ALL SAINTS: Rev 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Mt 5:1-12a

 

A story is told of a traveling portrait painter who stopped in a small village hoping to get some business. The town drunk — ragged, dirty and unshaved — came along. He wanted his portrait done and the artist complied. He worked painstakingly for a long time, painting not what he saw but what he envisioned beneath that disheveled exterior. Finally, he presented the painting to his customer. “That’s not me,” he shouted. The artist gently laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and replied, “But that’s the man you could be.” Today’s feast reminds us that we all can become saints.

 

All baptized Christians who have died and are now with God in glory are considered saints. All Saints Day is a day on which we thank God for giving ordinary men and women a share in His holiness and Heavenly glory as a reward for their Faith. In fact, we celebrate the feast of each canonized saint on a particular day of the year. But there are countless other saints and martyrs, men, women and children united with God in Heavenly glory, whose feasts we do not celebrate. Among these would be our own parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters who were heroic women and men of Faith. All Saints Day is intended to honor their memory. Hence, today’s feast can be called the feast of the Unknown Saint, in line with the tradition of the “Unknown Soldier.”

 

Today, the Church reminds us that God’s call for holiness is universal and that all of us are called to live in His love and to make His love real in the lives of those around us. Holiness is related to the word wholesomeness. We show holiness when we live lives of integrity and truth, that is, wholesome and integrated lives in which we are close to others while being close to God.

 

This feast offers a challenge to each one of us: anybody can, with the grace of God, become a saint, regardless of his or her age, lifestyle or living conditions. St. Augustine accepted this challenge when he asked the question: “If he and she can become saints, why can’t I?”

St. Catherine of Siena was right: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”  

 

In today’s Gospel (Mt 5: 1-12), the Church reminds us that all the saints whose feasts we celebrate today walked the hard and narrow path of the Beatitudes to arrive at their Heavenly bliss. As Pope benedict remarks, “ the blessed par excellence is only Jesus. He is, in fact, the true poor in spirit, the one afflicted, the meek one, the one hungering and thirsting for justice, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemaker. He is the one persecuted for the sake of justice.” The Beatitudes are God’s commandments expressed in positive terms.

 

Thomas Merton was one of the most influential American Catholic authors of the twentieth century. Shortly after he was converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s, Thomas Merton was walking down the streets of New York with a friend, Robert Lax. Lax was Jewish, and he asked Thomas what he wanted to be, now that he was Catholic. “I don’t know.” Merton replied, adding simply that he wanted to be a good Catholic. Lax stopped him in his tracks. “What you should say,” he told him, “is that you want to be a saint!” Merton was dumbfounded. “How do you expect me to be a saint?” Merton asked him. Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you consent to let him do it? All you have is to desire it.” Thomas Merton knew his friend was right.

The feast gives us an occasion to thank God for having invited so many of our ancestors to join the company of the saints. May our reflection on the heroic lives of the saints and the imitation of their lifestyle enable us to hear from our Lord the words of grand welcome to eternal bliss: “Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joys of your master” (Mt 25:21).

 

OT 30 [A]: Ex 22:20-26; I Thes 1:5c-10; Mt 22:34-40

 

A man attending a crowded Church service refused to take his hat off when asked to do so by the ushers. The preacher was perturbed too, and after the service told the man that the Church was quite happy to have him as guest, and invited him to join the Church, but he explained the traditional decorum regarding men’s hats and said, “I hope you will conform to that practice in the future.” “Thank you,” said the man. “And thank you for taking time to talk to me. It was good of you to ask me to join the congregation. In fact, I joined it three years ago and have been coming regularly ever since, but today is the first day anyone ever paid attention to me. After being an unknown for three years, today, by simply keeping on my hat, I had the pleasure of talking to the ushers. And now I have a conversation with you, who have always appeared too busy to talk to me before!” –- What do we do to make strangers welcome? Are we too busy that we have no time to keep the greatest commandment? When we come together to worship we can express our love for God by worshipping him and also loving our neighbor which is the flip side of the coin of loving God.

The central theme of today’s readings is the greatest Commandment in the Bible, namely, to respond to God’s Infinite Love for us by loving Him, and to express that love in action by loving Him in our neighbor.

In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, there was a double tendency to expand the Mosaic Law into hundreds of rules and regulations and to condense the 613 precepts of the Torah into a single sentence or few sentences. (The Pharisees identified 613 commandments in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Two hundred forty-eight were positive (“thou shalt”) and three hundred sixty-five were negative (“thou shalt not”). Jesus’ answer teaches us that the most important commandment is to love God in loving others and to love others in loving God. In other words, we are to love God and express it by loving our neighbor because God lives in him or her. Jesus’ answer was very orthodox, and very traditional. “The summary of the law is not original with Jesus. Its two parts represent a combination of Dt 6:5 and Lev 19:18.

The first verse that Jesus quoted was part of the Shema, the basic and essential creed of Judaism. This is the sentence with which every Jewish service still opens, and the first text which every Jewish child commits to memory.

Jesus combined the originally separate commandments and presented them as the essence of true religion. The uniqueness of Jesus’ response consisted in the fact that he understood the two laws as having equal value or importance. Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength as our response to His Love for us means that we should place God’s will ahead of ours, seek the Lord’s will in all things, and make it paramount in our lives. There are several means by which we can express our love for God and our gratitude to Him for His blessings, acknowledging our total dependence on Him. We must keep God’s commandments, and offer daily prayers of thanksgiving, praise and petition. We also need to read and meditate on His word in the Bible and accept His invitation to join Him in the Mass and other liturgical functions when we can.

 

God’s will is that we should love everyone, seeing Him in our neighbor. Since every human being is the child of God and the dwelling place of the Spirit of God, we are actually giving expression to our love of God by loving our neighbor as Jesus loves him or her. This means we need to help, support, encourage, forgive, and pray for everyone without discrimination based on color, race, gender, age, wealth, personal attractiveness, or social status. Forgiveness, too, is vital. We love others by refusing to hold a grudge for a wrong done to us. Even a rebuke can be an act of love, if it is done with the right heart.

Christian love is much more about what we decide to do than about what we happen to feel. Usually, we associate the word love with some pleasant feelings, intense and delightful emotions. But the word Jesus used means something much deeper. It is the word "agape" [AH-gah-pay], and it refers to the love that means desiring union with something that is good in itself. If we love ice cream, it means we love eating ice cream because it tastes good, we love becoming one with ice cream, entering into communion with ice cream. The communion is essential part of real love.

If we love a person, it means we love spending time with them, getting to know them, sharing the experiences of life with them.

 

Christian love for our neighbor requires seeing them the way God sees them, but we can only do that if our mind and heart are full of God's perspective, which happens through prayer. This is why the Catechism can say that "we live as we pray" (CCC #2752).

Today Jesus will pour his grace into our hearts once again in this Mass. As he does, let's beg him to teach all of us not only to understand these two great commandments, but to live them to the max.