Hanging on the wall near our baptismal font is a tapestry depicting Jesus being baptized. The original tapestry is one of 25 lining the walls of the Cathedral in Los Angeles, woven in Belgium, which portray 135 wonderfully diverse saints. These holy people, black, white, brown, male, female, young and old, appear in all their beautiful humanity, representing every era of our Christian history. Many of the figures are familiar but some are anonymous. Silently they grace the walls of this majestic cathedral. Their diversity reminds us that we are all called to holiness and sainthood.
The author of Revelation tells us that 144,000 from every tribe of Israel were marked with the seal along with a great multitude that could not be counted. That number sounds huge but it isn’t to be taken literally. The author was using math. Twelve, the number of tribes, representing the entire Jewish people, was squared then multiplied by 1,000. Recall how God told Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars. Added to that total was a vast number from every race, people and tongue.
These people stood before the throne of God wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. They cried out, “Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb.”
Who are these souls wearing white robes, and where did they come from? They were ordinary folks like you and me. As John tells us, they are children of God. They have made it to heaven, perhaps with a stop in purgatory, in spite of their many trials and tribulations and their moments of sinfulness because they heeded the advice of the good shepherd, following his blueprint to salvation that is outlined for us in the beatitudes. In this eloquent passage, Jesus suggests what our dispositions should be if we seek to spend eternity with him and the saints. The beatitudes characterize a person who trusts in God for everything.
Essentially, Jesus calls us away from being self-centered to being God centered. He describes his followers’ blessed way of life in eight ways. They are the ones who have been poor in spirit, have mourned without comfort, have longed for their inheritance with meekness, have hungered and thirsted for justice, have been merciful and clean of heart, have tried to build peace and has suffered for all these choices. Their striving to live this way in imitation of Jesus has not always been perfect or easy. Being human, they have stumbled and erred but have repeatedly asked forgiveness and tried again. They are the ones whom others may never have thought of as being saintly but who placed their trust in God, knowing that only by God’s grace can we be washed clean and clothed in radiance.
The last of the beatitudes, articulated in two different ways, reminds Christians that Jesus is their model and that the more we imitate him, the more we can expect to share his sufferings, his sorrows and his joys. Obviously, the attitudes Jesus describes here spring from a deep, loving relationship with God. That is what every saint holds in common.
Jesus called them blessed because they have grasped his understanding of life. Such an attitude is incompatible with lording it over others, culminating instead in gratitude.
When the beatitudes reflect our mindset, we weep over any society that allows children to be exploited by drugs, sex and crass commercialism. We mourn over a society that allows a million and a half abortions per year. We mourn over a society that takes children away from their parents and holds them in cages. We seek to respect the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death.
Today’s feast assures us of a place someday within the great heavenly chorus when we accept the grace of being sealed as God’s own. That happened at our baptism. Then choosing to live each day in accord with that grace.
We belong to an immense family, a great cloud of witnesses, who constantly surround us, praying for us and with us, urging us onward toward our final reunion with God and them.
What we can note about the saints, whether they are familiar to us or the ones who live in our neighborhoods is that they come in every shape, size, color, and age. They are set apart, not by their intelligence, talent, education, work, mother tongue, culture, but by the fact that like Jesus and Mary, they have accepted their life as a vocation to holiness, an opportunity to receive and spread God’s limitless love. Seeking to be holy should be every Christian’s goal in life.
Will we be numbered among the saints someday? Do we have the courage to proclaim God’s love with our lives? Hopefully, the answer is a resounding yes. That is why we pray today on the Solemnity of All Saints. We pray for the courage to follow the Lord. We pray for the courage to put God first in our lives. May the Lord help us to stand for him and with him all the days of our lives.