| IX. Choir | 30 July |
|---|---|
| “The paymaster of God” | Ingebord |
A silent angel with a weighty task stands as our intercessor before God’s Throne today,
Saint Johaim,
the Paymaster of God. He is an angel of the ninth choir assigned to Saint Geburah, the sixth of the Twelve Angels of Word and Answer, who carries justice into the building of all creation.
Many years ago, Saint Johaim was depicted in a picture; he stood in front of a large cathedral and paid the workers who had finished their work. The cathedral was the Holy Church, and the workers who finished their work were the ones who went home to God. At that time he paid out with large nails, sharp as the thorns of the Lord’s Crown of Thorns and large as the nails of the Cross on Golgotha. There was a deep and timeless meaning in this symbol, that God’s love pays with His values and not with ours. If we ask today why the reward of so many honest labours and righteous deeds is really only paid by the Lord with the Nails of the Cross, it is the Heart of Our Lord and the Heart of our Mother that gives us the answer. For love sees much further than the end of our lives, it sees our reward in eternity, and like an ambitious mother, like the mother of Zebedee’s two sons, it seeks to bring us as high as possible in the payment of our reward in eternity.
How much the Heart of the Lord may have beaten in love for His Mother, and yet Her love on earth remained outwardly unanswered and without reward. How much the Mother’s Heart may have been moved by human feelings, so that the burden imposed on Her Child would not become too overwhelming—feelings of longing for Her Child, of defence of Her Child—and yet the Mother’s Heart passed this most difficult of all tests of a mother. She did not lift a finger for Her Child from the Mount of Olives to Golgotha. She stood upright under the Cross. She silently stepped back into the darkness in the first years and decades of the young Church. She led the way for us on the path we have to take in following Christ, knowing that God’s reward is in eternity.
But this silent angel also tells us something else: God not only rewards the good with eternal values, God also reckons to us what was bad in our work: our negligence, laxity, malice and falsehood. Do we also want God to punish us with eternal values? There is no use in burying one’s head in the sand… the paymaster is as certain at the end of our life’s work as evening is after day. Let us think about this and act accordingly, asking for God’s justice in time, that His love may be ours in eternity.
Prayer: O heavenly Paymaster, Saint Johaim, we are never worthy of a reward, but let us bring the merits of Our Lord’s Blood and Our Mother’s intercession to the heavenly settlement, that we may find mercy. Amen.