All week now I’ve been posting about the saints in Protestant thought and today we come to All Saints’ Day. As I mentioned yesterday, this is one way that the church recognises that there are many more saints than those who appear in the calendar. Every Christian in every nation from all the ages, and all the righteous men and women who came before Christ are his saints, now in glory. In one of the readings assigned for the day, John tells us of the 144,000 who represent the faithful Israelites from each tribe and then ‘a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands’.

The collect for today picks up on several of the themes from the day’s readings:

O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The collect opens by layering up descriptions of the communion of the saints. They (we!) are God’s ‘elect’, those chosen to belong to him as his people. We are a communion and fellowship, sharing together in a common call, working together towards a common hope, each one a companion and a help to the other. And beyond that, we are the mystical body of Christ, who makes us one in the most intimate union with himself.

I love the beautiful image of us being knitted together. As it happens, my wife has done a bit of knitting today and as each link (stitch? I don’t know knitting terminology…) has been added to her new ear warmer, it has reminded me how we are saved, not as an agglomeration of individuals, like the grains in a pile of sand. Instead, like the stitches (she says stitches…) of my wife’s knitting, each of us is interlinked with one another.

We see this all over the Scriptures, but today we are reminded from the great crowd John saw and the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12 who have served as the theme for this whole week. These images complement one another. In Revelation, we see the saints in glory, focussed on the worship of God. But in Hebrews, they act as witnesses for us, spurring us on in the same race they have already run.

We pray for God’s help in imitating the saints in their virtuous and godly living. The Gospel reading for today is the Beatitudes, a reminder of the righteous life that befits the Kingdom of Heaven. These Beatitudes show us the qualities the saints embody – as does the ending of Hebrews 11. The standard is high. The Beatitudes describe a life that really is saintly. But by folding it into our prayers we remember the power of God’s grace. The first Beatitude says that the poor in Spirit are blessed and so we come as beggars, hopeful beggars, to ask for the work of God’s Spirit.

And lastly, the collect turns our hearts to the unspeakable joys that the saints experience now. In Revelation 7, they a given to continual praise of God for the salvation he has given them, and we return to that theme in Revelation 19 as the marriage supper of the lamb is proclaimed. Even the Beatitudes revolve around the blessedness of those who enter the Kingdom. The path the saints have trod, the one which we hear them call us down, is hard. But it is the path to joy unspeakable.