All Saints’ Day 2026
St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge
Matthew 5.1-12
Revd Dr Helen Orchard
Surprisingly enough in our secular age, saints remain both popular and newsworthy. You may recall a great flurry of media attention this time last year when the Italian teenager Carlo Acutis was canonised. His relics, which were brought to Salford for 5 days in January, were visited by over 6000 people, and that was only the first of a clutch of relic tours for various saints which have taken place in the UK this year.
The bones of saints are rather a curious business. When I considered which saint I had seen the most parts of, John the Baptist was the outright winner. I’ve seen two of his four heads: one in Damascus, and one in Rome. I’ve have seen part of his arm encased in gold in Istanbul, and in Malta I saw the reliquary which had contained the very forearm which baptised Christ. Poor John the Baptist; very much broken up and distributed in a manner symbolic of his Lord. But that’s what you can expect if you are an important saint in three religions.
Now I don’t intend to be dismissive. These things are very important to a great number of people, but I have to say that relics of saints have always been for me more a source of earthly curiosity than spiritual enlightenment. It is the lives, rather than the remains, of the saints which I find instructive.
This morning we are charged to consider lived sainthood in the context of the Feast of All Saints, which is not a catch-all for those who didn’t quite make the grade and get their own special day, like Mary Magdalene or Bernard of Clairvaux, (two of my favourites), but an opportunity to reflect on the concept of the communion of saints and our own vocation to blessedness. I’ve heard it said that a saint is merely someone whose life has been insufficiently researched. But given the bizarre and colourful lives of some of the characters we find with that title they are clearly not just people whose piety obscures faults yet to be uncovered. Rather, they are defined by something different.
In the New Testament the saints, - ἅγιοι (hagioi) or ‘holy ones’ - as they are called, is simply a designation for members of the church. The church is the communion of saints: the communion of the holy ones who gather together around those holy things, (like baptism and the eucharist), which have been given for the purposes of salvation and mission. The designation ‘saint’ is hardly ever used in the singular in the NT, which knows nothing of St Peter or St Paul, except in so far as they are incorporate in the communion of saints. It is Jesus who is ‘the holy one of God’ – the saint and the sanctifier – and his followers are those whose lives are conforming to the biblical injunction, ‘Be holy for I, the Lord, am holy’ (Lev 19.2, 1Pet 1.15-16). The saints are not, fundamentally, those who have done good works, but people whose lives were characterised by utter dependence on God as they conformed to the pattern holiness seen in Christ.
Now holiness is too often confused with priggish piety. Real holiness, by contrast is a courageous and deeply attractive quality. We find the essential characteristics outlined in the beatitudes, which are traditionally read on this day. They describe a community of those who care for one another, and are actively involved in advancing God’s plan of salvation by loving God, and neighbour. In this passage, Jesus makes it absolutely clear that our relationship with God is not just an individual, one-on-one affair, but a corporate matter. The outworking of the lives of the saints is, in fact, the blessedness (μακαρισμός) in community that we encounter here.
The ἅγιοι are those who belong to God. The μακάριοι (makarioi) are those who are blessed in belonging to him. And so, holiness is our shared identity in Christ; blessedness is our shared inheritance in his kingdom. And love is their visible expression in community which reveals our values and aspirations which, compared to those of the world may seem rather upside down and inside out.
The trouble is that we are rarely turned inside out when we hear this passage because, for many of us, it is so familiar that it is difficult to hear afresh. I wonder how you have just heard that gospel reading. Did anything sound new, or startling? Or perhaps it was difficult not to slightly zone out, as can happen with passages we know very well, and I speak for myself here.
Perhaps this is the moment to follow in the footsteps of Professor David Ford. Admittedly, they are rather distinguished footsteps for me to tread in but, like page in Good King Wenceslas, I found that, ‘heat was in the very sod, which the saint had printed’. In his sermon last week, David offered us several different translations of the epistle, one of which was from The Message, a version I use on occasion. I think it is most effective in re-imagining those passages which have suffered slightly from over-use. Here are its beatitudes:
3 “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
4 “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
5 “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
6 “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.
7 “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
8 “You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
9 “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.
10 “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.
11-12 “Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.
I hope that hearing the text afresh helps to bring it alive, enabling us to grasp more easily what it means to be blessed as we live out our vocation of holiness. The saints simply are those who have loved and forgiven and prayed for people who have hurt or betrayed them. They are those who have given generously when frankly they had little to spare. They are those who have tried to break the cycle of greed and hypocrisy and selfishness by focusing on reconciliation, rather than revenge and one-upmanship.
The early followers of Jesus changed the world as they committed their lives to this path of gritty holiness, loving and transforming people and communities they came into contact with, but they are dead and now form the Church Triumphant, enjoying full communion with Christ. The important question is how will we, the Church Militant, live out our vocation as saints here on earth this week, pursuing a path of holiness as guided by the Spirit, rejoicing to be among the blessed, proclaiming the gospel and building the Kingdom.
Amen