All Saints Day—Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time—1 John 3:1-3

Since the Solemnity of All Saints (All Hallows) falls on a Sunday this year, it takes the place of the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time. As such, our sequential reading of 1 Thessalonians is interrupted with this week’s interlude in 1 John.

The First Letter of John seems to be written by the same author who wrote the Gospel of John. While scholars debate which John this may be, tradition and a fair amount of modern scholarship point to John the Apostle, the youngest of the Apostles, who probably wrote it toward the end of the first century A.D. He seems to have written it to combat false ideas about Jesus and to emphasize that knowledge about God and love for one another are inseparable. In other words, right doctrine and right conduct are intertwined. It seems to be a theological treatise rather than a letter, and some scholars think it was written as part of a debate about how to interpret the Gospel of John. In any case, it is a short, intense, and sometimes repetitive writing.

In this week’s reading, John is reflecting on the incredible mystery that human beings can become God’s children. This is incredible because by definition God is immortal, invisible, eternal, all-powerful, omnipresent, etc., and as human beings we are mortal, visible, time-bound, limited in power and ability, limited by space, etc. God does not need any of us, and yet he provides a way for us to become his own adopted children. It seems crazy that a creature could become the child of the Creator. How does Saint John respond to this insanity? “Yet so we are.”

There is a popular modern misconception that every single person is a child of God simply because God created us all. But if everyone is a child of God by virtue of being created, then the Communion of Saints is nothing different than the bond that binds together our species and Baptism effects nothing. In Baptism, we are “reborn as sons of God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1270), and we join the family of God known as the Communion of Saints. Biologically, every person is brother and sister within the human race. By grace, by God’s life fused into us through the Sacraments, Christians become adopted sons and daughters of God and join a qualitatively different family that nevertheless remains part of the biological human family. We remain in the human family but not of the human family because we are part of the divine family.

Here is why this is important. If there is nothing special about be a Christian, if it does not change anything expect that I now “have to go to church on Sunday,” why should anyone become a Christian? If Christians are meant to be a “royal priesthood, a holy [literally “set apart”] nation, a people of his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9), then there has to be something different about us. If every person is a child of God, whether or not they have been adopted by him and even if “they did not know him”, then celebrating All Saints Day is as meaningless as if we celebrated All Peoples Day.

It may seem a bit odd to say that not everyone is a child of God but that only some of us are, and that is makes us different from the rest of the human race. What does Saint John say to this? “Yet so we are.”