All saints
Sermon preacher in St Salvator's Chapel on Sunday 1st November 2009 by Rev Canon Professor John Richardson
Reading: Hebrews 12.18-24; Matthew 5.1-12
The Lord be with you.
Today, the first of November, is the feast of All Saints, and it is that that I want to think about with you this morning. But before I begin, I want to express my very real thanks to your chaplain for his most kind invitation to come back to St Andrews and to occupy this pulpit once again. It is now over twenty two years since I left St Andrews, where I was a lecturer in the Department of Ancient History and a member of the Anglican Chaplaincy team, to move sixty miles down the road to become the Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh, and I can honestly say that the fifteen years that I spent in this place were some of the most enjoyable and fruitful of my career. So I am very glad to be back.
All Saints Day is in any case a day which reminds me of St Andrews, not least because, as you will know, one of the Episcopalian churches in this city (though not the one in which I served) is dedicated to All Saints, and I am sure that this morning there will be due and elaborate celebrations going on at the far end of North Street. But the whole question of saints and how they are to be thought of has been one of dispute between Christians of different traditions, not least here in Scotland since the days of the Reformation. The church of the Middle Ages venerated the saints and saw them as people gathered round the throne of God in heaven who could be called upon to support prayers to the Almighty. To the reformed tradition, this was anathema, tantamount to supplanting the work of Christ as the one who (in the words of the First Letter to Timothy 2.5) is the one Mediator between God and humanity. Episcopalians, needless to say, pursued a middle course, continuing the veneration of saints but rejecting the old Roman practice of regarding prayer to the saints as a direct means of access to God. Behind these arguments lies a riddle, or perhaps a series of riddles, about just who the saints are anyway, and (more to the point) what they are.
If we go back to the writings of the New Testament, we find a somewhat unusual situation. A number of what we now think of as standard parts of Christian doctrine and practice are pretty hard to discover in the New Testament. You can search hard in the gospels for Jesus' own views on marriage and the family, now regarded as central to Christian ethics; but what you will find is very little, and much of that very little is pretty dismissive. And as for the doctrine of the Trinity, a keystone of Christian theology, there is virtually nothing. As for saints, the matter is the other way around. It is not that there are too few mentions, but almost too many. The Greek word ¿γ¿ος, which means 'holy' and later is the word used when we would use 'Saint' with a capital 'S', is found again and again in the New Testament to refer to Christians; but here it is used not of people with special attributes or achievements but of all members of the Christian communities. Thus in the Pauline epistles the letters are regularly addressed in the form found, for instance, in Colossians, 'To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colossae'. Over and over again the ¿γ¿οι, the saints, clearly means simply 'the Christians'. The more specialist use of the word, used for members of the Christian community who had shown particular virtue, came about as the church grew and as individuals were called upon to witness to Christ not only in their lives but by laying down their lives as martyrs (a word which, of course, means 'witness' in Greek). These were the first Saints (with a capital 'S'), who were remembered on the anniversary of the days of their martyrdom, a day marked as their dies natalis, the day of their birth, the day on which they gained, through their death, a newer and fuller life. Gradually, over the first centuries of the church, this title was extended to others who witnessed to Christ to a special degree, whether as confessors (that is, those who confessed the faith), or as scholars (the doctors of the church) or missionaries or bishops or in the religious life as monks and nuns. And there were (and are) lots of those.
Our heritage, then, from scripture and from the history of the church, presents us with a double picture of saints, on the one hand of all who make up the holy people of God, all who are followers of Christ; and on the other of the heroes and heroines of the church, who have excelled the rest of us as witnesses to the life of the risen Christ. But that only takes part of the way to answering the question with which I began, as to who or what saints are. Here I want to call a witness of my own, someone who ought to be able to help us, not least because (if the rumours are right) he is about to be declared by the Roman Church 'Blessed', which is the first stage in the complex procedures of that church which result in someone being declared a capital 'S' Saint. I refer to Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Anglican priest who in 1845 became a Roman Catholic and who died in 1890. What does Newman have to say about what's a saint. I quote:
What's a saint?
One whose breath
Doth the air taint
Before his death;
A bundle of bones,
Which fools adore,
When life is o'er.
Ha! Ha!
Virtue and vice,
A knave's pretence.
'Tis all the same,
Ha! Ha!
Dread of hell-fire,
Of the venomous flame,
A coward's plea.
Give him his price,
Saint though he be,
From shrewd good sense
He'll slave for hire,
Ha! Ha!
And does but aspire
To the heaven above
With sordid aim,
And not from love.
