Angel of Justice
A Reading from the Prophet Daniel:
At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
A Reading from the Revelation of St John:
And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. 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.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Monotheism and polytheism are not nearly so different as we are prone to pretend. Almost all religions share a basic broad cosmology, in which there are a plethora of spirits, which some traditions call gods and other traditions call angels. These are beings who are greater than we are. They are older, wiser, faster, stronger, usually immortal, and yet—they have limits. They have flaws.
Early on, such gods were typically understood as physical beings, with bodies and clothing and food and lusts. But as humanity deepens in faith, as our spirituality becomes more sophisticated, gods and angels are seen to be “bodiless powers”. We stop thinking of them as having perfect forms—like ours, only better—and come to understand them as perfect minds. But they still have beginnings. They are finite.
There is only one true Creator in any of these traditions: the Father of Spirits. And while this Creator goes by many names, all agree that He is eternal, beyond time; infinite, beyond space; all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and everywhere present. And in the words of St Thomas Aquinas: “This all men call God.” Well, not really. Sometimes we call Him the One or the Source or the All or what-have-you. But what’s important here is that the God is nothing at all like the gods.
God, with a capital G, has no beginnings, no limits, no flaws. If He did, then by definition He couldn’t be God. He would just be another angel, just another little god.
The real difference between monotheists and polytheists is that the latter tend to think of God as being too high, too far, and too alien to have any real relationship with us. And so we have to deal instead with lesser divinities, finite spirits, middlemen. Monotheists, however, take a different tack: we believe that the infinite God has for us infinite love. And so the lesser spirits—the angels, the devils, the gods—they cannot be trusted on their own, for they too can fall. They too know evil.
When angels go bad, they go bad all the way.
Now, only a handful of holy angels in the service of the One God are named within the cannon of our Scriptures. And even these are a bit of a stretch. Raphael and Uriel, for example, are rarely found in Protestant Bibles. More’s the pity. But Michael—! We all know St Michael. I preach on him at least once a year for Michaelmas, the autumnal Feast of St Michael and All Angels. We find him in the books of Daniel, Tobit, Enoch, and Revelation, and that’s just for starters. He’s the great hero, the angel who cast down Satan from Heaven.
The story goes like this: there once was a great angel in Heaven, named in later tradition as Lucifer, the light-bearer. And he was the greatest creature that ever was, above all things save the Creator Himself. And this greatest and strongest of the angels astonishingly rebelled against the divine plan, for reasons we know not why. But the tradition I like is that God showed the angels a vision of His plan for the salvation of all the cosmos, that God Himself would be born a human being “through the guts of a girl,” incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
And this offended Lucifer, resplendent in his glory and beauty and power. Surely, if the Creator were to enter into His Creation, it ought to be through the greatest being in that Creation, yes? Lucifer, it seems, wanted to become the Mother of God. It was his right as a firstborn son, so to speak. And so war broke out in Heaven—a war of pure spirits, pure minds—and one of the lesser angels, much farther down in the hierarchy, asked a simple question, which was to become both his battle-cry and his name: Mikha’el, which means “Who is like God?” Who can ever be like God?
Thus he rallied the armies of Heaven, not by his own strength but by trusting in the faithfulness of his Father—“Who is like God? Who is like God?”—and he cast Lucifer down from Heaven, for the great serpent to become Satan, the Accuser. Michael is the original dragon-slayer, the original David-and-Goliath. He represents the spirit of humility overcoming the spirit of pride. He is the champion of God’s people Israel, and, according to some, the psychopomp who at the hour of death offers to each and every soul the pathway of salvation. Humility will do that.
Most popularly, however, Michael is the Archangel of Justice, the guy God calls when someone needs a whoopin’. In iconography he bears a flaming sword and set of scales, the identifying marks of justice—as well as a reminder that his feast day falls in Libra. And justice indeed is a scary thing when one is in the wrong. But how glorious to see the wicked stopped in the midst of their wicked ways when it means the protection of the innocent, the liberation of the oppressed, the establishment of peace, and the right ordering of society! Justice is harsh but fair.
As a holy angel, however, Michael represents not simply our conception of justice here below but God’s own divine justice from above. And God’s justice is not our own. Ours is but a weak and pale reflection of His. God is not concerned with retribution. God is beyond our brutish vengeance. God never punishes for punishment’s sake, but only for the restoration of the sinner.
Yes, when we and those we love are harmed, the terrible swift sword of St Michael descending from on high is a godsend. But that same sword serves the sinner: serves him by stopping him, by ceasing his sin, by turning him back, back to life, back to God, which is the very definition of repentance. We think that justice and mercy are opposed, that we can only have the one or the other. But it is not so in God.
In God, mercy and justice are one and the same. And we’ll speak more on that next week when we turn to St Gabriel, the Archangel of Mercy.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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