What is “the seal” placed “on the foreheads of the servants of our God”?1 You received a seal with the oil of sacred chrism on your forehead when you were confirmed. What did your confirmation confirm? Or, stated another way, Who are you?
What is confirmed through the anointing of confirmation is nothing other than the identity given you at your baptism; your identity as a child of the Father, through the Son, by the power of their Holy Spirit, just as Jesus’ identity as the only begotten Son of the Father was confirmed by the descent of Holy Spirit in the form of a dove and, at the same time, by the voice of the Father: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased,” as he emerged from the waters of the Jordan after being baptized by John.2
You may well ask, “Who are the 144,000 we heard about in our first reading?” Let’s start by noting that one hundred forty-four thousand is 12,000 x 12. Of what symbolic significance is the number 12 in Sacred Scripture? Twelve were the tribes of Israel and twelve was the number of apostles called by Jesus. It was the apostles, the ones sent (apostle means one who is sent) by Christ to spread the Good News to the ends of the earth, around whom the Church was formed.
Twelve thousand is not, as some suppose, a literal number. Rather, it is symbolic; indicative of the “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” who “stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.”3 Their white robes and palm branches are symbols of joy and victory.
Our reading from Revelation, also called The Apocalypse, both words mean to unveil, to show what was hidden, is fitting as we gather this evening to celebrate All Saints, or in older English, All Hallows. So we are gathered to rejoice in our participation in the communio sanctorum (the communion of holy people and things).
All Saints should remind each of us of our vocation, our divine call, to holiness. You received this call in baptism. It was confirmed in confirmation. Holiness, Christ-likeness, arising from your Christian initiation, is the primary vocation of every Christian. You heed this call by prayerfully discerning your state of life- lay or ordained, married or single- as well as the work you choose.
In our Gospel this evening, taken from our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount and familiar to us all as “the Beatitudes,” which constitute the core of Christian discipleship, we are taught in detail how we are to live our vocation, which is not an easy row to hoe.
Let’s be honest, the Beatitudes, for most of us, are a huge provocation. Observing them can throw your life into seeming chaos because how Christ calls you to live is so much at odds with how we are inclined to live, with how we are conditioned to live, and very often with how we want to live. But living in this way is evangelism!
French writer Léon Bloy observed in his novel The Woman Who Was Poor: “There is only one sadness, and that is for us not to be saints.”4 This is sad because, in the end, the Church is only the saints.
My dear friends because of the Father’s great love for us, “we are [his] children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.”5 It is the saints who not only show us who we are to become, they show us how we are to become who God created and redeemed us to be.
We need each other because holiness is never a solitary endeavor. Our sanctification and that of the whole world, which requires the grace we receive in and through the sacraments, is the Church’s mission. The Church, the assembly of God in Christ, exists solely for this purpose and no other.
Through this Eucharistic sacrifice, God unites us more fully with those who now live in his everlasting kingdom. It is by our frequent sharing in the body and blood of Christ that we are brought into the company of the eternal banquet.6
So, on this glorious feast with the psalmist let us say, “Lord WE are the people who long to see your face,” or, in the words of the song, played and sung so enthusiastically by the great Louis Armstrong: “O Lord, I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in.”
1 Revelation 7:3.↩
2 Luke 3:21-22.↩
3 Revelation 7:9.↩
4 Alan Morris, OP. “Leon Bloy: A Man for the Modern World,” by Alan Morris, OP in Dominica Journal 33 no 2. ↩
5 1 John 3:2.↩
6 The Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 4, Intercessions for Morning Prayer, All Saints, 1380.↩
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