Speaker: Ven. Rhonda Waters

All Saints’ Day doesn’t simply celebrate the saints as good examples – it celebrates the saints as ongoing participants in the life of the church, reminding us that the church is much bigger than what we see on a Sunday morning or even the collection of every Sunday morning across the world and through the generations. The church encompasses the faithful on earth and the faithful in heaven, transcending life and death just as Jesus does.

God is the author of life, the forgiver of sins, the restorer of God’s people. God’s reign is revealed not in death but in resurrection – a truth that the priests and pharisees and all of us whose knowledge of God’s justice is shaped by Scripture should know.

This isn’t a parable about authority – at least not exactly or obviously. Rather, it’s a parable about words and actions and the opportunity, for better or for worse, to change our minds. It’s a parable that invites elders and priests – and us – to reflect on their own choices in relation to God’s authority rather that getting hung up on Jesus’ or John’s authority.

Jesus is creating something new, a new church – a word Matthew uses but Jesus and Peter almost certainly didn’t – and people are working out what this church should look like. And Jesus’ answer, then and now, is this: it should look like the Kingdom of Heaven.

If God wants the good, why do things go wrong? This was the question the parable of the sower addressed – why did so many people – especially from among God’s own chosen people – not claim the good news of God’s kingdom for themselves? Where was God that this wasn’t going as expected?

But “sensible” is not the primary criteria when you are trying to describe who God is. “Sensible” forces God’s nature into a size and shape our human minds can manage. Rejecting these sensible options in favour of the fundamentally incomprehensible doctrine of the Trinity – One in Three and Three in One – requires us to get over our need to understand, to simplify, to manage the nature of God.