For All the Saints

³² When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” ³³ When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. ³⁴ He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” ³⁵ Jesus began to weep. ³⁶ So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” ³⁷ But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

³⁸ Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. ³⁹ Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” ⁴⁰ Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” ⁴¹ So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. ⁴² I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” ⁴³ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” ⁴⁴ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

John 11:32-44 (NRSVUE)

The church I am a part of celebrates All Saints Day, and although I grew up in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I did not celebrate it and I did not participate in an All Saints service until well after I graduated from seminary. I recall one of the more meaningful services at my spouse’s church where the reading of church members who died in the last year was paired with the Lord’s Supper in recognition of All Saints Sunday. As we came forward to partake in communion we were invited to light a candle at a station off to the side on the way back to our seats. A simple gesture, but one that moved me deeply: a persistent sign in which we recognize the lives of the people who were a part of the beloved community, especially in the context of the Eucharist, which literally means thanksgiving. 

Saints play an important cultural role for many traditions and communities. In Korean American Catholic parishes, the community incorporates a Korean indigenous ritual called jesa into their worship as a way to celebrate All Saints. It is a memorial that is usually held on the anniversary of an ancestor’s death, but memorial services are also performed on Chuseok (fall harvest), New Year’s Day, or April 5. The jesa bridges the living and the deceased by emphasizing the importance of familial and ancestral connections in Korean society. It reflects a deep-rooted respect for genealogies and a desire to maintain harmony between the spiritual and earthly realms. Although it was initially prohibited, the Catholic ban on ancestral rituals was lifted in 1939 when Pope Pius XII formally recognized ancestral rites as a civil practice. 

Angelyn Dries provides an ethnographic description of one church’s practice of jesa to which she and other outside participants were invited to witness. Dries reflects they “write on a scroll the name of a relative or friend who had died in the last year. After a brief explanation of the importance to Koreans in remembering their ancestors, the women then began the prayer for the participants’ ancestors, using incense, music, and placing wine, fruit, and flowers on a small table.” This practice of orientation towards the dead is a meaningful part of this community’s identity, and is thereby a sign of their ongoing presence among the living—they commune with the dead by worshiping and eating together.

John 11:32–44 similarly orients us towards the story around one saint’s life, death, and miraculous resurrection. Jesus raises Lazarus, fulfilling his promise to Martha in 11:25–27, and it is this act and its immediate aftermath that provides a turning point in John’s gospel. The narrative arc of John’s account is constructed around a series of signs performed by Jesus, and this is the final and seventh sign of the gospel in a series of miracles that began with the changing of water into wine in John 2. These signs inspire many who witness them to believe in Jesus and in some cases to worship him. 

I’ve written previously on John and how the gospel is called the Book of Signs, when the Word reveals himself to the world and to his own … (John 1:6-13). These signs would mostly be miracles, healings and feedings, indicators of his divine sonship and therefore, his authority and sharing in God’s sovereignty. But I also read signs more widely and broadly: teachings and prophecies, and long discourses where Jesus explains by analogy and metaphor who he is: I am the bread of life (John 6:35), I am the good shepherd (John 10:11), I am the living water (John 7:38). These “I am” statements are tied to the miracles, and can’t be disentangled from them. And so, I suggest it is instructive to intentionally read the sign of Lazarus’ raising with the corresponding statement (although it appears in the section prior), “I am the resurrection and the life,” (John 11:25) even as the sequence of sign-dialogue-discourse is reversed just for this sign. In this case, Jesus tells us who he is before he does the work. I wonder if this reversal suggests the necessity for the miraculous to be understood in the context of who Jesus is as he tells us over and over, “I am” here.

As one commentator, Alicia D. Myers writes: “For all the joy that may have resulted from Lazarus’s resurrection, the Gospel focuses primarily on the lead-up to this event and the ramifications of Jesus’ delayed arrival.” In this sign about the resurrection and the life, we are invited into the affect of such a moment—in particular the sorrow and the grief. It is a kind of foreshadowing and precursor to Jesus’ own resurrection, and hence, what makes the sequence reversal remarkable. 

