Today, the Sunday after Pentecost, is the feast of All Saints.  We remember all those righteous ones who have gone before us in Christ and who now live fully in Him.  It cannot be stressed too highly how important the saints are for us in the Church.  There are many aspects to this.  The saints are models for our own discipleship.  They add their prayers to our own making them stronger.  They guide us not only by their sayings on earth but also by their fellowship with us on the other side of death.  This they do as members with us in ONE Church; militant here on earth, expectant in Paradise and Triumphant in Heaven.  However, today I wish to speak with you concerning another vitally important role that the saints play in our Christian lives.  They have an authority for the Church, for us, born out of their own transformation in Christ.  It is not so with the heterodox.

In the west, in the Roman Catholic Church, the authority of Christian teaching is expressed by what Roman Catholics call the ‘magisterium.’  The Pope and those bishops in communion with him, including all other office holders before them determine in councils, encyclicals, decrees and canons what a Roman Catholic ought rightly to believe and how he or she should live according to the teachings of the Church.  We have something similar in our understanding of Holy Tradition, except, of course, we have no single pope with universal jurisdiction as part of the mix.  However, there are major differences between us and Rome in how we discern what should and should not be followed, what is part of Holy Tradition and what is not.  I will return to this shortly.

In the Protestant traditions, authority generally resides in the Scriptures and Scriptures alone, as being sufficient for salvation.  Clearly this creates a number of problems for our Protestant brethren since there are so many different interpretations of Scripture when an individual approaches them unaided.  The fragmentation of Protestantism can, in part, be explained by this faulty model notion of biblical authority.  For the Orthodox, authority cannot come simply and only from a book, no matter how important or holy … and to return to Roman Catholicism … it cannot come either from a pope, no matter how powerful, attractive or influential.

So, how do we Orthodox understand the authority we have in Holy Tradition if it is not that conferred either by a pope or a book?  Here is where we need to recall the role of the saints.  Perhaps in the modern era none has expressed this so well as Fr John Romanides of blessed memory.  He wrote …

When Holy Scripture says, ‘man is saved by faith alone’ (Ephesians 2:8), it does not mean that he is saved merely by acceptance. There is, however, another kind of faith, the faith of the heart. It is referred to in this way because this kind of faith is not found in the human reason or intellect, but in the region of the heart. This faith of the heart is a gift of God that you will not receive unless God decides to grant it. It is also called ‘inner faith’…Inner Faith is rooted in an experience of grace…Inner faith is noetic prayer. When someone has noetic prayer in his heart, which means the prayer of the Holy Spirit in his heart, then he has inner faith.

Through this kind of faith and by means of prayer, he beholds things that are visible. When someone has this kind of vision, it is called theoria. Theoria, in fact means vision…this inner faith (i.e. prayer of the heart) and hope are set aside, and only love for God remains (as a gift of God)…When the perfect is come, faith and hope are done away, and only love remains. And this love is theosis…This experience of theosis is the core of the Orthodox Tradition, the foundation of the local and ecumenical councils, and the basis for the Church’s canon law and liturgical life today. If the contemporary Orthodox theologian is to acquire objectivity, he must rely on the experience of theosis.

The saints are, of course, those who have fought long and hard and by grace and the Holy Spirit within them have achieved theosis, deification.  For example, St John Chrysostom does not have authority in the Church because he was a mighty fine public speaker, which of course he was; nor simply by his prophetic words or his scriptural knowledge, in which, by grace, he also abounded.  No, St. John Chrysostom has authority for us because his heart was on fire in God, because his inner faith had been forged out of suffering and radical repentance, because people saw him and heard him and said: ‘there is a true image of Christ!’  And so it is with all the saints.  It is their charisms, their gifts in the Holy Spirit and the fruit of those gifts in their hearts and lives, (as St Paul enumerates these): “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control” [Galatians 5:22-23] that gives them authority for us.  It is the same with all the saints.  They, and they alone, are the Church’s true authority.

Of course these men and women did not become saints without a deep understanding of Scripture and the Fathers, without a thorough immersion in the liturgical life of the Church and in their prayer.  Their authority, however, commends itself by the witness of what is in their hearts.  All the Church’s authoritative theologians have been saints.  All her administrators, her singers, her practitioners of mercy and righteousness have been saints.  In each age God raises us for Himself, and for us, new friends who will manifest His love and power.  Our closeness, therefore, to the saints, His friends; our familiarity with their lives and teachings; our supplications for their guidance and succour are all vital for our own deification, for our own salvation.

This is why we commemorate them immediately after Pentecost for they are the true lights in the Church that God in His mercy has given to us for our help.  Let us never neglect them or else we risk losing Christ Himself.  The beauty of Christ is always manifested in His saints and we desperately need that beauty to challenge us and inspire us to become better Christians and to come closer to God in both love and loving and we also might be united to Him and glorified ourselves.