The Saints Are the Fruit of Pentecost
A Reflection on The First Sunday after Pentecost – Feast of All Saints
First Sunday after Pentecost – (Hebrews §330 (11:33-12:2a) / Saint Matthew §38 (10:32-33, 37-38; 19:27-30)).
Beloved in Christ,
The Sunday immediately following Pentecost is dedicated to All Saints, an ancient and universal arrangement of the Holy Church. We might scarcely pause to ask why, yet the reason touches the very heart of our Faith.
As we spoke of last week, for us Pentecost is not the mere recalling to mind of tongues of fire, rushing wind, and the miracle of speaking in tongues. Rather, it is the revelation and celebration of God’s continuing and eternal purpose for mankind. The Holy Spirit descends upon weak, fearful, and sinful men and He transforms them into saints. For this cause the Feast of All Saints follows at once upon Pentecost. If Pentecost is the sowing of the divine Seed, All Saints is the showing forth of the harvest.
The saints are precisely what the Holy Spirit accomplishes in a human life when that life is wholly yielded to Him.
The Epistle for this day sets before our eyes a magnificent catalog of the righteous: men and women who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, and out of weakness were made strong. Others again endured mockery, scourgings, bonds, imprisonment, stoning, sawn asunder, temptation, and death by sword. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
Note that the Apostle makes no division between “successful” saints and “unsuccessful” ones. He draws no line between outward victors and apparent victims. All are joined in one glorious company by a single testimony: “All these being approved by the testimony of faith.“ Some triumphed outwardly; others seemed utterly defeated before the eyes of the world. Yet all were well-pleasing to God because all remained faithful unto the end.
This is a word of life for our own darkened age. Modern man, laboring under the lengthening shadows of Bolshevik and liberal ruin, measures everything by wealth, popularity, influence, comfort, and earthly recognition. The saints measure by one standard alone: Was I faithful to Christ? The martyr before his executioners may appear crushed; the confessor languishing in prison may seem forgotten; the mother or father laboring unseen in the home, or the monk in obscure obedience, may look to the world as though they accomplished nothing. Yet of such the Apostle declares with divine authority: “Of whom the world was not worthy.“
What a fearful and wondrous reversal! The world presumes to judge the saints. The Apostle turns the judgment back upon the world itself. It is not the saints who must justify their lives before this passing age, but this age that stands unworthy before the saints.
The Holy Gospel confirms the same truth with the words of the Lord Himself: “Every one therefore that shall confess Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father Who is in heaven.“ The saints are those who confessed Christ: some before kings and tribunals, some before raging mobs and hostile powers, others quietly in their homes, workshops, fields, and monasteries, bearing their daily cross with patience. Some preached to multitudes; others simply remained faithful in their daily duty, day after day. All became saints because all belonged wholly to Christ.
This feast teaches us something too often forgotten in our scattered times: the saints are not relics of a distant golden age, nor are they rare exceptions granted only to the extraordinary. They are the very purpose for which the Church exists. Too many would reduce Christianity to moral advice, social programs, cultural nostalgia, ethnic custom, or mere escape from punishment. But the Church of Christ exists for something infinitely greater.
The Father sends the Son; the Son sends the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit sanctifies the faithful. The fruit is sainthood.
This is why the Church rejoices today not only in the glorious names that fill the calendar, the apostles, martyrs, hierarchs, and venerable ones known to all, but also in the vast multitude of hidden saints known only to God: faithful mothers and fathers raising children in the fear of God amid a hostile world, laborers and widows, simple peasants and soldiers, priests laboring in poverty, and monastics, men and women, preserving the ancient piety against every innovation. Their names may never be inscribed on earthly scrolls, but they are written forever in the Book of Life.
The Feast of All Saints is therefore a radiant revelation of our own calling and future. The saints show us what man becomes when he surrenders completely to the grace of God.
And so the Apostle exhorts us:
“Therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over our head, laying aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us: looking on Jesus, the author and finisher of faith.“
The saints do not point to themselves. Their lives are not monuments to human achievement, but living signposts directing us to Christ. The same Holy Spirit Who descended at Pentecost descended upon them. The same Lord Who sustained them sustains us today. The same grace that made them saints is offered freely to every soul that will receive it.
So, indeed, Pentecost is not over. Its fruits continue to appear wherever men and women cast off the vanities of this age and yield themselves wholly to God. And among all those fruits, the greatest and most precious are the saints.
May their holy intercessions strengthen us, and may we, by the mercy of God, be numbered among them in the Kingdom that has no end.
7 June 2026