Daily Gospel Reflection – The Commemoration of All Souls’ Day
November 2, 2023
The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls’ Day)
Gospel: Jn 6:37-40
Jesus said to the crowds:
“Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and I will not reject anyone who comes to me,
because I came down from heaven not to do my own will
but the will of the one who sent me.
And this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day.
For this is the will of my Father,
that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him
may have eternal life,
and I shall raise him on the last day.”
*United States Conference of Catholic
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus says that the Father promises eternal life for everyone who believes in the Son. Every human being is a subject of inestimable value, because he or she has been created by God and destined by God for eternal life.
When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well and promises her “water gushing up to eternal life,” it is evocative of what Aquinas means by creation: the presence of God always at work at the very roots of our being. Creation is not a once-and-for-all act of the essentially transcendent God but rather the ever-present and ever-new gift of being poured out from the divine source. What Aquinas implies is that the creature is a relationship to the energy of God, which is continually drawing it from nonbeing to being, making it new.
Once the soul has been transfigured, the only path that seems appealing is the one walked by Christ—that is to say, the path of radical self-offering, self-surrender. Fired by the God-consciousness, in touch with the divine source within us, drinking from the well of eternal life, we are inspired simply to pour ourselves out in love.
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