Called to be Saints

All Christians have a calling to be saints. Each one of us as a Christian is a saint, one of the blessed ones of God – that is our inheritance and the hope that we have. Child or elderly, man or woman, whoever we are, we are God’s holy children, made blessed.

Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes* is a description of the lives of Christians, of saints. Our blessedness is to be found in certain qualities; qualities that mark us out, that define us and that enable us to live in God’s eternal kingdom. And they are surprising. They challenge us. We have lived with these ideas in the Western world for a long time, generation after generation, and they have left their mark on our society. But they are challenging and demanding as well as being a gift.

The Christian life is a life held in tension, a tension between blessedness and trial. Jesus’ life is the perfect example of blessing – the healings, the miracles, the relationships and the peace. But on the other hand the extraordinary trial of his suffering and passion. Jesus is the model for all of us, not because we all need to suffer as he did, but because the reality of living a blessed life is the reality of that tension. We cannot express and embody God’s love without experiencing its trials, tribulations and sufferings; we cannot embody and experience God’s love without being overwhelmed by its beauty, its fullness, its extraordinary power to remake and give hope.

So our experience of being a Christian if it is to follow the pattern of Jesus will be an experience of both deep pain and deep blessing – our experience will be Cross and Resurrection shaped at the same time. How do we make peace, for example? Well it’s unlikely to happen without some serious confrontation with conflict, with people’s pain, with anger and hurt. We will have to become a part of that. We will have to experience it with others and take some of that pain ourselves.

What about meekness? Well meek people are not the ones who are most likely to be taking what they want, demanding what they need, and asserting their power and rights on any sort of stage, personal or public. They are likely to be people that through their gentleness, suffer. They will suffer because others will take advantage of their unwillingness to use power to force or control others: but ‘in my weakness is my strength’.  

And what about the pure in heart? Well theirs is a potentially lonely road in a corrupted world. If we are pure in heart we will bleed with the sin and evil that we see, but we won’t condemn or judge it, we will be called to redeem it in and through that purity.

And what of those who are poor in spirit? Poverty as a state of mind will demand discipline in seeking to let go of what binds us. That will mean travelling light and letting go not only of material things, but practices and habits that condemn us to slavery, slavery to the world’s estimation of worth. Such a discipline of poverty will inevitably be at some point, sacrificial; there will be a cost and a pain experienced in those renunciations.

And those who mourn. Why should those who mourn be blessed? Here Jesus seems to be saying that the experience of loss, of losing those we love and suffering because of it is something God desires from us; that if we did not mourn we would not be people who value the gift of life and therefore the gift of the other. If we feel the pain of loss, God is with us.

And persecuted for righteousness’ sake and being reviled for it. We know that when we really get going in our Christian discipleship that we will be asked to make some hard decisions about what we really believe in. We will be asked to put our neck on the line, because the Christian truth is at odds with the world. And we can’t ever escape from that reality. Not everyone will speak well of us, not everyone will be on our side. The meaning behind Jesus’ words, 'I’ve come to bring conflict not peace'… The truth divides.

Being blessed then, being holy, being God’s chosen ones, being those who will worship with the Lamb will mean being washed in the blood (Rev 7:9-17). Purity and holiness are made through and in blood – not in anything else. Christian sanctity is about living that tension, having the strength and faith to live through the trial. The reason why Jesus had to be formed in the wilderness for 40 days to ensure that he was strong enough to cope with suffering that was coming. Why Christians often experience 'the dark night of the soul' as a purifying experience of love. 

We need each other then. Christians need the great cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints, the intercessors, the body of the faithful in the present. Because blessedness is now and not yet. It is good and demanding. Let us be a community that lives that tension, that proclaims the Cross and the Resurrection in the way that we live and the way that we proclaim: 'Jesus as Lord.'

Amen

Matthew 5:1-12

*When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’