Now, if you don't know the context of these remarks, you may find them surprising, coming from a churchman of the Roman persuasion. But, as any of you who have an interest in choral music will instantly recognise, this is not Newman speaking in his own voice but a section of the poem, The Dream of Gerontius, magnificently set to music by Edward Elgar. (The Edinburgh Bach Society and others are performing it in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 28 February next, which is why these words are rather in my mind at the moment: see me later if you want tickets!) At this point in the work the soul of Gerontius, who has just died, is being accompanied by an angel to his meeting with God. The scene is the same as we heard in passage from the letter to the Hebrews, which was our first lesson this morning, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, with innumerable angels in festal gathering, the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the righteous made perfect. But outside the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, in Newman's poem, there lurk demons, the fallen angels, who mock and attempt to terrify the souls who approach their last judgement. To the demons, the saint is a subservient coward, trying by sucking up to God to secure a place in the heavenly realms, which belongs by right to the free and independent spirits which the despotic tyrant (that is God) has wrongly ejected. Here is a little more of the cries of the demons' chorus:
Low born clods
Of brute earth,
They aspire
To become gods,
By a new birth,
And an extra grace,
And a score of merits,
As if aught
Could stand in place
Of the high thought,
And the glance of fire
Of the great spirits,
The powers blest;
The lords by right,
The primal owners,
Of the proud dwelling
And realm of light, -
Dispossessed,
Aside thrust,
Chucked down,
By the sheer might
Of a despot's will,
Of a tyrant's frown,
Who after expelling
Their hosts, gave,
Triumphant still,
And still unjust,
Each forfeit crown
To psalm-droners,
And canting groaners,
To every slave,
And pious cheat,
And crawling knave,
Who licked the dust
Under his feet.
So that, my brothers and sisters, is what a saint is, at least in the opinion of the demons in The Dream of Gerontius; and they do have a point, at least if we think that the main point about being a saint (or both varieties, with either upper or lower case 'S') is to avoid judgement on our sins and gain a comfortable position in the world to come. And sometimes the way we Christians speak about the saints, the blessed in the Lord, might lead a hearer to believe that this is the case. But fortunately we have an alternative picture available to us this morning in the words of Jesus as recorded by Matthew's gospel in the Beatitudes, which was our second reading, listing who 'the blessed' are. And it is to that reading that I want now to turn.
I spoke earlier of the riddle of what a saint is, and the Beatitudes seem to me to express this more clearly than anything. For all their apparent simplicity and clarity, the Beatitudes are exceedingly riddling; and to demonstrate just what I mean I want to call another witness to set alongside Newman's demons. This is a representative of the wisdom of the Greeks, Solon of Athens, poet, general, law-giver, not quite a philosopher in the proper sense, because he lived in the sixth century BC, before philosophers had been invented, but undoubtedly a wise man. Indeed he was reckoned by the generations after him as one of the Seven Sages, the legendary wise men of Greece. But first, listen to the words of Matthew's gospel, in the first of the Beatitudes. The Greek text reads:
μακ¿ριοι ο¿ πτωχο¿ τ¿ πνε¿ματι,
¿τι α¿των ¿στιν ¿ βασιλε¿α τ¿ν ο¿ραν¿ν.
Which, being translated (by me, rather than in the version we heard this morning) is:
Blessed are the beggars in the spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.
Now for Solon's view:
ο¿δ¿ μ¿καρ ο¿δε¿ς π¿λεται βροτ¿ς, ¿λλ¿ π¿νηροι
π¿ντες, ¿σους θνητο¿ς ¿ελιος καθορ¿.
Solon, fr.15 (D)
'No human is blessed, no not one, but all are wretched,
all mortals whom the sun watches over.'
Both of these passages are remarks about the nature of blessedness. Indeed, those of you with a little Greek (or even those with sharp hearing) will have noticed that the two contestants in this competition actually use the same word (or almost the same word) to describe being blessed. μακ¿ριοι is the word with which the Beatitudes begin; and Solon's lines have the words ο¿δ¿ μ¿καρ ο¿δε¿ς (no one is blessed, no not one). This simply underlines the fact that the two of them appear to be saying (no, are saying) exactly the opposite about blessedness. Whereas Jesus maintains that the beggars (for that is a better translation than the usual poor) in the spirit are blessed, the people who might be expected to be less blessed, less fortunate than most, Solon claims that no one who is still alive can be called blessed; and we know from other sources that he believed this because until someone was dead there was no way of assessing whether the state he or she was in could be properly described in these terms.
