What is All Saints’ Day? The Church’s “Second Easter” Explained

At one point, the global church added to its liturgical year a large feast at the beginning of November known as the Feast of All Saints (or All Saints’ Day). It was such a big feast that the day before it (All Hallows’ Eve) and after it (All Souls’ Day) were insignificant by comparison. (All three feast days are referred to collectively as “Hallowtide.”) In some places, All Souls was considered the third highest Christian festival of the year, after only Christmas and Easter.

Today, especially in the US, very little of the original grandeur remains in the festivities and folk practices which once attended the three-day Hallowtide. Folks may go trick-or-treating. Evangelical churches may host an alternative harvest-themed outreach event. Other customs inherited from regional cultures may be observed. But the critical links between the historic origins of the feast, its biblical roots, and our observances today have weakened.

The contemporary Western calendar rushes madly from “back-to-school” to the “holidays.” In the midst of all the clamor and hurry which have come to mark the contemporary fall and early winter seasons, All Saints’ Day offers us a unique opportunity to proclaim the gospel on the opposite side of the calendrical wheel from Easter. For this is precisely what the festival of All Saints did in its origin: It recalled the victory of Easter.

The origins of All Saints’ Day

Very early on in the life of the church, Christians began celebrating feasts of various “saints”—Christians who had died in the faith and whose deaths carried special weight in their witness to Jesus Christ. All cultures keep time by commemorating specific people and events. So too the church kept its calendar both by remembering the central events of the gospel of Jesus (e.g., his birth at Christmas, his epiphany during the visit of the magi, his transfiguration, his death and resurrection, etc.) and by remembering the lives of faithful Christians.

But by doing this, the church revolutionized the ancient world. It replaced pagan holy days with Christian ones, allowing calendrical time to tell a different story: no longer the pagan stories of violence and rebirth, but a story of repentance and resurrection.

Of course, there are more saints than there are days in the calendar. So slowly, from about the fourth to the ninth century, Christians began observing one special day a year in which all Christian saints—the whole company of the victorious church who had come before us, regardless of region or culture—would be celebrated by the living church.

What All Saints’ Day celebrates

All Saints’ Day was a feast which properly subordinated the local or national stories under the grand narrative of God’s kingdom which spans the whole world. Here the Feast of All Saints proclaimed that within the celebrated body of God’s holy ones there was “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28 LEB; cf. Col 3:11).

This celebration spans not only space (the church in different cultures to which the gospel has gone) but also time (the church as it spans generation to generation across the ages and into the future).

At its core, All Saints’ Day proclaims that what is true about Jesus’s body in the resurrection will also be true of the bodies of his people (1 Cor 15), the church, which is the Body of Christ (Col 1:18; 1 Cor 12:27). It celebrates that the Jesus who declared that no one could take a sheep from his hand (John 10:28–29), and that he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25), was indeed faithful to those promises in real lived history. Jesus had told his disciples that he would “build [his] church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt 16:18 LEB). All Saints’ Day celebrates that Jesus is true to his word.

At its core, All Saints’ Day proclaims that what is true about Jesus’s body in the resurrection will also be true of the bodies of his people.

This explains why All Saints was granted such a high place in the liturgical calendar: It was a kind of second Easter, acknowledging all those who will be raised with Christ in his resurrection. As when a single line in a melody is brought into union with other voices, so on All Saints’ Day the full chorus of the church joins in song to harmonize with the Easter victory of Jesus.

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How All Saints’ Day ties into Scripture

In this way, All Saints’ Day highlights the irreducibly social nature of redemption. Recall that the victory of Jesus was a corporate victory. He gave his life for a fallen humanity. He paid for our sins in both the individual and collective sense, and he redeemed not only humans but humanity. In baptism, we join him in his death, being buried with him (Rom 6:4). And being conformed to him in death, we will also rise with him in glory (Rom 6:8; 1 Cor 15:20–58). All Saints’ Day celebrates that this victory was truly accomplished not only for Jesus of Nazareth, but also through him for his people. It was indeed won. In this way, All Saints completes the story of Easter. We are heirs with him in glory (Rom 8:17).

In the beginning, God created a people for himself “in the likeness of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). That original unity of a fruitful and diverse humanity was always meant to go from glory to glory, reflecting the loving three-in-one glory of the Creator. A major symptom of the fall, then, was the fracturing of the human race.

Salvation in Scripture always carries this social dimension. It is not merely that Jesus cancels the individual debts of each redeemed person (though that’s certainly true), he also restores us to a single humanity united in Jesus (Rom 5:17; 12:4–5; Eph 4:4–6). Henri de Lubac on this point is brilliant:

The Church […] completes—so far as can be completed here below—the work of spiritual reunion which was made necessary by sin; that work which was begun at the Incarnation and was carried on up to Calvary. In one sense the Church is herself this reunion …¹

The church is, to paraphrase de Lubac’s central thesis, the social form of salvation.

