The reading from the Book of Revelation speaks of four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth. While those angels stand as sentries against the wind, another angel marks the foreheads of 144,000 men and women with the seal of God. The number is not meant to be a literal figure of those who are standing before the throne of God. It is simply to convey the notion that those who have persevered in their time of trial and distress are numerous indeed.
The Book of Revelation was written about the persecutions the Christians experienced as the Roman Empire tried to extinguish the flame of faith that had been ignited when Jesus rose from the dead. We will never know how many men and women died during those persecutions.
Persecutions or “cleansings” have continued throughout human history. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have been slaughtered simply for being different than their persecutors. Historians tell us, for instance, that 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and friars, and 283 nuns were executed during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. The Church has beatified 1,915 Spanish martyrs; 11 of them being canonized. For some 2,000 additional martyrs, the beatification process is underway. In addition, there is no way of knowing how many lay people were executed simply because they were Catholic. Of course, the Spanish Civil War is only one of the many persecutions that Catholic Christians have endured of the years.
I mention these numbers because All Saints Day was originally meant to be a Solemnity to celebrate the hundreds of thousands of martyrs who died for their faith. Around 609 or 610 A.D., Pope Boniface IV consecrated a church dedicated to the memory of the Blessed Virgin and all martyrs. Each year, a special liturgy was held in this church which became known as the Feast of All Saints. About 200 years later, the Empire created All Saints Day as a Holy Day of Obligation. As the years passed, more and more governments and local churches began to celebrate this feast on November 1. Pope Gregory IV extended the obligation to the whole church in the early ninth century. Today we remember all those who now stand around the throne of God singing the hymn of victory, “Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb.”
The second reading for today is taken from the First Letter of St. John, a book of the Scriptures that was written specifically to counter the idea that holiness or sanctity was meant only for those to whom the “knowledge” of God had been revealed (Gnosticism). St. John tells us plainly that all the baptized are now children of God. He goes on to say that “what we shall be” has not yet been revealed. When it is revealed, all the baptized shall know God and shall be like him in the glorified state of heavenly existence.
Finally, the Gospel presents us with the familiar beatitudes from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. We usually number them as eight; however, it must be noted that there at least eighty beatitudes scattered throughout the various books of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. These wisdom statements teach us that the things that this world marks as important are not the things that make us holy. Rather, God usually marks as holy the opposite of the world’s ideas of happiness or fortune.
The Beatitudes reinforce the idea that holiness is one of those “now” but “not yet” mysteries that we encounter in faith. We have been saved by the death and rising of Jesus, but we do not experience the full effects of that salvation now. We have but a foretaste of true happiness which awaits us in the next life when we shall join the throngs of holy ones that stand before God’s throne. To use another metaphor, we might look upon our life on this earth as the “choir practice” that prepares us for the day when we shall sing the song of salvation with all the saints. “Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen."
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator