REV 7:2-4, 9-14; PS 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; 1 JN 3:1-3; MT 5:1-12a
Every year my wife and I have a big discussion about how we should deal with Halloween. I’ll let you know if we ever come up with a good answer. We have five little kids. We don’t want them embracing the world’s standards of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. We’re not excited about lots of candy. And – on the other hand – we think that somehow, somewhere, there’s a good insight in Halloween, and we’re not into just ignoring our culture.
Halloween is, of course, really All-Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints. The original insight is something along the lines of, All Saints (Nov 1) remembers those in heaven, All Souls (Nov 2) remembers those in Purgatory – and Hallow’s Eve (Oct 31) remembers the forces of Hell. There’s something to that.
Our readings for the feast take us deeper.
***
The first reading is from Revelation. All Saints is an apocalyptic feast. It introduces November, the month of the dying of the year, by turning our gaze toward the end of time.
The reading from Revelation speaks of the great battle between the forces of heaven and the forces of hell. It begins with “the four angels who were given power to damage the land and the sea” – the great destruction at the end of time.
The saints are gathered around the Lamb, singing his praises. If we read more of Revelation, we know that its central image is “the Lamb who was slain,” a magnificent apocalyptic vision of Christ as victim.
The saints themselves are described here as “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.” Already we are turning the gore of Halloween inside out: the ax murderers and the zombies are replaced with those bathed in the blood of the Victim.
The destroying angels stand for God’s condemnation of the standards of this world. Or, to put it more positively, all things are passing, God alone remains. It is not God who condemns this world, but this world that condemns itself, by clinging to what does not remain and forgetting the one thing necessary. The blood-stained saints have held on to Jesus when all else collapsed.
***
We need to be in this apocalyptic frame of mind to appreciate fully our Gospel reading. It is perhaps the most profound reading in all of Scripture, all of literature: the Beatitudes.
We can read them against Halloween. Against pirates and princesses, Christ proclaims, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The world dresses up as the powerful and the plunderers – and Christ calls us to imitate him, the powerless who was plundered.
While the world celebrates conquest, Christ celebrates those who mourn.
The closest the world can get to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, and the peacemakers is superheros. But as the world decides whether to dress up as Batman or a zombie, we see that Christ calls us to a very different kind of heroism, our strength not in superpowers or high-tech weapons, but in the suffering of the Lamb.
The multitude of saints in Revelation have axes in their heads, not in their hands.
***
In this apocalyptic light we also read our epistle, from First John.
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called children of God.” How fascinating that, as our children dress up as adults, Christ calls us adults to become as children.
Yet avoiding the worldliness that affects our children, too. “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” We are not called to become children in the sense that we mindlessly embrace the world’s standards of glory and go seeking after candy. We are called to become children in the sense that we take God as our Father, Christ as our model, and the Holy Spirit as our soul and way of life.
Halloween reminds us of the world’s standards, the world’s mistaken views of good and evil, of glory and gory. It reminds us that the saints live by an entirely different standard, one that turns worldly values inside out.
“Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.” But part of that purity is seeing the foolishness of this world, associating ourselves with the victims, and the Victim, of this world’s crimes.
Like I said, I’ll let you know if I ever figure out how to turn these ideas into a children’s party. But I think it means something deeper than just turning our backs on Halloween, or just embracing it. To truly appreciate All Saints, and the fabulous new standards that it sets before us, we need to look Halloween in the face, and turn it on its head.
How does Halloween help you think about the Beatitudes, or the Apocalypse?
