Terrible Mercy
A Reading from the Book of Daniel:
When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I tried to understand it. Then someone appeared standing before me, having the appearance of a man, and I heard a human voice by the Ulai, calling, “Gabriel, help this man understand the vision.” So he came near where I stood; and when he came, I became frightened and fell prostrate. But he said to me, “Understand, O mortal, that the vision is for the time of the end.”
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
A Reading from the Book of Enoch:
And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth. And they said one to another: “The earth made without inhabitant cries the voice of their cryingst up to the gates of heaven. And now to you, the holy ones of heaven, the souls of men make their suit, saying, ‘Bring our cause before the Most High.’”
And they said to the Lord of the ages: “Lord of lords, God of gods, King of kings, and God of the ages, the throne of Thy glory standeth unto all the generations of the ages, and Thy name holy and glorious and blessed unto all the ages! Thou hast made all things, and power over all things hast Thou: and all things are naked and open in Thy sight, and Thou seest all things, and nothing can hide itself from Thee …
“And now, behold, the souls of those who have died are crying and making their suit to the gates of heaven, and their lamentations have ascended: and cannot cease because of the lawless deeds which are wrought on the earth. And Thou knowest all things before they come to pass, and Thou seest these things and Thou dost suffer them, and Thou dost not say to us what we are to do to them in regard to these.”
Here ends the reading.
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.
Before the Exile, angels had no names. Perhaps they didn’t need them, what with God being omniscient and all. They show up in the stories of the early Hebrew Bible as representatives and messengers of the Almighty, and if anything, they go by His Name: the Lord Yahweh, the Most High. They are His spirits, after all, even if they sometimes go astray.
But during the Exile, when the movers and shakers of the Kingdom of Judah were all forcibly deported into Babylon, the people of God there encountered a rich Mesopotamian culture of astrology, which would ever after influence the Bible. Stars, planets, and constellations were all thought to represent the gods of the heavens—in much the same way that we still name our planets Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so on. How literally the Babylonians took this is open to interpretation.
The night sky has always been viewed as something divine: something high and eternal and beautiful; in many ways we see it as the face of God. And it’s at this point, living amongst stargazers, that the Hebrew people really start to talk about angels. The angels are not God, yet neither are they us. The good ones, the holy ones, serve His will. And they are often imagined in groups of four or seven: four representing the cardinal directions, and thus the length and breadth of the heavens.
And seven—well, that might be because there were seven visible planets in the classical understanding, seven wandering stars: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Seven archangels related to seven celestial bodies. But it might also be because the Temple in Jerusalem possessed a seven-branched oil lamp representing the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden: seven calyxed wicks bearing the fruit of light in paradise.
The names of the seven archangels vary depending on one’s source. But the two who are always included—the two angels who show up time and again in the Bible and in extracanonical literature of the period—are the twin saints Gabriel and Michael. Michael we talked about last week, and frankly he has his own holiday every year. Tonight I wish to speak of Gabriel: Archangel of Mercy, and herald of Christmas.
Gabriel is first explicitly named in the book of Daniel, where his role is to interpret the visions of that eponymous prophet. Now, Daniel is a notoriously difficult book to date, set during the Babylonian Exile but likely edited into the form we have it much later. The name Gabriel means “strength of God” or “strong one of God.” And he’s described as looking like a really scary dude. In fact, whenever Gabriel shows up, people are initially terrified, and he has to implore them to please calm down.
Jewish tradition holds that Gabriel appears anonymously in other prophetic books such as Ezekiel, where he threatens Jerusalem. But he’s not named again until Enoch—a book that really should be included in our Bibles, perhaps as an appendix. Enoch is deeply weird but also very important. It actually made it into the canon of the Ethiopian church, one of the oldest Christian communities on earth. In Enoch, Gabriel is one of a quartet of angels who pray for and protect a fallen humanity.
But it’s the New Testament in which Gabriel is given his greatest opportunity to shine. In the Gospel according to St Luke, Gabriel is the angel who announces the births both of John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ: the former to John’s father Zechariah, and the latter to Jesus’ Mother Mary. It’s important that it’s Gabriel—because remember that he was the angel in Daniel; and the book of Daniel is all about the Messiah. It came to be understood as a collection of prophecies about the Christ. Indeed, Daniel is the reason why everyone at the time of Jesus was looking for the Messiah in the first place.
Gabriel heralds the Christ. Gabriel heralds Christmas. And because of this, tradition holds that Gabriel also will herald the Parousia, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ at the End of Days, blowing his ram’s horn to awaken all the dead. For this reason, for his association with Jesus, we consider St Gabriel, in Western Christianity, to be the Archangel of Mercy. Gabriel the terrifying, mind you.
This is something of a reversal; for in the book of Enoch, which I mentioned earlier, Michael is the Archangel of Mercy and Gabriel the Archangel of Justice! He’s a bit of a bruiser, really. For all the gentle imagery of Gabriel greeting Mary, he was traditionally understood to be a giant-slayer, a warrior-angel. And I like this ambiguity, this duality, because I think it illustrates a powerful biblical point: namely, that justice and mercy are not two separate irreconcilable ideals.
Here below we speak of having either justice or mercy, don’t we? Either we get what we deserve, or we are given what we don’t. Justice is all about fairness, mercy all about grace. Generally, we want the former for our enemies and the latter for ourselves. Where is the justice in leaving a murderer unpunished? Where is the mercy in denying the innocent their recompense? Yet it is not so in God. In God, mercy and justice are not opposed: they are both one and the same, both truth.
A perfect justice culminates in mercy. And a perfect mercy opens the door to restitution, allowing the repentant an opportunity to set right what he has wronged. Mercy doesn’t just free us from the consequences of our sin, but from the sin itself. And there is no greater justice than that. There is no greater justice than letting mercy do its work. The only real restitution anyone can receive is the repentance of the one who has hurt us, the restoration of a wounded and a broken relationship.
Little wonder, then, that Gabriel and Michael might sometimes swap their jobs. Justice and mercy are two sides of one coin, both of them working to heal. And we’ll speak more on this next week, when we meet Raphael, the Archangel of Healing.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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