THURSDAY OF THE TWENTY-FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 25, 2022
- Maria Knox
- Aug 25, 2022
- 3 min read
A Gospel according to MT 24:42-51
Jesus said to his disciples: “Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.
“Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant, whom the master has put in charge of his household to distribute to them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so. Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property. But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is long delayed,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eat and drink with drunkards, the servant’s master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
REFLECTION
"So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come."
In our contemporary and polite society, we try to be efficient in many things. One of them is estate planning. This is planning for when we get very sick and die.
We setup medical powers of attorney, DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) orders for the doctors in case of our demise. There are wills, trusts, and other preparations to unburden our loved ones. We feel prepared. We are ready for any contingency. Right?
Only if we have thought on the real contingency. This is, what am I going to tell Jesus the moment I see Him when I pass away from this world?
Did I spent time trying to find out what He wanted me to do, to be, in this earthly life?
Was I sincere about my pitfalls and deficiencies and asked Him, Mary and the Saints to help me work through them? Did I rather enjoy while I could? Did I waste time.
Of all the things we regret in this life, we regret the most those things we never got around to do. When I am finally before Jesus, will I regret not taking advantage of the Sacrament of Confession? Of Spiritual Direction? Of receiving Him in Holy Communion? On doing charitable acts towards those who could have benefited from them?
Our Patron, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, has many good reads on how to achieve sainthood. One focus of his advice is always prayer:
"Were you to ask what are the means of overcoming temptations, I would answer: The first means is prayer; the second is prayer; the third is prayer; and should you ask me a thousand times, I would repeat the same." ~ Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori
He also had great devotion to our Mother:
“Therefore, as St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, asserts, the archangel Gabriel called her full of grace: “Ave gratia plena;” because whilst to others, as the saint above mentioned remarks, limited grace is given, to Mary it was given in fulness. And thus it was ordered, as St. Basil attests, that in this way she might become the worthy mediatrix between God and men. For if the Virgin had not been full of divine grace, as St. Lawrence Justinian adds, how could she be the ladder of paradise, the advocate of the world, and the true mediatrix between God and men?” ~ St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, The Glories of Mary
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