Although it is referred to several verses ahead of our pericope at the very beginning of the chapter, Lazarus was ill enough at that point that his sisters worried and sent word to Jesus. But Jesus lingered long enough that Lazarus died and was in the tomb for four days upon his eventual arrival. When Jesus arrives Mary is weeping, and twice in the passage John describes that Jesus is “greatly disturbed,” first “in his spirit, and deeply moved,” and then again when he approaches the tomb (John 11:33, 38). Life and death, and everything in between is inevitably the challenge, and resurrection is not necessarily meant to be a solution.  

It strikes me here that the sign, or statement, “I am the resurrection and the life,” (my emphasis) has even more significance. This is a statement directed towards Martha, who understands the resurrection as located in the future. In many ways, this is not incorrect, of course, but Jesus, in this moment, in this act, promises to be present in the complexity of the very human experience of grief, of longing, of desperation, of loss. It is in the connection between both death and life that we experience the depth of humanity, and the joy and power of the resurrection in the here and now, as it is manifested in the person of Lazarus, and eventually, the person of Jesus. 

In the here and now is a daily mantra that I speak to ground me in the political realities of those who may not fit or make the category of the saint—whether religious or cultural. We have no shortage of stories of death all around us, but it is the jesa as a way to celebrate All Saints that invites me to consider not only those who are venerated in certain traditions, but those who are a part of our communities in other ways. Those on the margins. Those disenfranchised by structures of privilege. Those oppressed by white supremacy. The Lazarus story for All Saints Sunday is a way to consider how death is present all around us, not simply the natural end to a life cycle, but the way in which the state governs life by policies that govern death. 

We see this in the porousness of the line between life and death as Jackie Wang explores in Carceral Capitalism (2018): “What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?” Living hells, or perhaps, living deaths. Or near-death, as we have seen in the cases of those who face capital punishment, like Robert Roberson this past week, whose execution was put on hold. The saints are all around us in the here and now as reminders that they, too, embody the kingdom of God, of that mysterious and miraculous promise of God’s reign of peace, of dignity, of justice, of life. 

In my denomination, they describe: “All Saints’ Day has a rather different focus in the Reformed tradition. While we may give thanks for the lives of particular luminaries of ages past, the emphasis is on the ongoing sanctification of the whole people of God. Rather than putting saints on pedestals as holy people set apart in glory, we give glory to God for the ordinary, holy lives of the believers in this and every age. This is an appropriate time to give thanks to members of the community of faith who have died in the past year. We also pray that we may be counted among the company of the faithful in God’s eternal realm.” 

We remember all those who walked with us. We remember church members who were saints in their own ways—the extraordinary ordinary—they were generous with their time and support, they were children of the church, they were builders, they were historians, and storytellers. They were also someone’s brother, someone’s son and grandson, someone’s husband, someone’s partner, someone’s fiance, someone’s best friend. And on this day we lift up how they were also God’s beloved and they lived and loved out of that love. 

We give thanks, we pray, we remember, connect to, and honor the dead, we fellowship with our ancestors—that great cloud of witnesses who somehow remain among us. Perhaps in the end the challenge “if you had been here,” and the question “could …he [not] have kept this man from dying?” directed at Jesus—these are directed at us. For the task at hand is to continuously ask ourselves where is the “here” that we need to show up with love and justice? The work is to ask how might we keep those in need from dying? How do we keep living, and keep others living? The text itself might compel us to consider how the resurrection work of Jesus, as we participate in it, is not only one of witnessing to the power of life to overcome death, but simply one of presence, of courageous advocacy and deep care, of dismantling barriers and rolling away those stones for all the saints among us who are near death, living death, or dying, and then to unbind them from those systems and structures that insist on their death for the sake of the living. 

My hope this All Saints Sunday is that we would fully and faithfully engage in the realities of life and death, so that those who have gone before us will continue to inspire us to work towards love for those around us in the land of the living.

1 Angelyn Dries, “Korean Catholics in the United States,” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 99–110.