Reflection on Readings for All Souls Day, Sat 12 October 2024 – Fr Kevin O’Gorman SMA

November 2, 2024

Readings: Is 25:6-9; Ps. 26 varia; Rom 5:5-11; Mk 15:33-39, 16:1-6

After celebrating the Communion of Saints yesterday we turn today to the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. Here we are praying for those primarily known to us through the bonds of family, friendship and faith as well as through pastoral charity. With the decline of daylight in the Northern hemisphere in November, our minds turn to the natural cycle of life with its process of decline and death. Today we move between the moorings of memory and the horizon of hope.

Hope features prominently in today’s readings: the prophet Isaiah proclaiming ‘See, this is our God in whom we hoped for salvation’. The second reading starts with the line from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. (Pope Francis took this as the title of his document declaring 2025 as a Year of Jubilee in the church.) Today’s biblical translation reads – ‘Hope is not deceptive’ while the papal version declares ‘Hope does not disappoint’. These variations are not simply a matter of semantics but a sign of mystery, a reminder that the theological virtue of hope is multi-faceted, a horizon always leading us deeper into trust and thanksgiving to God through ‘our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation’. Reconciliation is a powerful metaphor for salvation, one that speaks strongly to our age with its terrible woe of wars around the world. Hope is fuller than ‘Finding optimism in hard times’, a line of introduction to an interview used in the past week. The Gospel gives us our reason for hope – ‘Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he has risen, he is not here’. In the Introduction to Jesus Risen Gerald O’Collins stated ‘It was the resurrection of the crucified Jesus which created and sustained the essential Christian identity’.[1] This is the identity we cling to today and indeed every day, as we remember the bonds of family, friendship and faith we pray that the beacon of hope from heaven brings all the faithful departed to the fullness of light, life and love in God.

Kevin O’Gorman SMA

^[1]^{Jesus Risen, The Resurrection – what actually happened and what does it mean? (London: DLT, 1987), 5.}