Audio:

“In the Risen Christ, the Confines of Death are Overcome”

by Gerhard Cardinal Müller
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Homily for the Solemnity of All Saints
Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel
November 1, 2016

Saint Iranaeus of Lyon, in his Adversus Haereses, wrote that “The Glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man consists in the vision of God.” Every human person is called to irrevocably accept the reality that they have been called to share in the heavenly reality. Paradise is essentially accepting the self-communication of God, or the gift through grace of fulfilling “the natural desire to see God” in an indefectible way. We are not able to find this end by nature alone, in virtue of our being a creature, a state of future tranquillity, delight, and spiritual and sensible joys, apart from God. The end of man is God himself, and paradise is the reign of God fully realized. In paradise, man encounters God himself as the source of his happiness, of his eternal happiness, of his joy without end, and in paradise man does not experience the actualization of the Communion of all of the Saints as an added extra, or as some sort of secondary dimension of beatitude. No! In God, man finds at the same time the communion of all of the blessed. This Feast, essential to understanding the essence of paradise, is that which we celebrate today, the Solemnity of All Saints.

God is the unique font of love that brings to fulfilment everyone, and everything, and this love permeates like an electric current through the relational bonds of the saints, through whom the love of neighbour is not an accessory to the love of the God, but it is the form that it takes in the relationships among the redeemed. In today’s Gospel, from Matthew Chapter Five, we have a portion of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where he teaches his disciples the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes certainly give us a taste of what these relational bonds are called to look like during our earthly existence, even with our frail humanity.  

Furthermore, it is important to understand that the doctrine of the Communion of the Saints does not contradict the universal theocentrism and cristocentrism of creation in its redeemed form. Every saint is known only in God, and all love for him knows of its source, of its being supported by the Holy Spirit, and of its being at the same time directed toward God. God therefore does not see in the man who is loved a rival. We must not have a fear that we are losing something by fully embracing this teaching. God himself honors his servants “If you serve me, my Father will honor you” (John 12:26). God does not need to be honored by his creatures, but he himself is honored in the actions of creation, and in his work of redemption. Again, “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man consists in the vision of God.”

We pray in the first part of the Preface for today’s feast, “For Today by your gift we celebrate the festival of your city, the heavenly Jerusalem, our mother, where the great array of our brothers and sisters already gives you eternal praise.”

This idea forms the basis of the Christian cult of the saints. The saints do not have ulterior dwellings, or destinations of worship apart from God, or apart from Christ. In their lives, they honor while on earth the power of the transformative grace of God. In every honor that they are given, in particular the recognition of their value as models of the Christian life, God is honored. Also their intercession, that we are able to ask for, not only presupposes that all of the grace of God and help in the daily life come solely from him, but it also presupposes that God unites some of his gifts to the intercessory prayer of the saints in order to manifest the communal and relational dimension of salvation.

Believers direct their prayer always to the Father, through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Christ, however, maintains a dual relationship with us. As the Head of the Church he is the origin of all grace, and the mediator of all of our prayer directed to the Father. However, he is also present in the body of the Church. Every action done by one of the members of the Church in favour of one or of the other, therefore also of prayer, is an expression of being for Christ. In our prayers for each other we express our communion in faith and in love. Invoking the living saints in heaven, therefore, signifies the insertion of ourselves in the “We” of the praying ecclesial community, that in the Risen Christ, the confines of death are overcome, so that we are uniquely received in Christ, with Christ and through Christ in the circle of the living members of the Body of Christ with the Father, with the end of opening ourselves completely in obedience, the obedience that we have come to know in Christ, and to his will, which is necessary for our salvation. In the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church from the Second Vatican Council, article number 7, the Christian cult of saints is described as being one of the central aspects of ecclesial eschatology.

In the first reading from the Book of Revelation we see the reality of the Communion of Saints illustrated in all of its splendour as we hear John, the Apostle and Evangelist, proclaim: “After this I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice: Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb.”

The meaning of paradise is participation in the eternal life of the Triune God. In the incarnate Son, and with the Incarnate Son, we know God as he is in his essence, that he subsists in the three divine persons. May we have the desire to participate in this communion of love between the Father and the Son, that has been given to us (Rom 5:5). In the Responsorial Psalm for today’s Mass, Psalm Twenty-Four, we proclaim “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” The question remains, however, with the full knowledge of God, that transforms faith into vision, and hope into the experience of the presence of salvation, and with our love of God both full and completely free, what will our final understanding of the mystery of the triune God be like, if we are among the chosen?

In the second reading from the First Letter of Saint John we hear the following words: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Here we have to take into account the structure of our finite knowledge, which always remains finite and limited in so far as the human being is a creature. The Logos, therefore, in and through the Holy Spirit elevates man in his nature above himself so that he may do a work that he would not be able to do according to the forces of his own nature. Furthermore, God is manifested in his Revelation. After our death we will no longer accept and believe only according to cognitive creaturely images, but God will reveal himself to us in his essence, through which we will know him, as we will know him in the form of a vision, directly. The limits will consist, however, in the fact that we will not know God in a divine way, but in our creaturely manner, through which we will know him as the object of our contemplation, but just as unfathomably, in his personal Trinitarian reality.

The contemplation of God therefore already places us at the goal, but in such a manner that God’s presence to us will also be at the same time his future, because the goal will be presented to man like a passage of dynamic escape, blessed, unfathomable and mysterious. Furthermore, if in our creaturely reality we remain marked by the incarnation of Christ, we have to also confess that the human nature of the Logos, in which we are inserted through the grace of participation, remains eternally the horizon to which we tend and the means by which we reach the triune God.

Finally, at the conclusion of the Preface for Today’s Mass we pray: “Towards her, (the Heavenly Jerusalem, Our Mother) we eagerly hasten as pilgrims advancing by faith, rejoicing in the glory bestowed upon those exalted members of the Church through whom you give us, in our frailty, both strength and good example.”

“The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man consists in the vision of God.”

May God bless you on this Holy Feast.