All Saints – The Feast Of The Last
Readings: Rev. 7:2-4,9-14; 1 Jn. 3:1-3; Mt. 5:1-12
On the feast of “All Saints’ Day,” the Church, in order for us to understand who the “Saints” are, and how we, too, can enter their happy ranks (First Reading: Rev. 7:2-4,9-14), invites us to contemplate the “Magna Charta” of Christianity, the passage of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes, as the Lucan version (Lk 6:17-26), which is probably more faithful to the original source, especially highlights, are first and foremost the joyful proclamation of a great “Purim,” of a total reversal of fortunes; they are the proclamation of the fulfillment of the hope of all categories of the oppressed and exploited of the earth: the poor, the afflicted, the meek, the persecuted are now “Blessed”!
God vindicating the poor is a concept we too often forget, yet it is revealed Word for us: and the New Testament fulfills this proclamation in the definitive Word and concrete example of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is first and foremost the “good news proclaimed to the poor” (Mt 11:5; Lk 7:22), who are the privileged recipients of the coming Kingdom: “theirs is the Kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20)! Only those who recognize themselves as poor, sick, children, sinners, and are therefore persecuted for entering into this logic, can welcome salvation (Mt 19:23-24; Lk 6:24; 18:9-15): woe therefore to those who feel “okay,” justified by their own merits: woe to those who judge others, and do not feel instead that they are the worst of all! The logic of the Gospel is revolutionary: “Many of the first will be last and the last the first” (Mk 10:31); “Publicans and prostitutes pass you by in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 20:16). In Jesus’ proclamation, by word and example, of the blessedness of the poor is the great, joyful hope of all the wretched of the earth, who know that the Lord has truly become one of them, and this is for them a pledge of redemption, salvation, and certainty of deliverance and resurrection!
From the theological-soteriological perspective soon shifted in the early Church to the anthropological one, presented to us especially by the Mattaean version of the Beatitudes, the one in today’s Gospel (Mt 5:1-12). The focus shifted from God’s behavior in establishing the Kingdom to man’s behavior in gaining access to it. Contemplating God’s logic highlighted the conditions that enable man to become the object of his mercy.
Therefore, the Beatitudes are also an invitation to always be on the side of the poor, the last, the marginalized, the oppressed, concretely. They “are a kind of self-portrait of Christ, they are an invitation to follow him and to commune with him” (Veritatis splendor, no. 16). Jesus is the model of the Beatitudes: he is the poor par excellence (Lk 2:11-12), the afflicted (Heb 2:17-18), the meek (Mt 11:29), mercy incarnate (Phil 2:5-11), the pure in heart (1 Pet 1:19), our peace (Eph 2:14), the persecuted Servant (Mt 23:34-39).
To participate in the Kingdom, we are asked to welcome Jesus into our lives, to make him our Bliss, and to transform our lives in imitation of his. We are called to live like him, in poverty and meekness, in sincerity and in the struggle for justice and peace, in the foolishness that is the logic of the cross, in the scandal of the consistency of love (1 Cor. 1:23); it is a harsh, countercultural and nonconformist discourse, opposed to the thinking of this world: but it is the only way-it is God’s Word! -to be already as of now “blessed,” “children of God … truly” (Second Reading: 1 Jn. 3:1-3), and then to have “our reward in heaven” (Mt. 5:12).