This is what animates the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the garden on the night he was betrayed:

And I do not ask on behalf of these only, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, that they also may be in us, in order that the world may believe that you sent me. And the glory that you have given to me, I have given to them, in order that they may be one, just as we are one—I in them, and you in me, in order that they may be completed in one, so that the world may know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me. (John 17:20–23 LEB)

All Saints’ Day declares that the history of the church, amidst its various messes and tragedies, is ultimately the story of how the Father is answering this prayer of the Son through the Holy Spirit. He is working in the messy, broken, common fellowship of sinners-becoming-saints.

Who All Saints’ Day is for

All Saints’ Day belongs to sinners

There is great encouragement in All Saints’ Day for Christians—especially those struggling with the faith. It is easy to doubt whether the truth of the gospel can actually be lived out by real humans like you and me, or if it is more like an elite workout regimen which only a few select, super holy individuals can achieve. All Saints’ Day shatters this false idea. All Saints’ Day catalogs the litany of individuals, everyday humans with real bodies and real problems, whose lives magnified Jesus.

Charles Wesley’s roaring verse from “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” sets this truth to music:

Harlots and publicans and thieves,
in holy triumph join!
Saved is the sinner that believes
From crimes as great as mine.
Murderers and all ye hellish crew,
ye sons of lust and pride,
believe the Savior died for you;
for me the Savior died.

All Saints’ Day proclaims that the gospel is no idle tale or myth, but a historical fact evidenced in the real lives of an uncountable multitude from every tribe, tongue, and nation (Rev 7:9–17).

All Saints’ Days belongs to the whole church of all times

All Saints’ Day is a feast which spans tradition or denomination, culture and era, revealing that mysterious inexhaustible truth of “mere Christianity” that C. S. Lewis “learned to recognize.”²

What is proclaimed on All Saints’ Day concerns the past: It celebrates the work of the Holy Spirit across history, moving in real human lives, in kingdoms and empires, across oceans and deserts, crossing language barriers and mountain ranges.

But it also declares something about the present. That same God who performed great wonders, converting the Visigoths and reaching the isles in the middle of the Pacific, is at work right now in you and the folks with whom you go to church. That same God is doing that same gospel work today in the lives of his saints. He has begun a good work and he will be faithful to complete it (Phil 1:6).

Finally, All Saints’ Day speaks to the future hope of the church. Come what may, the gates of hell will not prevail against the kingdom of Jesus (Matt 16:18). The fellowship and encouragement we share in our days before the Resurrection is only a foretaste of the communion we will experience when Christ returns and makes all things new.

Our eternal joy will be all the better precisely because it is shared with all the victorious church and with our Lord.

Yet we cannot conceive of that future glory only in individual terms. Those glories will be better because we will share them with the whole resurrected communion of saints in eternity. One thinks of the increased joy we experience by sharing moments like Christmases or birthdays with others. So also our eternal joy will be all the better precisely because it is shared with all the victorious church and with our Lord. It is, to put it crassly, not actually heaven if I have it all to myself.

How to celebrate All Saints’ Day

All Saints’ Day is also an amazing day, just before Christmas, to direct people’s anxious hearts towards Jesus.

It’s a great opportunity to preach about dying, the resurrection of the dead, and judgement day, and to help Christians understand what the Bible teaches about life after death. People today are increasingly hungry for what the Bible says about these matters.

There are some excellent Christian hymns perfectly suited for All Saints’ Day. I’ve already mentioned “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” by Charles Wesley. (All Saints’ Day was one of his brother’s, John Wesley’s, favorite days in the church year.) But here are some others:

• “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” by Reginald Heber
• “Idumea (And Am I Born to Die?),” by Charles Wesley
• “Rise Again Ye Lion-Hearted,” by an unknown author (trans. Martin Franzmann)
• “Come Let Us Join Our Friends Above,” by Charles Wesley

Conclusion

When Saul is struck off his mount on the road to Damascus, Christ asks him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4; emphasis added). Notice the way Jesus so deeply identifies himself with his church that he uses the singular personal pronoun without hesitation.

So the same Saul (or Paul) replicates this ideas when he states, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, and that life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20 LEB).

About six months after Easter, the Festival of All Saints presents the church with a feast that continues the story of Jesus by proclaiming the way in which his life is being lived out in the life of his church.

Mark Brians’ suggested resources on All Saints’ Day

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