This great celebration of All Saints has a rich and beautiful tradition within the Church. It honours those who have died, it serves to remind us that we are part of the wider communion of God’s holy people, and it affirms our faith in God’s loving fidelity to life. There’s no doubt about the importance of Jesus’ Beatitudes as far as Matthew  is concerned. It is the overture to the first of the five discourses that he gives to Jesus in memory of the five books of the Torah. The Beatitudes are steeped in the tradition that Jesus absorbed from his family and townsfolk as he grew up. At the same time they open out on to a new future. Past wisdom and future promise combine in these paradoxical sayings whose meaning we can never exhaust.