Thought for the week

In his letter to the Corinthian church Paul addresses the believers as those who are ‘called to be saints’. What does it mean to be a saint? We think of saints as people who live extraordinary lives, those who are unusually ‘holy’. The Roman Catholic Church requires two verified miracles before someone is even considered (they also need to have died!). Yet Paul suggests that all the believers are ‘saints’ in some sense. The word itself, literally, refers to the quality of something which can be brought near to God. Something which is holy enough to be brought into the presence of God without being destroyed.
This kind of saintly holiness is certainly something to aim for. Yet one suspects that even those sainted by the church would not have been holy enough for that. We are saints – holy enough to draw near to God – not because we have been really well-behaved, but because we trust in Christ.