Reading Excerpts from the Mass
Wisdom 18:6-9 The night of The Passover was known beforehand to our fathers, that, with sure knowledge of the oaths in which they put their faith, they might have courage. Your people awaited the salvation of the just and the destruction of their foes. For when you punished our adversaries, in this you glorified us whom you had summoned.
Responsorial Psalm 33:1, 12, 18-19 R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Exult, you just, in the LORD; praise from the upright is fitting. Blessed the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he has chosen for his own inheritance.\ See, the eyes of the LORD are upon those who fear him, upon those who hope for his kindness, to deliver them.
Gospel Luke 12 Be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them. And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.
Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
Angels On the Job and Watching over me.
Let us talk about angels today and the good, holy work they do for us. Let us not take their assistance lightly. We need their presence and we ought to ask God to provide us certain help by them. “Ask and you shall receive” say the Word. While God provides us regular ongoing help to in these heavenly beings, it is recommended to petition His certain help for more—for defense and protection, for comfort and strength, for guidance and for inspiration to act lovingly.
I go to a preaching theme today about angels because I see them in the backdrop of our Scriptures. The Gospel in Luke 12 announces to us that the Lord will come again in Glory, with His hopes that we will be living alertly in His Church, as good and faithful servants. Luke 12 says that “at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
Jesus will be coming on the clouds, as Scripture says. That doesn’t mean it will be a cloudy night of cumulus or cirrostratus types in the sky, but that the presence of so many angels with the Returning Christ will appear as to be many moving clouds. We also know then how an angel will blow the trumpet blast of announcement. Bible verses says this in Matthew 26:64, Revelation 1:7 and in 1st Thessalonians 4:16-17.
Angels are all about the authority and victory of The Lord. They were there at Christ’ Rising and Ascending. One even encouraged Jesus in the Garden of Gethsename, helping Him to carry out His mission. This angel was sent by the Father Himself. Angels are also there for you to help you live out your vocation. They are here serving you in this very moment, for whenever the Holy Mass is taking place, and we start borrowing the angels songs of Heaven, like in our Gloria and Holy Holy ones, they come and partake in our heralding the Lord of Lords, and Great High Lamb of God, Jesus. See Revelation 4:8-11. Here in Mass is when and where you will encounter the most angelic help, but I mean to encourage you that they are on your pilgrim journey in many other places.
The opening reading from the Book of Wisdom give words for people to see where and when they are—they verses sum up words to a post-exile people who are back in Jerusalem vicinity. God has delivered them back home. It’s the last phase of waiting for the Jews for their Messiah to come, and these poor-in-spirit people will be rewarded for the vigil watch. The Son of God comes! Like the Gospel that had said ‘blessed are the servants waiting in the late watch’—the Wisdom writer of these last Old Testament words of advice says ‘you people awaited the salvation of the just back in the original Passover days, and so will we wait and see You at work.’
I admit that one’s first hand hearing of today’s reading might not have excited you, as it sounds like just a wordy remembrance, but Wisdom 18 is actually predicting that God will glorify the people who have waited upon Him.
He’ll glorify them.
In application to ourselves, who faithfully await the Lord’s Second Coming, God is saying that He will glorify the people, like you, and deliver you into Glory and Heaven. Yeah, that’s all!
Angels will be involved in our being delivered to God. It’s a promise hiding in the end of the Lord’s Prayer, in its last petition for God to “deliver us from evil. Amen. “For Yours’ O God is the kingdom, power and glory forever! We want to have a “passover,” or better said, we want to pass into the heavenlies for our ultimate destination.
