All Saints

We have come to the end of a very long liturgical cycle, stretching back to the beginning of the pre-Lenten period, even to the Sunday of Zacchaeus in early February. The Sunday of All Saints is the fulfilment and fruition of the story of our salvation. If we look back from the perspective of All Saints to Pentecost, the Ascension, the Paschal season, Pascha and Bright Week, Holy Week, Great Lent and the preparation for Great Lent - it is a good third of the year! - we can see that everything that leads up to today's celebration of sanctity and the saints generally has had as its goal the creation of circumstances and persons capable of holiness, of our renewal and the renewal of the world we live in. The incarnate life, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, ascension and glorification the Lord are the step by step reconnaissance mission whereby our fallen, humiliated and enslaved humanity is liberated and renewed. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the power of this new life in Christ in the lives of believers and through believers passes actively into the community and world around us. We can say that the Son of God became incarnate in order to die, and He died in order to rise again, and He rose again in order to ascend back to the Father, and He ascended to the Father in order that the Holy Spirit would be sent, and the Holy Spirit was sent so that we might be filled with this new, glorious and grace-filled life in Christ.

The short-hand for the story of our salvation, expanding the famous phrase of St Athanasius, is that the Son of God became man so that man could share by grace in the communion of the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Or we could say that all that has taken place for us - what the theologians call the economy of salvation - has taken place so that saints might walk among us and so that we may be numbered among them. The point of everything is holiness.