by CCW | 30 September 2012 14:19
It is hard enough to contemplate the realities of hell on earth let alone to consider war in heaven. Just last Sunday we had the spectacle of the grieving widow and the sorrowing mother, images which in our day are often about the tragic loss of sons and husbands in the theatres of wars all over our war-torn and weary world. Sadly, not even Sunday Schools are safe as the reports this morning from Nairobi, Kenya, indicate. Only the compassion of Christ, it seems, can speak to such hard and harsh realities if anything can.
These harsh realities belong to an ancient understanding about the disorders of our humanity. They recall us to the story of Cain and Abel, the classic story of the first murder, the murder of a brother, fratricide, that arises out of resentment and envy, we might say, at a benefit that another has received. And so begins the long sorry tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. The point of the story is that we are in it. Have you thought or said about someone, particularly a sibling, “I hate you!” or worse, “I’ll kill you”? At the very least such things belong to our thoughts and words. I hope not our deeds! The moral point is simple and clear. If looks could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers! In the ancient biblical story, God’s challenging question, “Where is your brother?” speaks to Cain’s conscience which he tries to deny by the age-old phrase, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God reminds him and us, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
Nothing, after all, can be hidden from the sight of God. “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid …” We deceive only ourselves.
But angels? War in heaven? What does any of this have to do with Cain and Abel? The point is already there implicitly in the ancient Genesis story. It is simply this. The struggles between good and evil are cosmic in scope and they are inescapably spiritual struggles with which all spiritual creatures contend.
Angels are simply part and parcel of the biblical and spiritual landscape for Jews, Christians and Muslims. They remind us of that larger company of the spirit in which we find ourselves, if only we would see with the eyes of the soul. It is a point which our liturgy makes continually. “Therefore with angels and archangels and with the whole company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy holy name.” We are at one with the angels in prayer and praise. Their presence is an unmistakable feature of the biblical landscape and speaks to our being as spiritual creatures too, creatures who know and love.
The angels, to speak theologically, are the invisible reasons for the visible things of this world, the thoughts of God in motion, as it were, the intellectual and spiritual principles of reality. With respect to prayer, the angels lift our thoughts to God and bring the thoughts of God to us. Our prayers ascend on angels’ wings, we might say.
What can we learn from angels? It was a question Thomas Aquinas asked in 1257 at the University of Paris. “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). There is a wonderful clarity to his argument by which he shows that the angels can indeed teach us, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”.
Perhaps, then, the Angels may help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, the specter of civil wars and the ominous threat of wars between nations, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism or the machinations of political ignorance and hubris, the chest-beating and sabre-rattling of nations? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know?
“There was war in heaven,” we are told. There is the constant struggle between good and evil in our souls and in our communities; these are spiritual struggles. But “Michael and his angels fought the dragon and the dragon prevailed not.” The ancient serpent, the devil, the principle of all that opposes the goodness and the truth of God is overthrown. “There was war in heaven,” not there is. We are saved by grammar! But on earth, that is another matter, a matter of our being willing to will the reconciliation between God and man. And that is neither by ourselves, nor even by the help of angels alone, but only by “the blood of the Lamb,” the image of Christ in his sacrifice for us.
The angels lift us up to the contemplation of heavenly things. But they also descend to assist us in the service of God in earthly things. It is not just clarity of mind but also charity of heart that comes with the help of angels. Is that not, perhaps, the burden of St. Matthew’s gospel lesson? “Take heed that ye despise not the least of these little ones,” Jesus says, meaning that we are not to be the obstacles in the way of the ascent of souls to God, especially the souls in our charge. We are wonderfully reminded that “in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”
We are inescapably part of a larger community of spirit, a community of angels and men, which demands certain responsibilities of us in acts of charity and service everywhere in the world, from the troubled world of the Middle East to the violence in our own communities and in our own hearts. The angels, in short, help us to think more profoundly about the meaning and nature of our humanity both in its truth and its confusion. They think with us by “moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding,” reminding us of redemption and the truth of our humanity.
In the Gospel story for Trinity XVII, Jesus convicts the pride and presumption of the Pharisees who are watching him critically. He tells a parable about those who are invited to a feast on the Sabbath. Noting the presumption of those who “chose out the chief seats,” he advises the contrary so that you can be called up, not down. “Friend, go up higher.” Sometimes the struggles of good and evil reveal themselves in the little things of our lives. Our actions reveal our pride and presumption leading to a fall, and to shame and embarrassment. We are being called to go up higher but only through humility and grace, not through our pride and presumption. The angels belong to that idea of being called up higher through sacrifice and service.
But when we dismiss the angels from our company and our discourse, we find ourselves in the wasteland of modernity, forgetting the needful things which belong ultimately to our truth and dignity. T.S. Eliot captures this prophetically and poetically.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
We have forgotten, he says, “the way to the Temple” (Choruses from “The Rock”). On this “Back to Church Sunday” in our culture, an ecumenical venture in our communities, we are being recalled to our spiritual roots. The mercy is that there is a Church to come back to!
The angels help us to think about what it means to be human. They recall us to that larger spiritual community of rational souls and intellectual beings. They help us to learn that, in the face of the world’s troubles, the power of the good is always greater than the forces of evil. “There was war,” even “in heaven,” to teach us that great truth, the truth of God’s ultimate victory which is ever there for us to will in our lives.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII/Michaelmas (transf.)
September 30th, 2012
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