Thoughts from the Second Floor Front
All Saints Day
XXXI Sunday in Ordinary Time
November 1, 2020
Today’s gospel passage is among the most widely known and familiar to people. Even non-believers have heard of or have read this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount. Some, I believe St. Jerome among them, have presented the words of Jesus in Matthew 5 and likened Him to a new Moses. Remember Matthew was writing for a Jewish community who became Christian. As a Rabbi would do when instructing his disciples, so too, does Jesus sit and teach his disciples. Mountains are places of revelation in Jewish culture and in scripture. Just as Moses ascended a mountain and received The Law so now Jesus, Moses-like, ascends a mountain and delivers a new law. As fitting as the image may be, in Jesus we have one greater than Moses. Jesus asserts later in this chapter that he has come to fulfill the law not to do away with it or replace the Law.
Some assert that what Jesus has done in chapter 5 is introduce to His followers then, and now, an impossible ideal. We are to strive for the virtues and actions that He presents in His sermon, but we will never be able to achieve them because it is impossible. That is true. For us it is impossible to achieve the blessed state to which we are called. It will be impossible on our own but with God all things are possible.
Then there is the third approach to understanding the Beatitudes. It is more than a new law. It is not an unachievable standard. It is exactly what Jesus said we are to be and do. These virtues are the characteristics of what it means to be a disciple: practice a spirit of poverty, be mournful and meek, possess a hunger and thirst for righteousness, be merciful, clean of heart, peacemakers, have a willingness to endure persecution and insults for the sake of righteousness.
The vision of the Seer John, author of the Book of Revelation, is an expanding image of the New Israel. The symbolic number of 144,000 is the result of the sacred number 12 squared and multiplied by 1,000. These are the countless people who have been marked with the seal. On this day when we celebrate All Saints, reflect on the mark that you have received. You have been sealed at your Baptism and that Seal was further validated at your Confirmation. You have been consecrated to be a people holy and beloved as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians:
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another…. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.
That is our call to sanctity. That is our call to be Saints. These unnamed people we celebrate today were not plaster statues placed high on a pedestal. The saints we celebrate today are not the great unwashed; like us they have been washed in the waters of Baptism. The saints we celebrate today are the great unknowns who lived the life and ethic of the gospel much as we do, without notoriety but with the simple and direct purpose to make the Beatitudes incarnate in our world. A world that in so many ways needs to hear of the Kingdom.
There is a story told about a young girl walking on the beach after a terrific storm had tossed up hundreds of star fish onto the sand. As she walked along the beach she bent down and started to throw them back into the ocean. A man saw her doing this and went over to talk to her. He told her what she was doing was pointless because there is only one of her and there are hundreds of starfish. “What you’re doing won’t make a difference for all these beached starfish.” She looked back and squinted at the man, paused for a minute and then she bent down and picked up another starfish and tossed it back into the sea. “It made a difference for that one,” she said and went on her way.
Make a difference for someone today. Deliver the message of the gospel. The only way that message is going to be delivered is through our efforts, our everyday, mundane, quotidian efforts on behalf of the Kingdom.
Faithfully,
Msgr. Diamond