THURSDAY was All Saints Day, a day set aside by Christians to celebrate the lives of the saints, known and unknown. It comes the day after Halloween, which for many is a secular event characterised by its association with the macabre. What is easily overlooked is its link with All Saints Day which is evident in the word Halloween. Hallow is the same word for “holy” that we find in the Lord’s Prayer, and e’en is a contraction of “evening” so Halloween is a shortened form of “All Hallows Eve,” the day before All Saints Day.
Whatever one’s views about the secular Halloween, with its preoccupation with ghosts and skeletons and demons of one kind or another, the celebration of the saints is an assertion by Christians of another dimension to life; that those things which create fear and terror have been defeated by the greater power for good seen in Jesus Christ and reflected in the lives of the saints.
One of those saints – a 20th- century martyr – is Janani Luwum who was Anglican Archbishop of Uganda when President Idi Amin was in power. He stood up to Amin challenging his brutal regime. As a result he was accused of treason and on February 17th, 1977, while in custody, he died in suspicious circumstances. At the time the authorities claimed he was killed in an accident, but it was discovered later that he had been brutally beaten and shot.
As news of his death spread thousands gathered in Kampala on a hill called Namirembe – it means peace – the site of the Anglican Cathedral. They were devastated at news of the death of their archbishop but they had no body to mourn with, because the government wouldn’t give it back. They just stood around, lost, until the frail retired Archbishop Erica Sabiti stepped forward and read the story of the resurrection of Jesus. He reached that part of the story where the women who are looking for the body of Jesus encounter two strangers near the garden tomb who ask: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” As the reading ended, despair gave way to hope.
They were rediscovering the Easter conviction that Janani Luwum was not a corpse in a government mortuary; he was safe in the presence of the living Lord.
John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, writing about this event says “On Easter Day Jesus issues a challenge: ‘Who says I’m dead? Why do you go on looking for me among the dead?’ Because the places we find him are those where death is dying, where grey is turning to colour and green shoots are breaking through concrete; where the blind are recovering their sight and the oppressed are going free. The characteristic activity of the risen Christ is to bring people and places to life. People will know that Christ is alive, therefore, when they see transformation taking place before their eyes and want a piece of the action. And that’s a straight challenge to us, direct from the risen Christ.”
He goes on to make the point that in the West there has often been more fear than faith in our Christianity and more gloom than joy; that we have been preoccupied with sin and death and what they did to Jesus rather than being preoccupied with Jesus and what he did with sin and death. “The church has to get back to the risen Christ; its ministry has to be shaped by the resurrection; we need to be an Easter people. We need to affirm with complete confidence that Christ was raised from the dead and that here was a new world.”
Paul Tillich said that the saint is not a saint because he is "good" but because he is transparent for something that is more than he is himself. A friend makes the same point with the story of the young child who was asked what a saint was. Thinking of the figures in the stained glass windows in her local church she said: " a saint is someone who lets the light shine through". – GORDON LINNEY