MY SOUL CLINGS TO YOU

ALL SOULS DAY - Luke 7:11-17

This year, All Souls Day falls on a Sunday. Confronted with death, we look forward to resurrection. Death will not have the last word, and life will come out victorious. Whenever death comes our way, we must remember that we are called to life, and life will reach its plenitude in Jesus Christ, who is “the resurrection and the life”. (Jn 11:25)

Reading the gospels, we discover that, time and again, Jesus is touched by other people’s suffering. While entering the town of Nain, Jesus saw the funeral of a young man being carried for burial. He was the only son of a widow who remained helpless and defenceless. Faced with the suffering of that mother, Jesus felt compassion and addressed her with reassuring words: “Do not cry.” Then, he ordered the young man to get up, “and Jesus gave him to his mother.” This act of mercy to that mother is also a promise of resurrection and life to all of us.

On All Souls Day, aware of the deep bond that unites us to all of our dead, we remember them and pray for them. We entrust them to God’s mercy, that He may welcome them in His Kingdom. In the first reading, taken from 2 Maccabees, we learn from Judas, who sent the money from a collection "to Jerusalem to have a sacrifice for sin offered” for those who had died (2 Maccabees 12:42-45). Before death, faced with our own fragility and mortality, we recognise our sinfulness and put ourselves in God’s hands. We know that our lives go beyond death, and we ask the Lord to receive us with welcoming arms. Thus, we pray for our dead and offer for them Jesus’ sacrifice, a sacrifice for the redeeming of sins and reconciliation.

And we end with the words of Paul to the Philippians: 

For us, our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body. He will do that by the same power with which he can subdue the whole universe. (Philippians 3:20-21).

May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.