The word ‘angel’ comes from the Greek ‘angelos’,
which means ‘a messenger’. As far as we are concerned, in the way in
which we are related to the angels, they enter into our life as
messengers of God. This does not mean that there is not in the
angels an essence of their own, their own essential being, and that
they are nothing but messengers. They are related as messengers to
us; they are related to God as his own creatures which have already
attained a measure of perfection and which grow eternally, endlessly
into a deeper and more perfect communion with their Maker. Anyhow
tonight my intention is not to speak of the angels in their
essential being, but to speak of them as they appear in the
scriptures and in the liturgical texts in relation to the world in
which we live, to mankind and its destinies.
There are several ways in which one can be a
messenger. One can receive a message in which one does not
participate, which remains a thought, a will, which is different
from that of the messenger and conveyed to him who is to receive it
and capable of receiving it. There is a way of being a messenger by
being entrusted with the thought, the will, the intention of God and
commanded creatively, that is, with the full and complete
participation of all one’s being, to convey it. There is also a way
in which the message and the person can become so perfectly
identified that the person and the message coincide and that the
revelation is as much in the messenger as it is in the words
proclaimed by him <…>
A message may be brought, declared, left, as it
were, with the recipient. Something which is an experience of life
may be interpreted, explained, unfolded before him who is already in
possession of this inner knowledge. An angel may also act and not
only speak. But whichever way the messenger appears, one can see in
the Old Testament as well as in the New, that a message is an act of
God about to happen. A message is a warning, a declaration of
something that will occur soon. You remember the angel that appears
to Zacharias at the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel and to the Mother
of God with the promise of the birth of St John the Baptist to the
one and of the Incarnation of the Son of God to the other. You may
remember also in the Book of Job the passage in the 33rd chapter in
which Job longs for a mediator, an interpreter of the will of God.
He is confronted with this mystery. He cannot understand the ways of
God, and, apart from the intercessor who is mentioned in the 9th
chapter of this book, he also longs for an interpreter: one who
would make sense of the mystery which confronts him, challenges him,
crushes him indeed and remains unrevealed.
In the Old and New Testaments the word ‘angel’ may
be used with the definite article or with the indefinite article,
and some writers – and this is the opinion nowadays of a great many
of the students of the Bible – see a difference in what is being
conveyed. ‘An angel’ in all the various passages speaks of a
concrete being, someone who appears in the form of man, someone who
can be seen, someone who can be spoken to and heard, someone who can
be touched and can touch. In other passages the expression ‘the
angel of the Lord’ may (not always) signify a message coming from
the Lord with such directness and certainty that there is no doubt
that it is a divine message, and yet no description is given of a
celestial being bringing and conveying the message.
<…>
In the beginning of St Matthew's Gospel we are
confronted with a dream of Josephus. We are not told of a concrete
vision of an angel in the same plastic terms. It seems that the
expression is used to convey a certainty, the certainty of a message
that comes from God.
<…>
St Gregory Palamas spoke of angels in one of his
works. He calls them ‘second lights’. By this he means – and my
translation is very unsatisfactory – that God is light, the only
true Light, the light which is the origin of all light, which
enlightens every man that comes into the world, and that the
creatures of God, in order to become children of light, must lose,
indeed must free themselves from their opacity in order to become
translucent and transparent so that the light which is God himself
should flow into them, pervade them to the core, and that they
should become such that this light divine received by them
unadulterated should be transmitted to others.
He sees the angels as secondary sources of light
because they are of perfect transparency, they receive all
divine gifts without appropriating any of them to themselves;
they live by this flow of divine grace, divine light, divine
presence without trying to retain it, and handing it on from
hand to hand, as it were. There is an ancient vision of things
that teaches us that this light flows from its original and
unique source, which is God, through the ranks of angels down
from one step to another in a cascade to the earthly created
world in which it is also received to the extent to which we are
or become less opaque, more translucent, more transparent,
capable first of receiving the light, participating in it, and
freely giving it farther and farther.
<…>
The experience of the Christians, the faith of
the Church has spoken also – and this can be referred to the
book of Revelation – of angels guardians of human lives and
souls, of angels that stand as the guardians of human
communities and places, temples, cities. The term has evolved
also to speak not only of the messengers but also of him who
stands in God’s own name as a mediator, an intercessor, an
interpreter of the truth of God, one who proclaims that none is
like God, one who proclaims that God is strong, one who
proclaims that God heals, who proclaims the greatness of God,
who calls to prayer, who praises God in the name of his Church,
who brings down in sacraments and blessing the divine gifts upon
men. This is the link between the use of the word angel, angelos,
applied to the heavenly powers and the use which St John the
Divine makes of it in the Book of Revelation when he calls the
angels of the seven churches the bishops that stand at the head
of the human community.
As you see, there is a vast range of notions and
experience which is held both by the Old and the New Testament
on the one hand and on the other hand by the tradition of
pre-Christian and post-Christian Israel concerning the angels.
The expression speaks of a concrete, intense, palpable, tangible
experience of the Living God, the Holy Trinity, the Son of God,
the Spirit of God, of the concreteness and undoubted certainty
of the message received: the dream of Joseph and several dreams
of the Old Testament, of concrete, active, personal messengers,
in word or in deed, sent by God, Gabriel, the angels that saved
Peter and Paul from prison, and also these heavenly powers whom
God has appointed to teach, to guide us, to help us to find our
way. The names matter. The reality matters. And when we
celebrate services for their feasts, we are not speaking of
symbols; we are entering into a deep relationship with real and
concrete realities but realities which perhaps with more
challenging violence, with a claim more powerful than human
sanctity, confront us with our vocation to be God’s own. More
than the human saints they compel us to stand face to face with
a message of God which in them is fully realised, with a call of
God to receive from him a fulfillment which we can see in them
and of which they are the certainty and the guarantee.
