JN
11: 32-44
(ALL SAINTS' DAY}
It's hard to see
any meaningful connection between this passage & All Saints' Day.
Unless, that is, we accept the lectionographers have made the age old
mistake of connecting becoming a saint with their death rather than
their life. (For instance, I'm always sadly amused to hear our friends
the Romans getting into a bureaucratic tiz about 'canonising' someone.
If that person was a faithful disciple, no-one on earth needs do
anything about making them a 'saint'; God has long given them that
accreditation!) If there's something I'm missing here, I hope some
present day saint will kindly draw my attention to it!
The family at Bethany is a good example of a saintly family, but that's
not the focus of the story. That is fairly & squarely on Jesus
raising Lazarus from his grave. Because he is a saint? Because his
sisters are saints?.
So perhaps the focus is on the very ordinariness of the saints; they
are simply people who know they belong to God & do their best to
live that out. The old Sunday-school definition of a saint as 'someone
the light shines through' still has a lot going for it. But the light
that shines through a saint is always God's light, not their own
self-generated light of any kind. When God addresses anyone as his
saint, the true saint's response will always surely be, "Are you
talking to me, Lord?" The more gold paint an artist daubs into a halo
round the head of a noted saint, the more I imagine that sainted soul
itching to get the paint remover & erase both the halo & the
misconceptions we paint into sainthead.
