A Sermon for the Solemnity of All Saints

THE SOLEMNITY OF ALL SAINTS, SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2025
(TRANSFERRED FROM SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER)

In a rare exception to the old saying that the only thing that doesn’t suffer in translation is a bishop, the Jerusalem Bible (unlike the currently authorised edition) chose to translate the Greek makarioi at the beginning of each of the Beatitudes as ‘happy’, rather than ‘blessed’. Since happiness and holiness are not usually thought to have much in common, it seemed strange to some that the gospel on the feast of All Saints should dwell on the former rather than the latter. But in the Beatitudes, happiness and holiness (or blessedness) are the same thing.

To grasp how this might be so we need to rethink both. When the early Church Fathers read the beatitudes, they saw in them a wonderful congruence between the teaching of Jesus and the wisdom of the ancients, for whom ‘happiness’ meant something quite different from its current colloquial connotation. For most moderns, ‘happiness’ is felt rather than possessed, an inevitably fragile and fleeting experience, subject as it is to the vagaries of circumstance and fickle fortune. But for a whole tradition of thought and sensibility, from the ancients to the High Middle Ages, happiness was something held ‘in the soul’, as it were, and once acquired, not easily lost.

A happy life was a life well-lived, lived, that is, in a way that was consistent with and shaped by what is truest and noblest in our nature, irrespective of the contingencies and complications of everyday existence. It was to flourish specifically as a human being; and Christianity would add, as a being made in the image and likeness of God and called to share God’s life in friendship. But what about holiness? Most of us conventionally assume that the saints are those who have lived irreproachable lives and have thereby earned their place in heaven. For that reason alone, they are very different from ourselves, as we muddle along in our own chaotic way, lurching from one crisis to the next. But that rather discouraging account of sanctity corresponds neither to experience nor theory.

The feast of All Saints is not a celestial honours list or a heavenly Oscars. It is not intended to set the saints apart from us, in an intimidating pantheon. The lives of the saints have nothing in common with either the vacuous cult of celebrity or the tyrannous cult of perfectionism. Indeed, many of the earliest lives of saints, from the 5th century onwards, before hagiography becomes stylised and ideologised, and certainly long before more rigorous forensic criteria for canonisation were introduced, saints’ lives were deliberately contrasted with the sanitised heroes of antiquity.

The stock in trade of saintly lives depicted in these early accounts is the unconventional and unpredictable: their biographers deliberately dwell on the eccentric and grotesque, describing fierce inner struggles undergone by gnarled, volatile individuals. Nor are these stories exclusively about kings and queens or bejewelled bishops and impeccable clerics. Some describe the lure of ordination as a temptation, an enticement resisted by the best. These early accounts of sanctity are about unique personalities, not stereotypes, and their path to holiness is far from straight, let alone sanitised. So, instead of being discouraged by the great difference between us and the saints, we should be reassured that there is between us and them a bond, a communion, wrought by grace but building on nature.

This feast of All Saints is a feast of the whole Church, an ancient name for which is ‘the communion of saints’. It is, in other words, the feast of those who are already in heaven, those who are in purgatory, on their way to heaven, and of ourselves, the Church on earth, the ‘Church militant’, living still in time and space, striving for the happiness of a well-lived life, in hope of heaven. They and we constitute, all of us, the Communion of Saints. This is why St Paul rightly referred to all the faithful as “the saints”; and why, in the Byzantine liturgy, before the distribution of Holy Communion, the celebrant holds up the sacred species, saying: ‘Holy things for Holy people’. Holiness is one of the marks of the Church: one, holy, Catholic and apostolic, as we say in the Creed.

But the Church is not ‘holy’ because it is a gathering of the good, the wellbehaved and the squeaky-clean: empirical proof of that is not in short supply. Rather, the Church’s holiness is, as the Body of Christ, the holiness of Christ Himself. As such, it remains holy, even if we, its members (members not as in a club, but as in limbs of a body) all-too-often obscure and conceal that holiness by our failings and unfaithfulness. The saints in heaven are those in whom the holiness of Christ was not obscured, who bodied forth in their lives on earth his love, beauty and holiness. This does not mean that they led flawless lives by sheer effort of will. Rather, their life and love were so fixed on God that sin fell away. The saints are those who have revealed, each in their own individual way, but all with extraordinary and heroic clarity, the vocation we all share, namely, friendship with God and thereby true and lasting happiness, for which we strive in this life and for which we were created to enjoy for ever in the next