Sunday, 29 September 2024
Angels
Feast of St. Michael & All Angels Eucharist – 29.ix.2024
7 War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, 8 but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. 9 The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
These words from today’s second reading – from the Book of Revelation – first captured my imagination as a child. It wasn’t about reading the words themselves – I hadn’t read the Book of the Revelation of St. John then, and I suspect that most people never get round to reading it for themselves. But the scene is depicted in Jacob Epstein’s great sculpture outside Coventry Cathedral. I saw it while on holiday visiting part of the family who lived in the Midlands. It's a huge sculpture made of bronze, standing 7.6 metres (25 feet) high and it’s intended to depict the victory of good over evil. St. Michael the Archangel stands with a huge spear in his hand, arms and legs spread out – and he stands above the bound figure of the horned devil lying supine. Satan lies defeated, bound in chains. The triumphant angel is all the more impressive for his huge wings with a span of 7 metres, almost as wide as the statue is high.
You can understand why the sculpture was commissioned. The Cathedral itself is dedicated to St. Michael, so the angel was an obvious subject. More than that it was a new sculpture put in place to mark the building of a new Cathedral, consecrated in 1962 alongside the ruins of the church which had been destroyed by Nazi bombs during the Second World War. So it was about the hope that good will finally defeat evil – a reference to the promise that God will beat down Satan under our feet, just as that bronze devil lies beneath the feet of St. Michael the Archangel.
The sculpture certainly made an impression on me – probably at the age of nine or ten. But nearly 60 years later I look at it again, and I read the words of scripture that we hear today – and I wonder. Satan is bound in chains, but Epstein’s devil is not dead – he’s still struggling to get up. Revelation tells us that Satan, “the deceiver of the whole world,” is thrown down – but thrown down to earth, and it doesn’t say that he’s totally vanquished here. And when I look up my own reference to the promise that God will beat down Satan under our feet, I find different translations of that Bible verse from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: that God will crush or defeat Satan, or as the King James Version puts it – that he will “bruise” him. The devil is cast down, but is still a force for evil in our world – defeated by God and his angels, but still a reality for us to grapple with in our day to day lives.
The triumphant angel in Epstein’s sculpture declares hope for the triumph of good in a world which so much needs it. But while the devil is put in chains just as Nazi Germany had been defeated, there’s always the threat that it may struggle free. Bruised - but not destroyed.
I’ve been thinking about this as the news from the Middle East becomes more and more horrific. Each side is fighting for what it considers right – and for the rights of its people. But the means used inflict ever more atrocities from the initial attacks by Hamas across the border with Israel, through the taking, torturing and killing of hostages – and then the reprisals in repeated bombings, invasion and occupation, the loss of homes in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon; and the deaths of more than 40,000 people in Gaza, and approaching 1,000 in each of the West Bank and Lebanon, and still more amongst the Israeli population. Each side demonises the other. The avowed intention of the Israeli government is to destroy Hamas and now Hezbollah – but even after laying waste almost an entire country the perceived evil still remains to be defeated. Even after targeting the users of enemy pagers and walkie talkies, the firing of thousands of missiles into Lebanon leaving so many more killed, wounded and homeless - and now the death of Hassan Nasrallah – the stated war aims of Israel seem just as far away from being achieved.
I can’t offer a way forward to solve the problems of the Middle East. I’ve lived in Jerusalem and heard bombs go off. I’ve known people living in Northern Israel who have had to shelter night after night from rockets fired from southern Lebanon. I’ve also known people who have endured discrimination and loss of their homes because they are the wrong race, seen people humiliated in checks by border police because they hold the wrong passport, and met with people – both Israeli and Palestinian – who have lost children to the violence inflicted indiscriminately by bullet and bomb.
So we need caution when we read words such as those in Revelation and try to apply them to our own situations. What do we mean by good and evil? How do we achieve the defeat of one by the other?
St. Michael the Archangel stands as an emblem for what is right – but fighting in the sense of violent conflict is not the way to achieve it. And we should be careful in what we say about angels. Important that we recognise the place they hold in telling us of our relationship with God, but avoiding sentimentality.
Say the word “Angels” – and I’ll bet that a lot of people will think of the Robbie Williams song:
When I'm feeling weak
And my pain walks down a one-way street
I look above
And I know I'll always be blessed with love
And as the feeling grows
She brings flesh to my bones
And when love is dead
I'm loving angels instead
And through it all she offers me protection
A lot of love and affection, whether I'm right or wrong
And down the waterfall, wherever it may take me
I know that life won't break me
When I come to call, she won't forsake me
I'm loving angels instead
Maybe that’s what people think Guardian Angels are about – and there’s a real hope that life shouldn’t get us down, that there’s something might help us break out of all that holds us back, gives us strength when we need it. But that something is love – and the people who can show us that love.
The other song that came to mind for me is by the Eurhythmics:
No one on earth could feel like this
I'm thrown and overflown with bliss
There must be an angel
Playing with my heart, yeah
I walk into an empty room
And suddenly my heart goes boom
It's an orchestra of angels
And they're playing with my heart, yeah
Annie Lennox sings it wonderfully, but we don’t need an orchestra of angels to play with our hearts. We need hearts that recognise how love can open us to something beyond our day-to-day preoccupations. Hearts are not to be played with. But when we recognise that love is at work, then that may open us to something bigger than we are – it may open us to God and his purpose.
And that’s what we find in our First Reading and today’s Gospel. They use almost exactly the same words: a ladder set up to heaven in the vision given to Jacob, “and the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it;” and Jesus’ promise to Nathanael – “I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Angels when we see them at work in the Bible are those creatures that remind us of our connection with God and with a world beyond human sight. The word angel translates as “messenger.” What’s the message or question we need to hear? That’s going to depend on who we are but should always be something that opens us to the deeper mystery of God. When angels appear something new is revealed about our relationship to God. It’s not that our questions are given definitive answers. It is about God’s initiative as he reaches out to us.
The danger of what we take from today’s reading about St. Michael in the Book of Revelation is that we think we can sort things out in some sort of fight between good and evil. It’s more complex than that. Abraham finds his outlook changed by three strangers who come to him to share a meal and then go off leaving him with God’s purpose still fully to be revealed – they are his angels. Another angel will come to hold back his hand from using a knife in violence – and to declare that there is another way. The angel Raphael comes to bring healing to Tobit in the midst of a bizarre journey where human persistence and love are the outcome.
And most importantly the Archangel Gabriel will come to Mary to say that she will be the Mother of God’s Son. “How can this be?” - Mary will reply. The message she receives will take nine months of pregnancy and then a lifetime to work out. But the point is in that first dialogue. The angel comes. Heaven speaks to humanity but then the human responds. How will God speak to us? What will we reply? The vision we are given is the truth of that ladder set up between heaven and earth where the angels ascend and descend – and by which we are connected to God and his purpose.
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