Daily Bible: Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven
The readings for All Saints Day are just beautiful!
Revelation 7:2–14 recounts St. John’s vision of the 144 thousand saints who have come through the persecution and washed in the blood of the Lamb. In other words, these saints remained faithful to Jesus, and are saved by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. The word “thousand” isn’t an exact number. It’s actually a military grouping made up of a number of cohorts (which was made up of 5 or 6 centuries), plus calvary. By the time you get up to “legion” the exact number of soldiers was pretty ambiguous — at least 1,000 but sometimes as many as 5,000 or more. 144 thousand refers to the saints being a multitude from the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples (12 x 12).
The responsorial from Psalm 24:1–6 expresses one of our responses to All Saints Day — the desire to be saints ourselves.
The second reading from 1John 3:1–3 tells us that sainthood is exactly our destiny. By grace, we are now children of God. “what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” But the glory of sainthood is that we will be like the Lord and we shall see Him as He is!
The Gospel from Matthew 5:1–12 shows Jesus teaching the Beatitudes during the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes are the virtues of Jesus that we must adopt if we hope to be saints. The Beatitudes are specifications of Jesus’ teaching found in Matthew 16:5, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” The road to sainthood is to seek first the Kingdom of God.
May our Lord give us the grace to desire sainthood and to persevere in our walk with Him. May we become saints!
Originally published at Catholic Spiritual Growth.
