Archangels in the Scriptures and our daily lives

People of the Book: Archangels

“In the sixth month [of Elizabeth’s pregnancy], the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth.…”

Thus begins what Christians recognize as the culmination of God’s relationship with humanity, the initiation of an utterly new phase in what has been called the economy of salvation history, namely the Incarnation. This messenger (angelos) Gabriel, speaks not only to Mary in the Annunciation (celebrated exactly nine months before Christmas on March 25), but also to her betrothed spouse St. Joseph (the feast of whom is celebrated on March 19). This week then provides a unique opportunity to reflect upon Gabriel and the other archangels and their role in the Scriptures and our daily life.

The Catechism cites St Augustine’s description of angels: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are — ‘spirit;’ from what they do — ‘angel’” (§ 329).

The term “archangel” occurs only twice in the New Testament, in the First Letter to the Thessalonians (4:16) and the Letter of Jude (1:9). Typically three figures are named as belonging to this highest order of God’s messengers and most fiercely loyal supporters — Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. Other traditions expand this rank to include seven or more figures, but with quite fluid boundaries and always including the famed triumvirate. These figures reflect in their personalities and missions dimensions of the divine attributes. Thus, Gabriel (Gavri’el) means “God’s strength,” Raphael (Refa’el) “God’s healing/cure,” and Michael (Mikha’el) from the rhetorical question “Who is like God?” embodies the incomparability of the divine presence.

These archangels, along with their attendant ranks (which the angelologist Dionysus grouped into nine levels or “choirs”) are traditionally viewed as intermediaries between God and human beings. They are composed purely of spirit but do exhibit individual centers of will and intellect. (How exactly they “learn” has been debated by scholastic theologians, for since they do not have them, they cannot receive information from the material senses and subsequently abstract information through phantasms in the process Thomas Aquinas would describe as human epistemology, Summa Theologiae I, Q85, a1. Rather, it is commonly assumed that they learn through “infused” knowledge).

As we know, angelic wills are subject to temptation and corruption, for the former archangel Lucifer (from the Hebrew Helel Ben-Schachar, “the shining star and son of the Dawn,” which St. Jerome translated as lux-fero “light bringer”) allowed pride to disrupt his relationship with God. Any created self, human or angelic, aware of his own self-consciousness as a distinct “I” is faced with an immediate and pressing choice: to realize his radical dependence upon his Creator and thus fall on his knees in worship of him to whom he owes his existence, or to attempt to “set up on his own,” gravitating the center of his life eternally around his own limited being, in a self-deluded escapism from his own nature as divine son or daughter. The angels face no less of a radical alternative, and have reacted throughout history accordingly.

Doubtless we hold the angels in high esteem for their closeness to God, yet it was to us human sinners, not those dwelling in unapproachable Light, that the call to preach the Good News to the ends of the Earth was made. As John Henry Newman once wrote, “He left behind Him preachers, teachers, and missionaries, in His stead. Well then, my brethren, you will say, since on His coming all about Him was so glorious, such as He was, such must His servants be, such His representatives, His ministers, in His absence; as He was without sin, they too must be without sin; as He was the Son of God, they must surely be Angels. Angels, you will say, must be appointed to this high office, Angels alone are fit to preach the birth, the sufferings, the death of God. They might indeed have to hide their brightness, as He before them, their Lord and Master, had put on a disguise; … And yet, my brethren, so it is, He has sent forth for the ministry of reconciliation, not Angels, but men; He has sent forth your brethren to you, not beings of some unknown nature and some strange blood, but of your own bone and your own flesh, to preach to you.”

It is within our dusty, leaking earthen vessels that, with the help of the archangels, we are called and able to bring to the rest of the world the treasure of wealth untold, the salvific truths of God’s Word and very Life. It is the human vocation to echo the glorious and eternal cries of the angels, but from within space and time; to be, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel once put it, “cantors of the universe, able to sing praise and thanks in the name of the whole cosmic community of which we are a part.”

Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.