By Fr. Mark Cyza
Cathedral of the Risen Christ, Lincoln
Years ago, my dad was working at the sandpit. He was getting down from the loader and caught his leg on a piece of metal near where it was parked. He cut his leg pretty badly. The sandpit was only a short distance from our house, so Dad came back home. My mom is a nurse, and she took one look at him and said something like, “Ron, what did you do?”
We were outside, so they got a garden hose and Mom started cleaning the wound. She got the bleeding stopped and could see pretty quickly that he was going to need stitches. So she took him to the emergency room, they stitched him up, and eventually everything was fine.
But there was one thing they could not fix: his jeans. The blood had soaked in and dried. Mom tried to clean them, but even a nurse couldn’t get that stain out. Eventually she threw them away. That’s what blood does. It stains.
Which is why the image from the Book of Revelation, read at Mass on All Saints Day, is so strange. John sees an enormous crowd standing before the throne of God, clothed in white robes. When he asks who they are, he’s told:
“These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” They washed their robes in blood, and the robes came out white.
Blood stains, but the blood of Jesus cleanses.
We tend to picture saints as people who kept themselves spotless, who got through life without struggle or sin or weakness. Revelation doesn’t say that. It makes clear their robes needed washing. The saints are the ones who let the grace of Jesus Christ cleanse them, heal them, forgive them, and make them new.
That’s why the Lamb matters. Jesus is the Lamb because he gives his life for us. His blood is poured out for us.
What looks like defeat turns out to be victory, and what looks like death turns out to be life. The blood that should stain is the very thing that makes clean. It doesn’t ruin the garment. It restores it.
I think that’s why this reading belongs on All Saints Day. The saints aren’t standing before the throne pointing to themselves. They’re standing before the Lamb, and their whole existence says, “Look what he has done.” They came through suffering and temptation, through failure and grief, through sin and repentance, and now they stand there in white because they received mercy.
That’s good news for us. If sainthood depended on never being wounded or never making a mess of things, very few of us would have much hope. But the ones standing before God are the ones who have been washed.
So the question isn’t whether I’ve kept my robe clean. It’s whether I’ll let Christ wash it. Will I bring him my sins, my wounds, my failures, the things I’m ashamed of, the places where I’ve fallen? And will I trust that his mercy is stronger than the stain?
I once anointed a woman just before she died. She had been away from the Church since her parents separated when she was in middle school. But she had gone to Catholic school, and she remembered a nun telling her that if someone was dying, she should call a priest. So she did. She went to confession, received the anointing and Communion, and a short time later she died, washed clean, in the arms of Jesus.
My mom, a nurse, could clean my dad’s wound and yet never get the blood out of those jeans. The blood of the Lamb takes what is stained and makes it white.
That’s a good way to enter November. This is the month of All Souls, when the Church asks us to pray for the dead, trusting that Christ’s mercy is stronger than death and can finally bring them into God’s presence. Pray for them by name. Visit a cemetery. Have a Mass offered.
And with Advent coming Nov. 29, turn the question on yourself. What in me still needs to be washed? What sin needs to be confessed? What relationship needs mercy?
Holiness is not about being perfect. It’s about allowing and inviting Jesus to continue to wash the areas of our life that are not.
So pray for the dead. Go to confession. Make peace where you can.
The saints are not the spotless. They are the washed.
Washed in the blood of the Lamb.
