A Great Cloud of Witnesses

Tomorrow is All Saints Day, when the church remembers and pays tribute to its spiritual ancestors.

In Hebrews 12 they are called “a cloud of witnesses”, a great throng that grows larger every day and that provides huge motivation for us who are still alive and struggling to finish our race.

Hallowe’en is the secular precursor where kids dress up to impersonate (or scare off) the ghosts of the departed - or simply to play make-believe for a night.

I’ve been puzzling over why the Biblical writer uses the water metaphor of a cloud to describe this vast collection of the saints. I think the main idea is the density of this throng. They may be ‘in the heavens’, departed from earth, but they’re very real and they over-shadow the church on earth. They represent the collective memory of God's faithful people throughout history on earth and their stories rain down upon the living. Like the cloud of God’s presence that guided Israel in the desert, this ‘cloud of witnesses’ bears testimony to God’s faithfulness in history. They provide a substantial store of voices and experience that believers today can draw on for insight and encouragement.

At the same time, the crowd of human beings living today on our planet is also growing daily. Today, October 31, marks a milestone as the global population passed the 7 billion mark. Danica Camacho, born at midnight Sunday night in the Philipines is one of the representatives of this milestone event. The river of humanity grows deeper and wider with every passing day and their voices and stories are also vast and varied. And as the news today reminds us, this river is increasingly an urban river which adds to the complexity of life for everyone on the planet.

I'm pondering today how might these two clusters of names and faces might affect each other.

ImageSource
All Saints - Fra Angelica
Cloud - Unknown
Mother and Baby - .(AP Photo/Erik De Castro, Pool)