is the appropriate funeral rite for a practicing communicant Christian. We associate the life and death and continuing journey of a person or people as closely as we can with the saving death of Christ and his gift to us of new life in the resurrection, pledged and communicated to us in the sacrifice of the Mass.

Fr Michael Bowie