Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls) | Wisdom 3:1-9 | John 6:37-40

The Book of Wisdom was written for people who had watched the righteous suffer and die and could not make sense of it.

The foolish, it says, thought that the death of the righteous was a disaster - that their lives had come to nothing, that the suffering at the end undid everything that came before. And from the outside, from the vantage of what is visible, that is not an unreasonable conclusion. They died. It looked like defeat.

"But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them."

The peace they have entered is not visible to the ones who watched them go. It looks like absence but it is not. They are held.

Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says the same thing from his divinity: "Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me." And then the wonderful claim: "I will not lose anything of what he gave me, but raise it on the last day."

He will not lose one.

Today is the beginning of November - the month the Church sets aside for prayer for the dead - for the faithful departed who are still being made ready: the ones in purgatory, being purified of what clings to them so they can bear the weight of the glory they are being brought into. They are not lost. They are held, being completed. And our prayers for them are efficacious, because the Body of Christ does not stop at the boundary of death.

This is the Church's great faith for the dead - that the one who said this meant it, that the souls of the faithful departed are still in his hands, that death has not undone what baptism began. We pray for them today, and all through November, not because we doubt the promise but because we are part of the same Body they are part of, and prayer is how love crosses the distance that death seems to have made.

Psalm 23 is the Church's oldest answer to this grief: "Though I walk in the valley of darkness, I fear no evil, for you are with me." The shepherd does not stop being the shepherd when the path goes through darkness. The rod and the staff are there in the valley as surely as they are in green pastures. The ones we have buried walked into that valley, and they were not abandoned there.

Today the Church names no individual saints. It names all of them - the faithful departed, the ones we carry by name in our own hearts, the ones who crossed before us and whom we have not stopped loving. They are in his hand. He will not lose them. He will raise them on the last day.

That is a promise made by the one who walked out of his own tomb.