1 st November: All Saint’s Day

For all the Saints

On this day of remembrance, the church calls to mind the grace and mercy of God, which have greeted all saints who have gone before us into the eternal communion of the divine life. We call to mind also our own love and care for the dead, those we have known and loved and who have loved us in turn, as well as those unknown to us this side of the veil but with whom we are, nonetheless, made one in the communion of all saints. The rhythm of the liturgical cycle as well as common human experience steadily assure us of the frailty of human living and the finality of human dying. We cannot escape these facts, though we may wish to avert our eyes from those who serve as reminders—the aging, dying, diseased, infirm, and victim. Increasingly, in our experience of near-instant cable and social media, we know so much of the fate of innumerable others. We are perhaps more aware than any of our forbears of the depth and scope of global death from injustice. Those of us not immediate victims of death-dealing injustice suffer a lesser though real grief as onlookers. The world appears destabilized, people increasingly vulnerable, and aggressors increasingly depraved and resolute. We are left to wonder what, if anything, Christian preaching offers unto such destruction.

An infrequent voice in the Revised Common Lectionary, the Wisdom of Solomon this morning offers words of comfort familiar to the community. Indeed, its words of comfort applied first to the text’s first-century BCE persecuted Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt. Yet, as words of comfort, we must not make little of the destruction to which they respond. “But the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction. And their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace” (Wisd. 3:1-3). The word of promise interrupts us in the midst of our scenes of loss and grief with a series of divine counterpoints to conventional perception. The souls of the righteous are now preserved in and by God in a way known only to God; they are not subject to torment. Though real and final, death does not spell the end of God’s relating and preserving; we are in the hands of God. While physical, and indeed emotional, death is “torment,” no torment now touches the righteous. As Karl Barth might say, the word of promise also becomes a word of verdict: it is “foolish” to perceive in death an end that does not make space for God’s irrevocable determination to relate to all with grace and mercy in the communion of the divine life.

The author continues with consolation that likewise must not be interpreted as minimizing the destruction and torment of living persons. “For though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself; like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them” (Wisd. 3: 4-6). The dead and dying are here described as being “disciplined a little,” “tested,” “tried,” and “accepted.” Surely we do not conclude that this word of promise bequeaths to us an Olympics of suffering, so that divine acceptance grows in proportion to the degree of suffering withstood. Such an interpretive turn is ruled out by our teachings against works righteousness. It is also ruled out by a principle of self-care that directs us to disbelieve those thoughts and behaviors that somehow sanitize and invite suffering and even place us on a spiritual path wherein we learn habits of self-hatred from a god who creates life for suffering. Christian faith, according to Reformed theologian Christopher Morse, invites us to disbelieve the view “that human life is ever glorified by rendering suffering invisible, or that there is any glory in suffering other than its overcoming.” ¹ No, instead the text leads us to perceive not a God who wills and creates suffering, but one who works with it and through it, redemptively, in a broken world, for us and for our salvation. According to the author, those who trust in these promises “will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his elect, and he watches over his holy ones” (Wisd. 3:9).

What can it mean, in your world and in mine to say with the Wisdom of Solomon that God “watches over his holy ones”? What can that mean, here and now? Surely not simple protection from all that threatens in this life. Otherwise, the watching over is quite ineffective. Perhaps a key is found in Jesus’ response to Lazarus’ death in the Gospel of John.

The raising of Lazarus serves a more complex pastoral purpose than a simple object lesson of Jesus Christ’s power over death, in this case the death of Martha and Mary’s brother, Lazarus. Prior to Jesus witnessing the corpse, Mary kneels at his feet and says “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (Jn. 11:32). Upon seeing Mary and the others weeping, Jesus became “greatly disturbed in Spirit and deeply moved” (Jn. 11:33). Preciously, he too begins to weep. Cynthia A. Jarvis writes that “Jesus weeps, his tears constituting the only conscionable theological response we often can make when called to the side of the grieving. To another’s lament and longing for a reason from on high, we speak of the God who weeps with us.” ² Even here in the Fourth Gospel’s presentation of Jesus as omniscient and confident that God the father hears him (Jn. 11:42), here too Jesus weeps, and is moved to do so at the death of a loved one and upon witnessing those he loves grieve and weep. Jesus responds to them and is moved by them even before he sees the body.

Upon reaching the sealed tomb, Jesus once more becomes “greatly disturbed” (Jn. 11:38). Next, a sequence of events unfolds that reveals for all to see the glory and power of God for all, in the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Martha reports that already there was a stench, that his face was wrapped and his hands and feet bound. “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus commands (Jn. 11:44). Death binds no more.

Yet we move too quickly: notice that the Johannine author stresses more than once the fact that Jesus “weeps” and was “greatly disturbed.” We do well to linger here. The word in Greek, embrimaomai, connotes anger. In the presence of a sickness unto death and the raw grief of Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary, Jesus is angry. A. K. M. Adam suggests that translations of embrimaomai as “greatly disturbed” or “greatly moved” obscure the element of anger on the part of Jesus and may imply a level of discomfort with his wrath among translators. Adam writes that “taking Jesus’ anger as hostility to death itself fits the Greek usage, fits John’s cosmology, and makes sense of the narrative.” ³ Among other lessons, we are left this morning to grapple with a God who, in Christ, accompanies us toward the grave, weeps with us, and experiences anger at our demise even as he reveals to Martha that “I am the resurrection and the life. . . ” (Jn. 11:25).

Death and especially preventable death are rightly met by not only the wrath of God but our own prophetic anger as well. May it be channelled towards works of justice and peace in a world badly needing these, helping us all to anticipate the communion for which all the saints are intended.