KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 1 October
There was war in heaven.
Where does that come from? We have been looking at the accounts of creation in the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis which complement one another about the place of our humanity in the created order. We have seen that ‘adam’, meaning our humanity collectively speaking, is embedded in the whole order of creation, connected to every other aspect of the natural world, and yet, distinct and different by virtue of being made “in the image of God,” and as “the dust of the ground” into which God breathes his Spirit. The challenge lies in how we think what these things mean.
As we have noted, being made in the image of God counters a modern misreading of dominion. To be made in the image of God means to act in the image of God, to act in the way of divine dominion. What is that? It means to act with care and concern for everything in the created order as derived from God, “to till the ground,” as Genesis 2 puts it. Our “dominion” provides no warrant for our manipulation, abuse, and technocratic domination of the world. Instead we are called to care and respect for the world and for one another. But what if we deny or reject that idea? Therein lies the long, long story of sin and evil. It has to do with the denial of God and of our being made in God’s image.
The reading from Revelation about war in heaven belongs to the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels celebrated on September 29th. It has a particular significance for our school. The Fall term is properly known as Michaelmas Term as derived from the great Medieval universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. Angels in this sense belong to intellectual life. We are with the angels in our thinking and loving the good. The angels are pure intellectual, and non-material spiritual beings, the thoughts of God in creation, the invisible reasons for the visible things of creation. They belong to the spiritual landscape of the Scriptures of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions and to the intellectual world of Hellenic philosophy in its interaction with those traditions.
The angels teach us, Thomas Aquinas, known as the angelic doctor, says “by moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding”. But what are we to make of this reading? The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine is the last book of the Christian Scriptures. The imagery here looks back to the Genesis story of creation and the Fall. The story of the Fall, as we will see, is about how we separate ourselves from God, the world, and one another through the sin of disobedience and discover division, death and suffering. That is really about a denial of our being as made in the image of God. Genesis 2 offers the possibility of a way of beginning to make some sense of the negative side of our humanity. Not only is our humanity said to be made in God’s image, but it is only our humanity which is given a commandment by God in the paradise of creation. We are told not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day that you do you will die.” Wow. To be given a commandment implies rationality. There is more to us than just our instinctual drives and desires.
