Why All Saints? Are not all the baptised “saints” – set apart for God? Does the separation of All Souls from All Saints suggest that something has gone wrong? Let us begin to explore this by paying attention to the translation of verse 1.
“Ah, distinguished and ransomed, the city, the dove” – this, translated into English, is how someone in antiquity rendered the Hebrew text into Greek. Spot the difference to NRSV (“Ah, soiled, defiled, oppressing city!”). What is going on? The poet used three Hebrew words that can be understood in very different ways.
The city that should be distinguished in revealing the ways of God has become rebellious against him (as I would render it) – or soiled, as the NRSV interprets it.
The city that has been ransomed, redeemed for God’s purposes has become defiled – a city like any other.
The city is meant to be a dove, a term of endearment in the Song of Songs (2:14; 5:2; 6:9), maybe evoking freedom (cf. Ps. 55:6) and security (cf. Jer. 48:28) or senselessness and hence vulnerability (cf. Hos. 7:11) or innocence (Mt. 10:16). But instead of being like a dove the city is oppressing – no freedom, no security, no admission of vulnerability, no innocence, nothing here to endear her to us. The dove has become a vicious creature.
The people of God should appear glorious, a picture of redemption, innocent like a dove. Instead we so often partake in humanity’s rebellion against God.
In Hebrew, the word for “dove” is also the name Jonah, reminding us of the response of Nineveh (which had just been mentioned in Zephaniah) to the preaching of repentance. Not so Jerusalem.
Verse 2 speaks of a lack of attentiveness and a lack of submission (in Hebrew “listening to a voice” has connotations of obeying). We know of course cases of bad submission in slavish, denigrating obedience. But we see the importance of good submission when it is missing as is the case in verses 3-4.
In the ancient world, not just in the Bible, people were often compared to sheep and rulers to shepherds whose task it is to protect and provide for the sheep. To be good officials and judges, rulers must submit their agendas to these wider and higher tasks. Politicians who refuse such submission and put their own interests and careers above the welfare of the communities they serve are a disaster – “roaring lions” rather than shepherds.
Judges whose decision making does not submit to the law (God's law in this case) but to their own agendas, maybe driven by the amount of bribes they received, are “wolves at dusk” – nocturnal animals at their most hungry. Their greed – alluded to with the comment that “they leave nothing until the morning” – is a threat to the community.
In such situations prophets ought to be speaking truth to power but if, e.g., they are more concerned about their own reputation – like newspapers whose chief concern is to make a profit – they will not submit to the truth, they become “faithless persons”.
The tasks of priests should have been the most straightforward of them all. God’s word lays down clearly their tasks and responsibilities. But it takes courage to distinguish between what is holy and profane, between what belongs with God and what does not, to declare right and wrong in accordance with God’s word when these distinctions are not popular and so the priests here are taken to task for doing violence to God’s instruction.
We all submit to something or someone. The question is whether we submit to God, to what is good and right and beautiful, or whether we submit to tradition, to an ideology, to the needs of our family, or purely to our own desires.
What happened in Jerusalem at that time is that a people that was linked with God’s name and revelation, that was committed by covenant to submit to Him – as our baptism commits us to submit to Christ and gives us the name Christian – have instead submitted to other gods and agendas, mostly their own.
There was no attentiveness, no submission, no obedience, no trust in God. The city “has not drawn near to its God” and so had become indistinguishable from any other city.
So far so bad, but then comes verse 5.
The LORD within it is righteous; he does no wrong.Right there, in the midst of this unfaithful city, is the LORD God – righteous, just, committing no iniquity, no unjust acts, doing no wrong. As the apostle Paul put it, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful-- for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). Here is good news: God cannot be compromised. His integrity, truthfulness, and justice remain unchanged.
Every morning he renders his judgement,
each dawn without fail;
but the unjust knows no shame. (NRSV)
But what good is that? What does it mean to say
Every morning he renders his judgement,How is that evident when God loves to delegate, loves to rule indirectly? He has given his word to his people. Does he not render judgement through his human agents, the priests, the prophets, the judges, the officials? If God’s agents fail, how is God’s judgement rendered? Well, imperfectly at best.
each dawn without fail?
But the saying (wrongly?) attributed to Teresa of Avila that “Christ has no body but ours, no hands but ours” is not entirely true. Other parts of creation fulfill Christ's command. And there is a hint of that in the Hebrew poetry.
I reckon that the expression translated “each dawn” in the NRSV has a double use and meaning, belonging with both poetic lines (in what scholars call a pivot pattern). God renders his judgement, implements his decree each dawn by bringing forth the light of morning. Poetically speaking, the reliable movement of the sun – coming up, traversing the sky and going down, day by day – is an implementation of God’s decree, without fail because there is no will involved other than God’s.
In reality, of course, the sun is the fix point and it is the earth – it is us – that are moving. And this also presents us a beautiful image, as we remember that the sun shines forth its light whether we see it or not, whether we can see the sun brightly in the sky or whether it is hidden behind clouds, whether we and our part of the earth are turned towards the sun, feelings its warmth, or whether we are turned away from it at night.
The sun is constant and in this an image of God’s constancy and the fact that he has ordered the universe in a way that offers some stability (reliability and therefore predictability), even when we mess things up. The light and warmth of his love are unchanging.
but the unjust knows no shame.The final line reminds us of the reality on the ground. God does not commit unjust acts but the unjust know, i.e. experience, no shame (in the objective sense = disgrace) – not at the moment anyway.
This will in fact change – the whole book is about the disaster that shook things up in the sixth century BC. But for most of the time we live in a world in which many who bear God's name sully his reputation and do so without being taken to task for it -- and this is why we have saints days and celebrate All Saints.
Sadly there are many who have been set apart for God in baptism but have no knowledge of God, whose mind is set on things of this world rather than on Christ, and whose lives dishonour the name of Christ by which they are called.
And so we remind us of those saints, those set apart for God, through whom the light of Christ shone so brightly that they show us what it means to live with and in Christ. They were of course not perfect but there was, as it were, credible evidence in their lives which could be used in a law court to convict them of being Christian.
We sometimes use the saying “I’m not a saint” to mean “I am not perfect” but it would be foolish to dismiss our call to be saints on the grounds that we will never be perfect in this life.
The question is one of identity. We are all sinners, falling short of the glory of God - of our calling to reflect him into this world. Those of us who are baptised are all saints in some sense, namely set apart for God, bearing the name of Christ. But some are saints by name only and in reality sinners who live without God in the world. Others are saints in a fuller sense – they depend on Christ, draw close to him, listen to his voice and seek to implement his will – while still being sinners, falling short of their calling in one way or another.
For them and us saints days and All Saints may be useful after all as an inspiration to keep going and to pray fervently that the light and warmth of God’s righteous love would ever more clearly shine through us too and we would be Christians not in name only but as those who live in Christ.
This is one of the things it means to pray Hallowed by thy name.
