GOSPEL REFLECTION, FRIDAY, 26TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME, 2 OCTOBER 2026, THE HOLY GUARDIAN ANGELS

Matthew 18:1-5, 10:  If we ponder the text of today’s gospel, we cannot avoid crucial words in verse 3: “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  We have all heard many homilies that focus not so much on the word change as on the word children and therefore take the text to be all about the very young.  But the text is about conversion.  Conversion from what?  It means conversion from the way of understanding and interacting with each other in terms of earthly society, for earthly society as it is cannot be the Kingdom.

Jesus is meeting with his disciples alone, without surrounding crowds.  The way they interact with each other and with Jesus is different from the way that Jesus and the crowds interact.  The disciples on this occasion ask Jesus, “who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven” (v. 3).  They asked such a question as if their understanding of the Kingdom was in like worldly society, based on prestige, privilege, status, and the acquisition of power.  Jesus’ reply is that they must CHANGE from that understanding.  To illustrate his point he called a young person to him and declared they must become instead people like this  -- HUMBLE.  What is it to be humble?  In a sense it is to be a nobody, an insignificant person, much like everyone else in the Kingdom, although it is not at all that way in worldly society in its struggle for prestige and power.  To be humble like a child is to acknowledge one’s dependence, in this case dependence on the Heavenly Father.  It is to have a very grounded sense of who one is in the Kingdom because worldly society is not at all like that.  I say grounded because the words ‘humble, humility’ are related to the word for receptive, fertile earth, or ‘HUMUS.’  We are to change, converted, in our ways of understanding and interacting from worldly ways to the ways of the Kingdom.  To be spiritually grounded in the Kingdom way is to have a realistic understanding of just who we really are in relation to the divine and to each other.  That is, beyond all illusion and self-deception or self-aggrandizement, beyond worldly delusion and that chronic self-concern which is the root of sin, of estrangement from God and each other.