These Wisdom Scriptures from the Bible today has them refer back to the original Night of Passover, when those Exodus people put faith in God, and thus, the Lord’s Angels went about executing God’s commands. The Hebrews found salvation and deliverance with much unseen power happening around them. They not only saw God spare them from Pharoah’s plan to take out all of their first born, but saw the reverse of the curse by God’s angels giving the enemy that same end—as an Angel walks through the land to bring it about—the death of Egyptians’ sons. Pharoah gets a big rebuke: God’s enemies do not deal well with opposing Him. The Jews had put the blood of the lamb on their doorpost, following God’s directions, to signify their identity as who would not receive death—but whom the angel would pass over. Then later at the Red Sea, angels were at work holding back the waters for a pass-through passageway for the Jews. Angels then let it fall back upon the chariots and charioteers to drown and vanquish those pursuing them. Thus, the Jews had a successful escape—with lots of unseen help—from angels.
I would want you to know that you and I have a sign of the blood of the Lamb put upon us by our holy communion with Jesus. Angels see it as our clear sign of belonging to God. Death will not come to us, not to our souls, because we’re born anew already. Do you catch on to that amazing parallel?
You and I will have our own deliverance story of what the angels are providing us, though so much remains unseen, going on in a realm that the eye does not behold.
Speaking of eyes, God uses His angels to have eyes on us. Today’s Psalm 33 says that God “has His eyes upon those who fear the Lord.” We praise God for His watchful service of angels. Nothing is missed by God; all will be in His record. Angels do record what they see—better than any security system today—even compared to the Pentagon’s eyes of technology. It will bring you reward in the end, and the punishment upon your enemies and enemies of God. (Via angels!)
Angels travel along with us, you know. I think of the Book of Tobit as a fine example of it. Do you recall the dire need of the family in that story? How did God help them? He sent Raphael the Archangel to assist the son Tobias in his big task. Not only did Tobias succeed in it, but he also came back with a wife, Sarah, and a cure ointment for his father’s blindness. The Angel helped it all come about. Only at the story’s end does Tobit, Tobias and all realize how this big strong body-guard guy that joined Tobias happened to be an angel servant of the Lord, and Raphael was on the job for them.
Some may think such things are make-believe tales and not real accounts. Yet people have angelic stories to tell in our modern times. I can recall a member of the Barry/Smith family telling his story, of while being in the military on a near-impossible mission for survival, that he had seen a red light leading him out of danger to safety. It’s a real story in our family. He claims the light was an angel. When I saw a recent ‘Mission Impossible” movie, it showed the hero=person, playing by actor Tom Cruise, as wearing an ear piece and being helped by a person seeing his situation by satellite, and leading him out of the building past those persons who wanted to get him dead. Nice idea in a movie, but in real life, an angel comes much more handy for a person who is praying to God for deliverance.
Our Responsorial at Mass is the strong Psalm 33 which celebrates how the angels serve God by helping us to practice praise to God. “Praise from the upright is fitting,” says the Psalmist—telling us that God will use angels to help us “exult in The Lord.” Have the angels of God helped you to exult and praise The Lord? Praise is one of your mightiest prayer weapons. People of faith know this well, and so they use it. The Word says “God inhabits those who praise Him.” Psalm 22:3.
Psalm 33 was a rally prayer for the nation of Israel to become a blessed nation, for her faith in God. For America, we really want to live out this Psalm 33, too. Angels help us to realize our vocation of being children of God, so as to help this nation in living in godly ways. “Blessed the nation whose God is the Lord.” God has sent many angels among us for having us live in great witnesses of faith, hope and love. We get inspiration from these holy friends of God. That help is going on in 2025. Do you notice it? Do you notice what help our nation is getting spiritually—for the faithful ones?
Let’s finish this survey by remembering the whole gamut of what angels provide us, as given by God to you and me, or us.
Angels are involved in comforting us, having us find healing, leading us to see holy connections and signs and divine instances for us to be on the Straight and Narrow Way of the Lord.
Angels protect us. Good angels work to beat away the fallen angels and have us win in unseen battles. Angels watch over us while we sleep.
Angels are here in Holy Mass in assembly to sing the Holy, Holy, Holy with us in excitement for our encounter with God. It’s a lot of help we get, isn’t it? Think about it today. It was a message underneath all the Scripture passages today.
To our guardian angel we pray: Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.