Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ John 1:45-51
This is the Gospel reading for the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, which falls this Sunday, 29 September. The angels we meet in the Bible aren’t cuddly little creatures with chubby arms – they’re scary, and we know this because the first thing they say to whichever human encounters them is “don’t be afraid.” Angels turn up at key times, like the birth of Jesus (a sort of public address announcement to the shepherds), and they’re there at the resurrection. And whenever angels appear they’re never the focus: they point to God, signaling God is about to appear and do something, often something surprising.
In this reading we see Nathaniel’s surprise over where Christ is to be found: coming from a smallish town at a distance from the centre of power. This was unexpected, but God has a habit of turning up in unforeseen places. Nathaniel, in all his astonishment, names Jesus as the one they’ve been waiting for, as Son of God and king of Israel. But wait, there’s more, says Jesus. You’ll see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Jesus here is saying that he is the ladder between heaven and earth, the place where God and humanity meet. It’s the job of angels to point to and bear witness to the meeting of God with people.
Angels are close to God and know God. They live to worship God – in the Eucharist we’re joined by “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” As an elderly liturgist I worked with used to say, when the midweek service was sparsely attended, “more room for the angels.” And as I used to say back to him when a lot of people came, “the angels are going to have to bunch up today.”
The angels are called to worship and witness to God, and to God’s action in the world, to point to the meeting of heaven and earth that happens in Christ. Christians are called to do those things too. The word from which we get “angel” simply means “messenger,” and sometimes we are called to be those messengers: to bear witness to the ways God comes to humanity. Sometimes we are called to be angels.
Comentários