29 September 2018
Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, archangels
“As I watched, thrones were set up… the court was convened, and the books were opened.” Deuteronomy 7 introduces us into a world that we rarely reflect upon, the heavenly realm that precedes and penetrates the world in which we live. Jacob caught a glimpse of this world in Genesis 28, in his dream of the angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth. Through Nathaniel, Jesus promises that within the Church, there will always people who live under this same ladder, who see “the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). Our reading from Deuteronomy shows us just how many angels serve God on heaven and on earth: “thousands upon thousands and myriads upon myriads.”
There is far more to this world than we can see with our natural senses, which barely scratch the surface of reality. The vision that our fallen nature offers us is one in which we measure almost everything in the world on the basis of potential gain or loss. But underlying all things is Love, not the superficial and often egoistic sentiment that we so often call “love,” but that Love that Jesus reveals to us through his life for us, so that we might actually find it all things, because it was already there in the very stuff of the world which was, already from all eternity, “created in the blood of the Lamb that was slain” on the cross for all of creation.
We cannot properly understand the place of angels in our lives apart from this vision, this “sight,” that Jesus offered Nathaniel and which he offers us today. The archagels are no fantasy; they are attested to throughout scripture, and they are the chief among those messengers that move within heaven and earth. Ignatius of Loyola senses angels’ presence as he discerns the motions within his own heart. Ignatius knows that within his heart lies the great cosmic battle between the good and evil angels that we hear about in Revelation 12, and he knows that, because this battle also takes place in our heart, we are not mere bystanders. We can choose a side and engage in the battle that Christ wages for us. When we do, our eyes will be opened as we begin, more and more, to live in heaven on earth and to “see greater things than these.”