Empire of the Saints

Ancient Rome City Watercolor, by Taylor-eOS

     

Lections: All Saints’ Sunday (Hallowmas), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Book of Daniel is an apocalypse. It utilizes prophetic imagery and sensational symbolism to unveil how God is at work behind the scenes, interpreting historical happenings—political, military, socioeconomic—through a religious lens. Daniel, in other words, is concerned with the meaning undergirding world events. Empires rise, dynasties fall, and the faithful wish to know why.

We divide the Hebrew Bible, traditionally, into three parts, with the most authoritative being the Law, then the Prophets, and finally the later Writings. Judaism places Daniel in this third category, whilst Christians rank him amongst the Major Prophets. And that might seem a little odd. Why would Christians hold a Jewish book to have more authority than would most Jews? Quite naturally, it has to do with Daniel’s importance to the ministry of Jesus.

The Book of Daniel is set during the Babylonian Exile, when the Jewish people, Jesus’ people, had been defeated by the Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. They lost their homeland, their Temple, their king. They were scattered as strangers in a strange land. They had to redefine what it meant to be the people of God: to be faithful to the Covenant that the Lord had made with their forefathers, despite now living in a brave new world.

The stories in the Book of Daniel had to do with keeping the faith, maintaining the community, and trusting in the promise that God was ever with them, even in Exile, even in defeat. And of course they held the hope that someday they’d go home, that Exile wouldn’t be forever. If you know your Bible, then you know that this hope was fulfilled. Some 70 years later, a bigger empire, the Persian Empire, destroyed the Babylonian and let God’s people go. Many stayed where they’d put down roots, in Persia and Mesopotamia. But many others made the long trek home, in order to rebuild.

The Book of Daniel, in the form that we have it, was clearly compiled at a later date. Yes, it was written about the Babylonian Exile—and some parts of it might indeed stem from that era—but Daniel is a second-century work, published perhaps 400 years after the fact. That’s like someone today writing a book about the Pilgrims of New England. Why then? Why release a new edition of the story of Daniel the Prophet generations later? Well, it’s because Judea had once again fallen on hard times.

That Persian Empire, which had proved relatively benign so far as foreign overlords go, had fallen to the Greeks. And some of the successor kingdoms to Alexander the Great were actively, violently hostile to Jewish culture and religion. Just as Jews in the Exile had taken comfort and inspiration from the story of the Exodus, so their descendants struggling against the Hellenes drew inspiration from Daniel in the Exile.

And the Book of Daniel promised a number of things: it promised the coming of “one like a Son of Man,” who would appear as though human, yet would clearly be divine. There would be four beasts, Daniel prophesied, arising from the sea—that is, four empires from amongst the Gentiles. And the fourth empire would be toppled, by a rock not hewn by human hands, so that the empire would then be handed over to the saints, to the holy ones of God.

Crucially, Daniel also set a timeline: a “week of weeks,” interpreted as 490 years, before these promises would come to pass. Well, jump 490 years from the time when Daniel was set, and you get the beginning of the first century. You get Jesus. Yes, Daniel was the reason why so many people, Jewish and pagan alike, were looking for the Messiah around the birth of Christ. He fit the bill. Moreover, Jesus regularly described Himself as the Son of Man, the divine ruler prophesied in the Book of Daniel.

By then the Jews had survived the Greeks. That’s what Hanukkah’s all about. But alas, their erstwhile allies in that conflict became their next round of conquerors: the Romans. Never ally with Rome. Romans have no allies. They only have enemies and underlings. Once again, people read the Book of Daniel in the light of current events. And they could count. Four empires had been the prophecy, yes? Well, now, we’ve had Babylon, Persia, Greece—and now Rome. Rome is the fourth empire. Rome is to be toppled by the rock.

Lo and behold, what sobriquet does Jesus give to His right-hand man? He takes Simon bar Jonah, a fisherman, as one of His Apostles, and renames Him Cephas, or Petrus, which both mean Rock. Simon Peter will be sent to Rome, in order to hand it over to the saints. That must have seemed insane, all the more so once the Romans had crucified Christ! And yet it worked, did it not? Simon Peter founded the church at Rome after Jesus’ Resurrection. Paul later helped to water what Peter had already planted.

And for 300 years—300 years between the death of Peter and the rise of Constantine—the Roman Empire persecuted Jesus’ Church. It came in fits and spurts, mind you, but for three centuries any Christian who spoke a little too loudly, who stood a little too high, could end up on a cross, just like Jesus. Yet this did not prevent them from witnessing to the Good News of Jesus’ Resurrection. So they became known as martyrs, for to martyr means to witness.

After 300 years of feeding the poor, preaching the Gospel, and dying for our faith, the world as we knew it ended. The Roman state, which had crucified Christ, and spilled all the blood of the martyrs, itself converted willingly, nonviolently, unto Christianity. Through Simon Peter, the Rock, Christ conquered in love the empire which had murdered Him. And so we hold the prophecy of Daniel as fulfilled! The fourth and final empire, toppled in its hate, had now been handed over to the saints.

The martyrs held the office of their murderers. What we did with it—well, that’s a longer story.

All Saints’ Day descends from those fourth-century commemorations of the martyrs who died during those three centuries of imperial persecution. We venerated our dead, holding their bones to be relics, because they had been joined to Jesus in a death like His, and so also were united to Jesus in a resurrection like His. The martyrs, the saints, the holy ones were the Body of Christ crucified again, risen again.

Yet with the persecutions over, and the reins of power now within our sadly sinful hands, we had to redefine what it meant to be a Christian martyr, what it meant to be a saint. If we could no longer die for Jesus as a red martyr, then we would have to live for Him instead; in the white martyrdom of the monastery, or the green martyrdom of everyday life. Even today Christians struggle with how to live in a Western empire, which may no longer torment us, but which seduces us into corruption, with lip service, privilege, and power.

On All Saints’ Day, we remember those who have gone before us and are at rest, those who fought the good fight, who ran the race, and are welcomed home by our Master. We remember that death has never been our end, that we are connected to a vast cloud of witnesses, of martyrs, past, present, and future, who rejoice in Christ alongside us. And we remember that saints are not saints because they were superhuman, but because they were sinners saved by grace, as are we all.

You are now His saints, my brothers and my sisters. You are the Body of Christ still at work within this world. Yet coupled to this blessing comes an unexpected burden. For in addition the Cross, which we knew we’d have to bear, we find that now an empire has been handed unto us. And what are we to do with such a power?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026