All Saints Sunday. Holy Apostle Carpus, One of the Seventy Disciples.
Hebrews 11:33-12:2. Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38. 19:27-30.
Read Hebrews 11:33-12:2
We aspire to be included in communities of people. If we meet the education and training requirements, we can be accepted into certain professional or trade organizations. If we agree with their values and goals, we can gain membership in various volunteer or fraternal organizations. Social groups can be more difficult. We may wish to be accepted into a group, but we or they might not think we fit in.
In our spiritual lives we are directed to keep company with the saints – to reflect on what their lives impart, to emulate their ways, and to ask them to intercede for us. But do we really consider ourselves as being numbered among them? They can seem like a club of heroic virtue that we could never live up to.
But today’s epistle reading includes us with the saints in the most important way – we are to be “made perfect” together. They endured their trials by faith but did not yet receive “the promise”. God’s intention all along has been that that should happen to them together with…us!
Jesus did the ultimate looking ahead for something better kind of endurance of trials – “for the joy” of us and the saints being perfected together and Him being seated “at the right hand of the throne of God”, He “endured the cross”. What we are to do is look to Him, together with the saints. If we “lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and…run with endurance the race that is set before us” we will find ourselves, in our everyday lives, living up to what the saints did.