All Saints Day is November 1; at Immanuel we celebrate the festival on the first Sunday in November. It’s a day for martyrs. The term martyr is from martyria, Greek for witness; on special days, we remember martyrs for their martyria, their witness to Christ in life and death. Some martyrs, like Ss. Peter & Paul, St. James the Brother of Our Lord, St. Lucia, Ss. Perpetua & Felicity, these martyrs all have a day when the church remembers them. All Saints is a festival to remember all the martyrs who don’t get their own day.
That number grows daily, as our brothers and sisters in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere have fulfilled in their bodies the words of Jesus, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:10 NKJV)
Read their stories, and you will sometimes marvel at their sacrifice, their piety, their love. Other times, you may see them simply as victims caught up in religious and ethnic conflict. You may not se them as particularly righteous.
But the Christian martyr is never a martyr for his own sake. We heard our Lord say, “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.” (Matthew 5:11 NKJV) It is attachment to Christ, identification with Christ that causes martyrdom. And that is what righteousness is for us. Not how good we are or how holy we appear, righteousness is in being joined to Christ, attached to Christ. While in English the words sound very different, in both Greek and Latin the words righteousness and justification have the same root. The righteous person is the person justified. And the Scripture teaches clearly that no person is righteous, no person is justified by his own goodness; we are justified—declared righteous—through faith in Christ Jesus.
Jesus is the righteous one. Thus for us to understand the Gospel reading for All Saints, we must see Jesus in all the descriptions of the one who is blessed.
Matthew 5-7 is called the Sermon on the Mount, and the opening verses which comprise today’s Gospel reading are called the Beatitudes, from the Latin word Beatus, blessed. Standing behind this text are the opening words of the Psalter:
Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful; But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night. (Psalms 1:1–2 NKJV)
The blessed man is the man who delights in God’s Word, who meditates on it constantly. Preceding the Sermon on the Mount, the devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness. Hungry for food, Jesus spurns the temptation to use His power to make bread for Himself. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4 NKJV) God’s mouth gives words of life.
That’s Mt. 4. Now listen to how Matthew begins ch. 5, introducing the Sermon on the Mount:
“And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’” (Matthew 5:1–3 NKJV)
From the mouth of Jesus come words of life. Jesus is both the blessed Man who delights “in the law of the Lord,” meditating upon it day and night, and also the One from whose mouth proceeds the Words by which we live.
Look, friends: we are dying. Today we will commemorate two men from our parish who fell asleep in Christ this past year. Next year the bell may toll for you. Or perhaps you have a few more years still. But the time is short. Man, years, generations – of all these Moses says to God,
“You carry them away like a flood; They are like a sleep. In the morning they are like grass which grows up: In the morning it flourishes and grows up; In the evening it is cut down and withers.” (Psalms 90:5–6 NKJV)
That is the life of the human race, and yours in particular: the sun is setting, evening is coming on, soon you will be withered and cut down. What then will come of all your boasting? What then of all your arguments? The secret things you have done behind closed doors, what then will you have gained? Of what use will be your money? Of what use will be your degrees?
Jesus’ words today should describe the life of His disciples. We should daily ask the Holy Spirit to conform us to this image of one poor in spirit, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. But we will not find escape from death or satisfaction of the soul through greater efforts, as though Christianity is simply an ethical rule. The words of blessing in today’s Gospel don’t tell us how to become a saint, they tell us who Jesus is. In Him do all the saints find their holiness, their righteousness, their justification. Every Beatitude describes Jesus:
He is poor in spirit, making Himself poor that we might be rich.
He mourns and laments a world that groans under the curse of the fall and the ravages of sin.
He meekly submits to unjust whipping, beating, the piercing of His brow and the bite of the spikes pounded through foot and wrist.
He hungers and thirst for righteousness, hungering in the desert where He fasted for you, thirsting on the cross where His blood and water were poured out for you.
He is merciful, praying for the forgiveness of His enemies.
He is pure in heart, speaking no deceitful word, never acting in self-interest.
He is the Peacemaker, making peace between God and man by His atoning death.
He is persecuted for righteousness’ sake, persecuted in order to make you righteous.
All this He bore for you. Our sin is in seeking blessings apart from the Blessed One, our Blessed Lord.
Yet still He comes to bless you. And that blessing leads to suffering in this life, because the world scorns the Blessed One; the worldly seek the kingdoms of the earth, and despise those whose very lives indicate that the emperor of this world has no clothes. That emperor, the devil, scowls fierce, and brings depression and darkness, trying to turn the saints away from the Blessed One and the blessing He gives and is. And so Jesus blesses them with His nine-fold blessing, blesses those saints who have found life in Him, losing their lives in this world to be united to Jesus who is the Life. Jesus blesses them, knowing that they will suffer His sufferings, as even the prophets were persecuted. He blesses us with the comfort that our way is His way, which is to say, now through our grave is resurrection because of His resurrection; now through our crosses is glory because of the glory attached to His cross; now we can see in our own sufferings the kingdom of God breaking through, because in His suffering the kingdom is revealed.
He is the Blessed One, but He attaches Himself to us. He gives us what belongs to Him. He gives us His blessing, and in it, He gives us Himself. Having Him, your life is not meaningless, but has found its true meaning. Having Him, you need fear no suffering, for He is comfort. Having Him, you need fear no death, for He is Life. Having Him, you need not look to the kingdoms of this earth, which even now wither and decay.
So if you lose the election, lose your job, lose your house, lose your wife, lose your life – it’s all going to be lost anyway. The blessed man meditates on the Word of God, and there finds the life of God which cannot be lost. For He who brought about life by speaking a Word, can He not give you back everything with a Word?
Today is All Saints. And all those saints, all those holy martyrs, would have us look not to them but to the object of their martyria, the object of their witness: Jesus, the Blessed One. They lost their lives confessing Christ, because they knew that the One risen from the dead will bring His own brothers and sisters also to the resurrection.