Homily for All Saints 1 November 2008

“Do you know who these people are?” (Rev 7:13). That was the question an elder put to John, the seer of the book of Revelation, in the 1st reading.
Today, All Saints, we are standing with John and seeing what he saw, seeing a huge number impossible to count, of people from every nation. We are seeing the fulfilment of the promises made to Abraham centuries before. “Look up at the sky, the Lord had said to him, and count the stars if you can. Just so will be your descendants be” (Gen 15:5). We are seeing all those believers who have gone before us and have arrived at the heavenly goal we’re still travelling to.
And then the question comes, “Do you know who these people are?” Do we? This doesn’t mean, Can we name them all? Some we can; they’re in the Ramsgate Book of Saints! The question is rather, Do we know what a saint is? Do we know what it means to stand before God in everlasting life? Do we know what God is calling us to and how to get there? It’s a question all the saints are putting us today.
“You can tell me, my lord,” answers John. And the elder does. “These are the people who...have washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14). And what does that mean? It’s bizarre imagery, deliberately so. You don’t use lamb’s blood as bleach. And it’s imagery that has been used so enthusiastically in some Christian circles, that it may well turn us off quite effectively. But this is who these people are: “They have washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb.” It’s worth trying to understand. What does it mean? Let’s say this: the robe is our humanity, the blood of the Lamb is the power of Christ’s passion, his suffering and death, and white is the colour of closeness to God. So a saint is someone whose humanity, whose life, has been brought to God, been made god-like, by the power of the Cross, by the power of the self-offering Christ the Lamb made on the Cross. There, on the Cross, the naked Christ gave us back our robe. On the Cross, he showed us our truest and deepest vocation as human beings. He gave us the pattern. He showed us love of God, his Father, and of us, his brethren, “to the end”, to the shedding even of his blood, to the sacrifice of his life. “No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). “Do you know who these people are?” Good Friday will come back to us here, and the Gospel of John: “When [the soldiers] came to Jesus they found that he was already dead, and so instead of breaking his legs one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water” (Jn 19:33-34). It isn’t a pattern simply outside us then; it’s a stream. The blood and water flow out of him into us. Who are these people, then? Who are the saints? Those who have let that blood, that is the self-giving love of Christ, come into their lives, their humanity, and wash it of all that is alien to that love. They’re those who have let it in through the doors of faith and sacrament, and consented to have their thought and decision, their love and their action shaped by it. The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, says St Paul (Rom 5:5). And it has shaped and formed them to the likeness of Christ. And they have washed their robes in the poverty of spirit, the gentleness, the hunger and thirst for what is right (cf. Mt 5:3ff) of Jesus himself, purified them into his own purity (cf. 1 Jn 3:2).
This may of course - history has enough examples - go as far as actual martyrdom. “These are the people, says the elder, who have been through the great persecution” (Rev 7:14). But I remember Abbot Gilbert Jones preaching here 16 years ago today, and saying that just life itself can do duty as the “persecution”. Daily life, the demands of family and work, others’ needs, the things that go wrong: it’s through all that, most usually, Christ’s love is to be lived.
“Do you know who these people are?” Do we? Yes, by faith we can see them already, and by love be in touch with them already. They are those “who have washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb.” The torrent of time, the torrent of transience, as St. Augustine calls it, is sweeping us all along, into the dark. Every autumn turning to winter reminds us of it. But there is this other stream. And All Saints reminds us of it. It is the stream flowing from Easter, from the pierced side of Christ, and, for all its apparent weakness, it is the stronger.
“Can a man - asked a poet - grow from the dead clod of failure
Some consoling flower,
Something humble as a dandelion or a daisy,
Something to wear as a buttonhole in heaven?” (Patrick Cavanagh, From Failure Up).
Yes, he can. Thanks to this stream, he can. “Do you know who these people are?... They are those who have washed their robes in the blood of Lamb.” Let us open then the grubby, tattered robe we are to the power of this love, that love to the end which has no end, and that can have us poor things flower for ever with all the saints in the white and flaming love of the living God. Amen.

Abbot Hugh, O. S. B.