Praise be Jesus Christ.
Carissima Famiglia.
“Blessed are those whose help is in the God of Jacob”.
Not the God of the philosophers, as Pascal would say, not the indifferent God who just clicks the world on and lets it go on its merry way without any involvement. Rather, the God of Jacob who wrestled with Jacob, the God of Jacob who journeyed with Jacob’s family, who named him ‘Israel’, the God who became part of the family of Israel, and created a new Israel, you and I, to be the kingdom of God, and to be scribes in that kingdom.
Jesus told us today, “every scribe who has been trained in the kingdom of heaven is like a master of his household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”(Mat. 13:52), beauty ever ancient and ever new. The love of God, so great that He gives to each of us the gift of a guardian angel. Think of that. You and I, each of us, have this angelic being as our guard. Remember, angels are not like people. You can say, ‘there is group of people that are here” because we all share certain traits that make us people . You couldn’t say that about angels by looking at them or encountering them, because every angel is an utterly unique being of its own, unlike anything else. The ranks of angels are occupied by all these amazing beings, beings of spirit and service to God. And God asked one of these, a special angel, ‘will you take care of Nicole?’ And that angel said ‘yes’, and its whole being is about caring for you, Nicole. Isn’t that amazing? And that’s part of the “treasure new and old” that we bring out: that an angel has been at work in our lives too, if we let it.
Listen to this treasure: “So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”(Mat. 13:49) Already the judgment “at the end of the ages” is met daily: when we make our examination of conscience before we go to sleep our guardian angel is at work sifting out the bad and the good, and we from this we meet the learning that makes us “scribes of the kingdom”. Also come to the Eucharist we meet this “sifting.” For me the silent prayer a priest makes before I consume the Eucharist is a “purgatory” prayer: “ “Lord Jesus Christ, may the receiving of your Body and Blood not be for me judgment and condemnation, but in your loving mercy be for me protection in mind and body and a healing remedy.”.
What an awesome God we meet here who comes to us meet us. It is a meeting that really convicts us of our utter insufficiency, our utter unworthiness of such a gift. And our guardian angel is the one who constantly tell us, ‘Do not be afraid.’ The one who is sifting us now will be the one who is sifting us at the end of the ages.
So, scribes of the kingdom, let us rejoice and bring our experiences, the stories of our own healing, the stories of the way in which the guardian angel has been at work sifting and teaching us, not just protecting us when we let it. So often we do not recognize this. But at the end of our lives we well be able to see how many things our guardian angel has done for us in God’s plan.
Even now, in this moment of judgment as we come before the Lord, let us allow our guardian angel, to take from us what is not is evil … and to leave us as “households” that look like the chalices on the altar. Beautiful chalices. Good households that are good, not as good as they can be, but always open to He who is beyond Goodness, Jesus.
Thank you, guardian angels.
Let us be holy. Let us be saints.