But it is not just that these two statements are different that sets tham apart from one another. What really differentiates them is what lies behind these two views. In Solon's case, it is an argument based on the shortness and uncertainty of human existence, from which he deduces that the state of blessedness is not available to mortals. It is worth noticing, by the way, that this was a sufficiently widespread belief among the Greeks for the words μ¿καρ and μακ¿ριος to be used to mean both the immortal gods and dead humans, neither of whom suffer from shortness of life. The point is that Solon's view, whether you agree with him or not, is based on a serious reflection on human life and reasoning on the basis of that reflection. What Jesus says, on the other hand, could never be deduced from simply considering what happens to people (or at least, I should like to hear the argument if so!). It is based instead on a reflection on the nature of God, as he had revealed himself.
The difference is not that the Greeks did not believe in the divine; rather it is that for the Greeks, wisdom was something which was acquired by hard thought and imaginative reasoning about humanity, while for Jesus, the truth about humanity comes from God. And for Christians, the truth about God comes from Jesus.
Now, if there is any truth in that rather large generalisation about two methods of thought, we can understand why the Greeks might be appalled by the notion that the truth about the human condition was to be seen in figure of a man nailed to a cross. No wonder Paul, writing to the Christians in Corinth, says that Christ crucified is fooloshness to the Greeks. But that understanding does not resolve the confrontation that I set up rather artificially between Jesus and Solon. The point, that is to say, is not how do the two differ but who is right? When it comes to deciding, as from time to time we have all to decide, what really matters about what we do and how we are going to live our lives, which side do we back? Are we to follow the rationality of the Greeks; or the apparently irrational methods of Jesus? Are we to look to God or to look around us for the answer to what blessedness is?
Put like that, if we are honest with ourselves, the answer is probably that we side with Solon. Certainly that is the way we run our society and our economy, the way we decide where to go on holiday or what career to follow. In such cases as these, we tend to think of what would make us or those for whom we have any responsibility happy by looking at what affects or has affected those around us. We live in a world, that is to say, which is determined by a Greek way of making decisions. What then are we to do with so extraordinary a set of observations about humanity and blessedness as the Beatitudes, which we heard read this morning? How are we, living in a world dominated by a wisdom which is essentially the same as that developed by Paul's Greeks, supposed to cope with the foolishness of God?
The answer to this apparently insoluble conundrum is in fact insoluble. If we insist on trying to understand God from inside our normal way of thinking about the world, we are going to come unstuck. Before we can make any sense of what Jesus said and of what Jesus is, we have to look beyond what is immediately around us. And I don't mean that what he is talking about is all going to become clear in the afterlife, that all the miseries of this world will be set right in the next, as some have interpreted the Beatitudes. That, after all, is a view that Solon (or even, in their perverted way, Newman's demons) might have agreed with. What Jesus says in the verse we have been using is not that in the end the poor (whether 'in the spirit', as Matthew has it, or just plain poor) will have the kingdom of heaven. What he says is that they do now. 'Theirs is the kingdom.' What this must mean is that there is something about the absence of wealth and possessions which brings the kingship of God closer to those who lack all the things which on a Greek estimate are needed to make a person blessed. The crucial question then is not how do explain this, how do we find a rational explanation for it; but, is it true? Is it in fact and in experience the case that there is a quality of living that we can only call blessedness which belongs to those who recognise the kingship of God, and that that blessedness is not obtainable through wealth and possession, that indeed such possession makes it harder to reach?
This is the sort of question we are confronted with in the Beatitudes, and indeed whenever we come face to face with the man who was nailed to the cross, whom Christians believe more than any other revealed the reality of what God is like. That is what releases us from the logic of Solon's reasonable conclusion that only the dead can be called blessed; and it is why the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world. It is also why the Christian life is one of continuous conversion, of forever bumping into the uncomfortable yet wonderful truth that all our human rationality cannot account for a world which is full of the presence of a God who gives himself to us in a way that goes far beyond anything our rationality can make sense of -- a God who is seen most fully in the man who, on the night he was betrayed gave himself to his followers in the signs of bread and wine so that they and we might become possessors of the kingdom that is God¿s alone.
The question with which I began, 'Who are the saints?', and the distribution of that capital 'S', must, I fear, remain unanswered, tied up with (for me) unanswerable questions about the detailed arrangements of the after-life. But, more importantly for us here and now, who, in the words of our first reading, have come to the city of the living God and the heavenly Jerusalem, is what that kingdom is like, the city of which all saints are citizens. It is especially pertinent to us, gathered in this chapel, in the college of St Salvator, of the Holy Saviour, of Jesus, whom we Christians profess and follow, for we are all saints and part of that assembly of the first-born. All we have to do is to live, knowing that that is what we are.
The Lord be with you.