1.
I drove past this sign a day or so ago, and circled back to take a picture:
This is a familiar notion, obviously, but itโs a deeply misleading one nonetheless. For, as Rahner says, โthe real God does not need to reduce us to nothing.โ
The real God, as opposed to the non-gods of our wishes and worries, does not show his greatness by belittling us or buy his glory at the cost of our shame. The real God does not have to take us from ourselves to give himself to us. He is everything and more than everything to us; therefore, the more we become like him, the more we find we are truly ourselves. Those who have most fully abandoned themselves to the Spirit are not absorbed or effaced but established and exalted, receiving the glory Christ prayedโprays!โfor them to enjoy.1 This is the very point Rahner was seeking to make, in fact:
The old-fashioned, traditional Catholic practice of venerating the saints is something which still stands ahead of us almost like the distant goal of our own religious development, as a higher future. It means real, genuine, living realization of the fact that they exist, that they are living and powerful, that they are nearer to us than ever, that they are not absorbed by God but are confirmed by him, that he is truly the God of the living and not of the dead, that far from being destroyed if we approach him, it is only then that we attain our own plenitude and independence, for the real God does not need to reduce us to nothing.2
What comes clear, then, as we weigh the wisdom what Rahner has said, is this: what we believe about the communion of the saints and our relationship with those who have gone before us through death into God is a test and proof of what we believe about everything else, including who God essentially is and what he finally wants for us and from us. To think that their glory rivals his is to warp the gospel itself, to misunderstand and misrepresent the innermost truths of our faith.
2.
Robert Jenson lays down two rules for a theology of the saints: (1) โthe saints are not our way to Christ; he is our way to them,โ and (2) โour communion with departed saints, whatever may be included in it, is not fundamentally different from our communion with living saints.โ3 We donโt need Mary or any other saint to convince Christ to love us more. We donโt need to be saved by them from him or his Father. We need to seeโto be shownโhow we can cooperate with him and the Spirit to the glory of the Father. In a word, then, the saints donโt come between us and Christ, but before the Father with Christ on our behalf. They do not interrupt or interfere; they intercede.
The problem is, those of us who have been raised to think by means of contrasts and polaritiesโโa little more like Jesus, a little less like meโโare bound to think of our relation to God as essentially rivalrous or one-sided. Thinking that, we canโt help but conclude that the saints must be kept in their place in order for the Lordโs supremacy to be known. But in truth the Lord is their place and his supremacy is their exaltation.
The glorification of the saints, their goodness, their worthinessโall of this is an expression, an explosion, a raying-out, of the mystery of Christ, revealing that God does not manifest or validate his deity by contrast with our humanity but in total continuity and full, unbroken communion with it. The life of the triune God is, in Jensonโs word, โroomy.โ And his character is transitive, transfiguring, radiant. We cannot help, then, but be affected by his loveโas surely as we are effected by it, first and last.
To see the saints rightly is not to idealize or idolize them, of course. To see them rightly is to see them as the human beings they in fact are, warts and all. It is precisely in their humanity that the saints are our lights. That said, for them to have entered into God and his glory means they are in fact light. Thus, Jenson delivers a necessary caution: โIf the saints know us at all, they know us infinitely better than we know ourselves; surely this makes them attractiveโand fearsomeโas intercessors.โ4
3.
Rowan Williams, in an All Saints Day sermon, suggests that our relationship with the blessed dead runs both ways. They need us as surely as we need them. What they need, he argues, drawing on a line from Hebrews 11, is for us to recognize them, to come into relationship with them as our co-suffers and co-heirs. โThey enter into their glory when we come with themโ toward God and the future God means for us. Just as we do that, โthe way in which they have made God credible comes alive in usโ for the sake of the world:
These great figures that the writer to the Hebrews has listed, โwithout us [says the writer] they will not be made perfect.โ This is a truly extraordinary claim. Weโve heard about the heroes of the Old Testament, the Judges and the Prophets, those who have suffered atrociously for their faith, those who have performed stunning miracles, โAnd yet [the writer to the Hebrews says baldly] without us they will not be made perfect.โ Think of that in our own terms. Without us, Francis of Assisi will not be made perfect, without us St John of the Cross will not be made perfect, without us Mother Theresa will not be made perfectโฆ [T]he holiest, the mostย wholeย of God's children, reach that wholeness only in communion withย us.
For Williams, what sets the saints apart, really, is their unusual readiness to let God be God. The rest of us are so quick to fret, to meddle, to put our nose where it doesnโt belong, to try to fix ourselves and others, to try to get a handle on what is happening ro us and around us. We tend, in other words, to try to play God, to do Godโs work for himโonly better. What is needed, however, is to leave room, to hold space, to wait on the Lord. And that is what the saints doโfor us. Exactly so, they not only help us see God more clearly, they also make God look good and make the faith more believable. To quote from the sermon again:
Witnesses establish the truth by giving evidence. It really is as simple as that. When we celebrate the Saints, we celebrate those who have given evidence, who have made God believable by how they have lived and how they have died. The saints are the people who recognise that arguments will finally not win the day. God does not make himself credible by argument. God does not respond to our doubts, our intellectual querying, our uncertainty, by delivering from Heaven a neatly annotated list of logical propositions with which we cannot disagreeโฆ God deals with us by our life and a death, by Jesus. And God continues to deal with us by lives and deaths that make him credible, that make Jesus tangible here and now.
In the end, there is no competition between God and the saints. As Rahner recognized, veneration of the saints is not a sort of โveiled polytheismโ that diminishes the Creator by exalting the creature. Just the opposite, in fact. Because God does not want to be God without us, faith in him inevitably opens us to the saints. And as we are being sanctified by the Spirit, we naturally become more and more delighted by those who are like Christโand less and less anxious about the fact that we need them and their intercession to know him fully. In truth, then, our veneration of the saints is an expression of our worship of God. Think about it: what could delight the God of Israel, the God of incarnation, more than us celebrating those who have been most like him in caring so unconditionally and unstintingly for us?
Those who have gone before us are blessed. As the Scriptures say,
And I heard a voice from heaven saying, โWrite this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.โ โYes,โ says the Spirit, โthey will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.โ
Rev. 14:13
The saints are blessed because they have reached their end in God. Dying, they enter the rest of God (in both senses of that phrase), finding their place in the company of heaven, joining with the angels and archangels in the praise and petitions of Christ, the high priest. They rest from their labors, as the text says, because they have entered into his. Though dead to us, they are alive in Godโmore alive than we are, as Bonhoeffer says in one of his funeral homilies. They have become integral to Godโs life in Christ. So, to know him means knowing them, and knowing him as they did and do.
In the end, that prayer just is their being.
Rahner, The Great Church Year, 315.
Jenson, Sys. Theo. Vol. 2 , 269.
Jenson, Sys. Theo. Vol. 2 , 269.
๐ฅ Itโs like so many things Iโve been trying to put into words lately. And, of course, so much more as well.
๐ฅ The awareness they are โthereโ increases. The other day descending stairs in my house, I could thank my dad for praying the psalms every morning and night..Out loud and with peace I did thank him, knowing he is alive in God. Not anything weird, just true.
Thanks Chris