Homily at the Solemn Requiem for All Souls’ Day

Preached by the Vicar, Fr Christopher Woods on Sunday 2 November 2025

The Gospel Reading was Luke 7. 11-17

Two different groups of pilgrims coalesce in the scene from today’s Gospel reading: one, a large funeral cortege leaving the city of Nain and the other, Jesus with his disciples and a crowd of followers with him. This is a poignant moment, into which the author of Luke’s gospel draws us, inviting us to observe, or even become involved.

St Luke is careful with his detail. The dead man is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.” In one sentence we are shown a whole world of tragedy and loss. Jesus “saw her,” the text says; and then more compellingly “his heart was moved with compassion.” He is not aloof. He does not offer a lecture on the afterlife, or a spiritual pep talk. He draws near, touches the bier and speaks directly to the mother: “Do not weep… and then to the departed man … Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the young man sits up and begins to speak, and Jesus gives him back to his mother.

The miracle is astonishing, of course, and we might all react in different ways when we contemplate it – some of us would accept it literally, some of us might question its historical veracity, some of us see it as another sign of the mystery of Resurrection. But however we mentally process it, let us first notice the shape of the encounter: Jesus restores a relationship. He returns a son to his mother, a future to a household, a sign of new hope from painful loss. The mercy of God is not an abstract power; it is a tenderness that repairs communion. Where death seems to rupture our belonging, God restores it. And the force and power of this passage offers to us a great deal of spiritual nourishment for our questions of death and grief.

Today, 2 November is All Souls’ Day. Rarely do we get the chance to observe it on a Sunday, the day of the Resurrection. We carry with us names and memories of people who have died either recently or many years ago - some names we can recall without tears, some we cannot yet speak aloud. We carry stories incomplete, and goodbyes that were rushed, and words that should have been said but weren’t. We carry gratitude; we carry regret. The Solemn Requiem is the point where our complex memories can meets the grace and compassion of Christ, who still walks directly into pain, and lays his hand on our hurts.

All Souls’ Day allows us to dwell a bit longer than normal with our departed loved ones - their ordinariness or their extraordinariness. Some loved deeply, some whom we wanted to love more, and some barely known. We remember those whose faith was shining and those whose faith was faltering. We remember those who hurt us and those we hurt. We do not pretend grief is tidy or that love is simple. We simply place them all, with reverence, into the mercy of God.

On of the residual controversies of our post Reformation inheritance in the Anglo Catholic tradition is praying for the dead. Why do we? Why do we need to? Well, because love does not stop at the grave. Love hopes and works for the beloved’s good. If we can do that for one another here—by cooking meals and keeping vigil and speaking a kind word—how much more will charity do its work across the veil, trusting that God gathers all our prayers into his own redeeming will. God’s eternity is not a long corridor of time; it is the living present of the One who was and is and is to come. When we pray “Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,” we step for a moment into God’s Now, placing our beloved in the light that already knows them fully and loves them wholly.

When we pray for the faithful departed, we are being part of the final tenderness of God: the as God finishes the healing and forgiveness that could never be completed here on earth. Who among us, if offered such a gift, would refuse it for ourselves—or withhold our prayer that others might receive it fully? The Requiem is our consent to that mercy.

We ask God to be fully present with with our dead, and encourage them to be open to his pure love.

The scene at Nain also speaks to those who mourn with unresolved grief and pain. Perhaps the person you remember left you with wounds as well as gifts; perhaps there are questions around a death that trouble the soul—addiction, estrangement, violence... Hear the Gospel’s quiet courage: Jesus touches what everyone avoids. He places himself where we fear to go. Nothing about your mourning is beyond his reach. Nothing about your beloved, or about you, is beyond his compassion.

And then this: “He gave him to his mother.” In Christ, nothing good is lost. Whatever was wholesome and true in our relationships is conserved and made more itself; whatever was crooked is straightened in love. When we pray for the departed, we are not trying to change God’s mind; we are letting God change our hearts—so that we learn to recognise our beloved in the light where they are going, and to recognise ourselves as the people who can meet them there.

The Requiem Mass locates this hope at the altar. Here, in bread and wine, the Crucified and Risen One places into our hands the pledge of life that death cannot hold. In our worship, heaven and earth move toward one another. The saints at rest, the souls in healing, the Church on earth: one great company joined to one great offering. It is why this liturgy carries its own music, its own colours of darkness with glimmers of light – the purity of the unbleached candles on the high altar, the sombre tone.

Shortly, during our prayers we will read the list of names of the departed whom you and those in our wider parish family have asked to be prayed for. Each year at our All Souls’ Mass some names re-appear. Some years there are different names. In a way, whether tnames are read aloud or not is not the point – God knows them and has them. But as this year’s list is read, allow them to move from a controlled memory to memory eternal. Let the spacious mercy of God hold them all.

“Do not weep,” Jesus says to the widow, not as a command to stop feeling, but as a promise that her tears are seen and will not have the last word. “Young man, I say to you, arise.” The hope of the Resurrection is never absent from us.