Believing In Angels Today

  Michaelmass, 2008

‘War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated.’

 + In nomine …

Those of you who were here yesterday for our feast of Dedication will have heard the Bishop decide to talk about angels instead. I’m going to go over some of the same ground, but hopefully from a slightly different angle. I want to look particularly at some of the problems which seem to come from believing in angels, and what difference believing in Christ makes to our view of angels.

          ‘Do you believe in angels?’ I was once rather caught out by that question from a not particularly religious friend in a pub. It wasn’t asked aggressively, just curiously. I suppose if I’m honest I hadn’t thought much about angels up to then. Of course I knew they appear in Scripture and Tradition, but they didn’t feature much in my own thoughts and prayers, so I felt a bit hesitant just saying yes. A few years worshipping in this Church has certainly helped to bring angels more to the forefront of my spiritual imagination! But I guess the other reason for my hesitation is that a lot of the people who talk about believing in angels seem, to be frank, a little bit crazy. Experiences of angels certainly are remarkably widespread, across cultures and religions, throughout history. And the interesting thing is that this doesn’t seem to be dying out. The interest in angels seems to be increasing rather than decreasing in our modern world, perhaps particularly amongst those who don’t hold to any traditional religious beliefs – just look at all the films and pop songs, let alone all the books in the mind-body-spirit section in most bookshops or the extraordinary stuff you can find on the internet... But that’s the problem for me. I’m afraid I tend to find all this stuff about getting to know your angel, or whatever, pretty whacky, up there with crystals and seances. I guess at the root of all this scepticism is the fact that most of us haven’t seen angels with our own eyes. Belief in angels requires us to stretch our imaginations and to trust the witness of other people. But this might not be such a bad thing! In the creed we say that we believe in the ‘Creator of all things, visible and invisible’. In the Bible angels are not visible in the usual way. Their normal state seems to be invisibility to us, only making themselves visible for specific purposes. Sometimes they appear in the usual form we know so well from Christmas cards with wings and light. Sometimes, like our statue here, they are wingless and look like ordinary humans. At other times they are frankly monstrous, like wheels of fire covered with eyes and with many heads. If, as the theologians say, angels are properly bodyless, pure spirit, then any appearance is just a concession to our limited vision.  Belief in angels is part of our belief in the invisible creation, part of believing that there is more to this world than the ordinary everyday stuff we can see and understand.  

          But there’s a bigger problem with believing in angels which someone brought up this year on our choir tour: where are they when you need them? If we believe in angels, why aren’t they popping up all the time to rescue the innocent from prison, preventing horrific accidents, making sure the good guys win? This is a real question. It seems particularly to undermine that image of the guardian angel, the idea that everyone has an angel allocated to look after them, familiar from all those slightly saccharine nineteenth century prints of children praying. This popular idea of guardian angels seems to have its origin in the gospel we heard today where Christ warns people against despising children because ‘their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.’ But Christ says this not to the children to assure them that nothing bad will happen to them, but rather as a warning to anyone who would harm them, that these children are precious to God. This brings us to a crucial difference between Christian beliefs about angels and a lot of the popular schmulz. Angels in the Bible are not superheroes to fix all our problems, they are not safety blankets to cling to, nor fantasy projections to serve our own interests and agendas. Sometimes they do rescue people from physical trouble, but just as often not. In the temptation in the wilderness Satan tries to seduce Christ with this view of angels when he asks him to jump off the pinnacle of the Temple. ‘Go on’ he says, ‘doesn’t scripture say his angels ‘will bear you up, you will not dash your foot against a stone’? Christ rejects this attitude to angels, and only then do they come and minister to him. Similarly, when it comes to his greater trial in Gethsemane, the disciples want to fight, and Christ rejects such a view of angels again, saying that he is not going to call armies of angels to his aid. Instead he has already received the consolation of the angel who gives him the strength for what he must do. In the Scriptures the role angels have in relation to us is simply that of messenger, what the word ‘angel’ means. They can open up any moment to the possibilities of heaven, to the presence of God, in good times and in bad. But if they serve anyone it is God, not our whims, like the pop angels. In themselves they are strange and alien, incomprehensible to our limited bodily natures, not tame pets. More than that, in Christian tradition angels are not simply emanations from God, nor heavenly mirrors of earthly things, they have their own real freedom. They may not die, but they are still finite and fallible. Like us, they can choose to turn towards God or away from him, which is why in Christian tradition we speak also of fallen angels as well as good ones. This view of the universe as caught up in a great spiritual conflict between the forces of good and evil, the vision of our epistle and all these images of St Michael slaying the dragon which fill this Church, seems to be something we share with many non-Christian views of angels. But once again there is a significant difference from the neo-Gnosticism popular with many. This is not a contest of equal forces with an unknown outcome; in the mythical language of our epistle, the dragon and his angels ‘were defeated. Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah.’ Christ’s victory on the cross, symbolised by Michael’s eviction of Satan, is our assurance of final victory over the evil in our world, visible and invisible. The forces of darkness have already been defeated, even if that victory remains hidden until it has worked itself out through history.

          Finally, it is crucial that this victory has been won, not by an angel, but by Christ, the God-Man. God does not finally take the form of an angel, he takes human flesh. So we need have no inferiority complex about our clumsy bodies and slow, drawn-out freedom. We are not called to become angels! This is the final difference from lots of the pop views of angels. As the author of the letter to the Hebrews put it: ‘to which of the angels did God ever say ‘You are my Son’?’ Christ is the true ladder between Heaven and Earth, worshipped by the angels who serve to bring us to him.

          So now if someone were to ask me that question ‘do you believe in angels?’ again, I think I could say a more confident yes. Angels are part of the mysterious depths of creation beyond our powers of comprehension; they’re not pets or solutions to all our problems, they have their own freedom, but ultimately they can bring us to Christ, who is the one who has conquered the forces of darkness and, beyond all the angels, really saves us.   

         In nomine …

AMEN.