Wisdom 3:1–9
Romans 5:5–11
John 6:37–40
The Wisdom writer sets the tone for the commemoration today. The tone is one of hope and love: “The faithful shall abide with him in love; grace and mercy are with his holy ones; his care is with his elect.”
Today’s remembrance must be set in the background and foreground of mercy. Those we remember today are the beneficiaries of God’s love, his outreach, his creating arm. Paul continues the theme when he presents Jesus as the proof of God’s love. And that proof is that Christ enters into the reality of sin on our behalf, sin’s greatest face being death. God’s love for us is manifest in his Son’s willingness to take on our humanity to its depths. God’s mission is bringing us back into the fold of his embrace. The remembrance today of those whom we knew and those whom we do not know, we are about all the dead today, is fundamentally to recall how God’s mercy wins in the end. Death is not the end even if it looks like it. What is the end is God’s fidelity to our flesh.
Jesus makes the point very clear: I came to do the Father’s will. And his will is that nothing belonging to him be lost. The Father is about saving not losing. So, if there is any hint of judgment that we would like to bring to anyone whom we may have known or heard about, today it is taken away from us. Instead, Jesus takes over and says, it is life that I am about. The love the Father has poured into my heart, I have poured into yours in the Spirit. And that love means life.
Today we are given the opportunity to profess faith in our solidarity with the human race— Our solidarity with humanity as it experiences death. No doubt each of us will bring to mind parents, relatives, friends…all those we lost and can name. But, in reality today is about all who have passed from this world and to see them connected with the Lord of the living. We understand ourselves as one with the masses of those gone before us. Yet at the same time, we understand that they belong to the Father just as we belong to the Father. And we understand that we too will join them in solidarity in dying.
We believe that when God created he saw that everything was good, very good when it came to us human beings. It is easy for us to affirm that in what is alive. We might hesitate to say that death is part of that good. But today we also say that even in death God has seen it and transformed it into a good. Jesus in the flesh takes our death and transforms it into a means and entrance into eternal life.
We remember all who have died, those who died in Christ through baptism and those whose faith is known to the Father alone. Today we remember them in mercy, as chosen and loved. And in this Eucharist we will touch Jesus’ communion with us in his death so that we can have a share in the life and love he promises to those who are faithful.
~ Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB