Memorial of the Guardian Angels
All week we have been hearing the familiar story of Job—the one who loses everything and calls upon God for answers. God’s answer to Job is a three chapter long assertion of His power over everything, which illustrates how God’s ways are not the ways of humans. In today’s first reading we see Job’s response to God’s speech. Let us note the profound humility with which Job responds to God.
Confronted with the utter majesty of God, Job realizes that he does not know and cannot do all that God knows and does, therefore he respectfully withdraws his challenges to God (Jb 42:2-6). Job recognizes his ultimate dependence upon God for everything, even his very being.
By and large when we think about dependence as a culture, we think of it as a negative: it’s not good to be dependent upon one’s parents, one’s spouse, one’s community…etc. Rather, we extol independence as among our chief societal virtues (for an example of this, one only need see the comments on this website in response to Fr. Satish’s homily on 19 September). Job sees that he cannot even comprehend the extent of his dependence upon God!!! If all of us—no matter how hard we work—are ultimately radically dependent upon God, aren’t we called all the more radically to lay down our lives for others as did Christ on the cross? Aren’t we all completely dependent upon God for everything we have, everything we do, and everything we offer? Aren’t we called to forget about the amount of work that I put in and to fight for a preferential option for the poor? Now that’s a challenge!
In today’s gospel, the disciples, trying to sort out who’s the greatest (which seems to have been something of a pastime of theirs!), approach Jesus with this question. Jesus points to a child. A child is the greatest in the kingdom. This is not a sentimental move by Jesus, but rather a starkly challenging one. Children are utterly dependent upon their parents and on society. They couldn’t survive without being feed, taught, etc. But especially in Jesus’ context, along with women, children were considered to be a lower class of people in Jesus’ day. They were not counted among the powerful and certainly not among those who would rule a kingdom. They were, rather, without understanding and needed much discipline. A scholar who spends time with children wastes his time and dulls his mind. Yet, Jesus says that unless the disciples humble themselves—become like children—they will not enter the kingdom (Mt 18: 3-4). This fits with Jesus’ entire ministry of exalting the lowly and humbling the exalted. Jesus disrupts our expectations of who the powerful are. Are we powerful because of our hard work? Or does everyone stand in utter dependence upon God?
Let us pray today to our guardian angels, who are constantly interceding for us, that we might be free of the curse of measuring our merits and evaluating our greatness in order to become like humble children, understanding our utter dependence on God.
- Tim Gabrielli