This One’s for the Losers: A Reflection for All Saints Day 2024

There’s a popular conception out there, as prominent in the Church as outside of it, that Christianity is about “going to heaven when you die” — that, if you ‘believe in’ Jesus, you’re on the ‘right team’ and when things get sorted out, you’ll be sorted accordingly. These days, this black-and-white, team mentality has turned quite a bit darker, and infected much of Christian social and political engagement in a way that sees everything in terms of winners and losers and punishing those on the ‘wrong team’. But all of this is far, far from the spirit, ethic, and teaching of the New Testament. There the focus isn’t on going to heaven when you die (though this is a logical consequence of Christian teaching) and even less on winning political victories over one’s (supposed) enemies, but rather on living the life of the Kingdom of God as much as possible in the here and now, no matter what team you’re on.

This is why it’s interesting to reflect on All Saints Day through the lens of the current series on the Sermon on the Mount. For it’s there that the saints of every day and age get our marching orders — not victory by the standards of this world, but the overturning of those standards. As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously put it, citing another of Jesus’ teachings:

We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s road side, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.

The Good Samaritan is a particularly apt reference, since the whole point of that story is that it’s better to be on the wrong team and do the right thing than be on the right team and do the wrong thing, that heresy is a lesser sin as far as God is concerned than cruelty or indifference. As Jesus puts it, and John the Baptist before him, “A tree will be known by its fruit” (Matthew 12.33; cf. Matthew 3.10; 7.17). And that’s the whole point. You can be the most beautiful apple tree in the world, but that’s worth nothing if your apples are bad.

We see echoes of this idea — that faithfulness is determined through the quality of our life — in the Old Testament lesson appointed for All Saints Day. This classic reading, brought out whenever the Church remembers the Saints, is from the book of Wisdom and is one of the few times a Deuterocanonical book is read in the lectionary. It’s easy to see why:

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. … Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and he watches over his elect. (Wisdom 3.1-9)

This Second Temple era text expresses well the fraught religious sentiment of that age: How can we say that God is faithful in a world where the ‘good guys’ always lose? The return from Exile had not been the triumph God’s people had expected; instead, they remained subject to increasingly hostile foreign powers for hundreds of years. This text insists that God is faithful, but that human faithfulness is rewarded not in this world but in the next, and is judged on how well one lives out the ways of the next world in this world — even if that usually ends up getting one trampled.

To put this another way, as we saw the other week, the first words of Jesus’ public ministry were, “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven has come near!” (Matthew 4.17). One of the things we are called to repent of is pursuing power and prestige on this world’s terms, and to see the world instead through God’s eyes of mercy and compassion. This is a conscious choice — to live the life of the God’s Kingdom within the kingdoms of this world, despite the often fierce opposition, or to continue in the ways of this world, which always lead to injustice and destruction. And it’s not easy to do, which is why the Church has always held out as exemplars the lives of particular people who have despite the odds lived the life of the ‘next world’ in this one.

And that brings us to today’s celebration of the Saints. As I’ve previously written:

The Saints are those who have managed to run the gauntlet of this life faithfully, without losing heart or hope.

The Saints are those who have lived the ‘not yet’ of God’s Kingdom in the midst of the ‘now’ of Empire.

The Saints are those who have known God in a world without eyes to see and ears to hear.

The Saints are those who have born Good Fruit in dry and rocky soil.

[…]

Today we remember all of those countless Saints who have done just this. We remember the Apostles, like Peter, James, and John, who gave up everything to follow Jesus. We remember the Marys, who tended to Jesus’ body when those same Apostles were cowering in fear. We remember the martyrs, like Polycarp and Justin, Perpetua and Felicity, who refused to bow to the false gods of Empire. We remember the unnamed Christians who nursed the people of Rome during a plague. We remember bishops like John Chrysostom, who sold off the Church’s gold to buy food for the hungry. We remember Augustine of Hippo, who encouraged the faithful as they watched their world collapse. We remember Francis of Assisi, who gave up his comfort and wealth so that nothing could distract him from God. We remember John of the Cross, who found God even in the midst of the desolation of persecution and false imprisonment. We remember Maria Skobtsova, who ran a safe house for refugees fleeing the Nazis and was killed at Ravensbruck. We remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who dreamed of God’s justice rolling through his country like a mighty river. We remember Olga Michael of Kwethluk, who gave generously to the poor even in her own poverty and gave comfort to those living with sexual traumas. We remember Bishop Oscar Romero, who was killed for standing with the poor against the oppression of the wealthy. We remember Fr. Alexander Men, who was murdered the morning after speaking out against the rising tide of nationalism in the Russian Church.

Today we remember them. But in so doing, we also remember that they are not so different from us. The Saints are not superheroes, but normal men and women just like us, full of the fears and anxieties of their lives and times, who made the choice to rise to the occasion.

This year, as in every year, we are faced with that same choice. Do we pursue the ways of this world and its injustice, or do we repent and open our eyes and hearts to the ways of God’s Kingdom? The Gospel truth is clear about this; the only question is which path we’ll choose.