Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for November 1, 2006
Liturgical Year B - Cycle II
All Saints Day
By Dcn. Bob Villarreal
 Topic: All Saints Day
+  +  +
 
Reading 1
Rev 7:2-4, 9-14
I, John, saw another angel come up from the East, holding the seal of the living God.  He cried out in a loud voice to the four angels who were given power to damage the land and the sea, “Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.” I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, one hundred and forty-four thousand marked from every tribe of the children of Israel.

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.”

All the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures.  They prostrated themselves before the throne, worshiped God, and exclaimed:

“Amen. Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”

Then one of the elders spoke up and said to me, “Who are these wearing white robes, and where did they come from?”  I said to him, “My lord, you are the one who knows.”  He said to me,   “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.”

Reading II
1 Jn 3:1-3
Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God.  Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.  Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.  We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.  Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.

Gospel
Mt 5:1-12a
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.  He began to teach them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad,
for your reward will be great in heaven.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today is the Feast of All Saints Day.  This is a very special time for me.  It is a time when I can reconcile myself and in some ways feel that I am close to the Saints, who are very special.  Not only the ones that the church has canonized, but also to the saints who have been very close to me in my life; my mother and my father, my uncles and cousins, those who have died and gone that were very special to me.  I know that my mother used to always pray for my two brothers and myself.  She would pray for us all the time and we never did quite appreciate that because we were living in a time of hormones and we were teenagers.  We didn’t really recognize what she was doing for us. She was trying to establish in some ways, a means for us to be redeemed and for us to achieve salvation.  In doing so, we didn’t recognize that she was preparing us for that.  It wasn’t until much, much later, even after she had died that we began to realize that she was preparing us to be able to be saved, to have salvation.
 
In today’s Old Testament reading, it is a reading that tries to explain to us what heaven is like.  It is symbolic and we can’t understand it.  On the other hand, we also know that the last statement in that reading tells us how to achieve the kingdom of God.  You have to be washed in the blood of the Lamb.  That’s what we do here at mass.  It is a way of becoming very close to each other and to God.  We do this because we receive the Eucharist.
 
In the second reading today, it talks about how far away is this and can we understand this.  It says that we cannot understand what it is that is on the other side, what it is that is in the kingdom of God.  So we always try to achieve this unity with those that are on the other side.  We think today about the Saints, we think about our mothers and fathers and those who were very special to us so that we can in fact, achieve some form of unity with them, because after all,  those saints are our extended family in Heaven.  Love is beyond this earth.  It goes on.  God loves us.  He loves us from Heaven.  Jesus loves us.  The saints love us.  They are our extended family that love us and that we love. 
 
Like many of the Old Testament Jews, we don’t know who God is because we are too full of ourselves, we are too full of what is going on, we are too full in this world of everything that is happening and of what is going wrong, and we worship another god or other gods just like the Israelites did.  There is one thing that is very different.  It is what we are doing here at this mass to receive the Eucharist.  For the Jews, as it said in the Letter to the Hebrews, they worshiped at the Tabernacle and they knew that it was a shadow; it was a copy of what was happening in heaven.  When Jesus came, it was no longer a shadow of what was happening in heaven.  It was the real thing.  That is what we do when we come here to go to mass.  One of the things that is very special when we go to mass is that when we come here, there is a premise, there is a presupposition that when we come to mass, that we are in someway conjoined with heaven.  That is a premise.  In most of the Eucharistic prayers, we in fact say, Let us join our hearts; let us join our praise with the angels in heaven as we proclaim our praise to Jesus who is in Heaven.  We do this because we feel that in some ways, in some very special ways, when we are here at this mass, we are with them.  We are with the Saints in heaven.  We are with Jesus.  Jesus is with us and God is with us.  This is what is so very special about the mass and the Eucharist.  It is that we can be together in unity and we pray for that and every prayer that we make in the Eucharistic prayer eventually in some way means unity, unity with God, unity with Jesus and unity with each other.
 
Therefore, on this day of All Saints Day, let us keep this in mind.  Even at this mass, when you come up to receive communion, and when they say, “Through Him, and with Him, and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit”; you have within you the Holy Spirit.  That’s what that is all about, having unity with each other.  It’s reaching that unity within this Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, and then we can say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb.