Angels Ascending and Descending

Christians understand that the space we call "the world" is an illusory space. It is has long been observed by physicists and biologists that what we see around us is a filtered version of the totality of cosmic noise that bombards us. You see, our sensory perception, evolving from the dawn of Creation, selectively chooses a fraction of this cosmic data so that our world appears to be orderly. All pattern-matching proceeds from here. We ordain a certain set of "codes" and "symbols," you might say, and we compose our "reality" from those axioms. In that sense, it is a closed system, devised by ourselves, vigorously fencing out all data that does not conform to the orderliness we have selected. A corollary is that we could not cope with the fullness of light and sound that always surrounds us.

During the first part of the twentieth-century, the Western theologian, Henri de Lubac, trying to break the stranglehold of rationalism on the Roman Church, applied these same general insights concerning the physical world to the way humans perceive the spiritual world. In his revolutionary book, Surnaturel (1946), translated Supernatural, he observes that our two-tiered conception of the "natural world" and the "supernatural world" is a convenient fiction evolved over time to accommodate our human limitations.

Let's say this a little differently. We have developed a "two-story reality" (having a dark and dangerous basement) because of our fixation on the material world. Our fixation on "streets paved with gold" above and "creatures having arrow-tipped tails" below with us in between. But this picture has hobbled our spiritual growth and delayed it. For there is no material Heaven above the clouds as our flying machines have revealed. And there is no material Hell beneath volcanoes or sulphur mines as our resilient technology has discovered. Where then is Hell? And where is Heaven? We could do worse than to quote from Paradise Lost:

Perhaps we can revise Milton a bit and say that the state of our soul is our Heaven or our Hell .... And that this is less of an exaggeration than you might think.

Heaven is here and now .... if only we would be open to it. This is the good news Jesus and His Forerunner reveal throughout the Gospels:

From this, we understand that poverty, having stripped us of worldliness (or voluntarily being stripped), opens us to Heaven's nearness.

We understand that setting our face against the world in a posture of the prophet opens us to Heaven's nearness. It's the only world we see.

As my teacher John J. Collins explained to me, to be righteous is to be blameless before the Law; to be just is to be trued, like the spokes of a finely tuned wheel, rolling without resistance through God's Rule of Life. It's so easy to live the life God has in mind when you already are godly.

Jesus says here that we are to be purified, cleansed of all toxins, having no shadows upon our lives — living as blamelessly as the virtuous scribes and Pharisees. The ideal here is to be stripped down of worldliness, and its attendant hungers, to make the love of God the life-giving center, the nucleus, of our lives.

In this sense, the real question is not a checklist of good deeds done or temptations refused. The real question here is, are we Heavenly, or are we Hellish?

We hear the approach of the Forerunner and then of the God-man Himself, Who cry out to the world,

"At hand .... " to be touched! We might render this, "Wake up!" "Look at what is all around you!"

Did we not already know of the abundant life around us? Of the essential goodness of God's Creation? Wherever and whenever we choose for this goodness, for this purity, for this love, we have already begun to follow Him; we have already begun our journey towards becoming Him.

When St. Paul writes, "we see as through a glass darkly" (1 Cor 13:12), I picture a clear glass but in darkness. Have you ever walked past a parked car at night? Have you ever walked past the windows of your house at night with the room beyond in darkness? In this glass we see only ourselves reflected back — our egos and the unredeemed world around us. But as light begins to illumine the glass, as the glass flood with photons, bringing it to a state of clarity, we see face-to-face .... no longer ourselves but rather God. Let us say, we see past ourselves, for the glass has been illumined. We are no longer interested in ourselves, for we see God.

I suppose we do see ourselves, for see in God. And He is the image of the fulfillment of ourselves. Here is the high point and end of our spiritual journey: becoming exactly like Jesus, truly assume and claiming and living into the Family Resemblance.

Or consider that we are in the midst of God's Kingdom already. Everywhere we turn, it surrounds us separated by an immaterial veil. Angels are constantly ascending and descending. It is a fluid situation. And we begin to let go of our conception of angels as being messengers — ambassadors from a splendid land — but rather instances of Heavenly life inseparable from God the Father, Who is One with the Son, Who are One with the Holy Ghost, Who are One with the Apostles and, in the fullness of our lives, are One with us.

It is not there and here situation. It is a fluid situation. The only "distances" are imposed by our spiritual undevelopment.

With the Gospels we pass through clear glass into a luminous world in which the veil is ultra thin .... even vanishing where the God-man is. He tells the Disciples,

Not the Son of God but the Son of Man, implying you and me and everyone.

Astonishing! We have only completed the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, and we learn of the veil vanishing, a light-filled Heaven flooding into the space where we stand. Truly, "on earth as it is in Heaven."

Nonetheless, on earth this light is evanescent, brilliant-yet-brief .... just as the angel in our Gospel lesson this morning is not always stirring the waters of Bethesda, just as Jesus is not always being transfigured before His Disciples.

Wherever and whenever angels appear we stand in the presence of this Heaven, this permanence and stability. We are overwhelmed for we have dwelt in darkness so long. So they must always reassure us, "Be not afraid."

How then could "Gospel reality" differ so starkly from the world depicted in the Old Testament? Where are the angels? Where are the near occasions of Heaven scattered everywhere across the wide landscape of the Levant? The Christian theologian, Marcion of Sinope, born in the first-century, was so piqued by this absence of the Heavenly Kingdom, that he proposed being rid of our Old Testament altogether.

But consider that the Old Testament which we have is not the Old Testament that Jesus and the Apostles knew. Actually, I am not saying that completely right. For the Old Testament of Jesus time was in flux. It was still an "open document." The real question for us this morning is, what was that Hebrew Bible which Hebrews to the north of Judea knew?

The twenty-first-century Scripture scholar, Margaret Barker, has revealed a very different first-century world than the one that has been represented to us. Dr. Barker, "who has made a significantly new contribution to our understanding of the New Testament and opened up important fields of research" (Abp of Canterbury Rowan Williams), has emerged as a foremost scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their meaning.

Of primary interest to her is the paucity of angels in the Old Testament. In the Holy Gospels (understanding Luke-Acts to be one book) and the Book of Revelation, the word appears 145 times, but only 105 times in the entire Old Testament, actually only eight-six times in the Old Testament if you set aside the Book of Zechariah (19).

Angels abundantly habit the world of our Gospels: at Jesus birth with angels singing alleluias; at the revelation of St. John Baptist's conception appearing at the right hand of the altar of incense; at the brilliantly luminous Annunciation to Most Holy Mary; throughout the Joseph story, directing his betrothal, the flight to Egypt, and the return to Judah and thence to Galilee; at the Calling of the Disciples (as we have just seen); at Jesus' temptations in the wilderness; during the Sermon on the Mount and throughout Jesus' many homilies; in descriptions of the Last Things; in descriptions of the Parousia; and finally at the empty tomb. There are angels everywhere!

We might come to the conclusion that angels had been deliberately suppressed — edited out of the Scriptures that have been passed down to us. And we would be correct to believe this.

Consider that the Sadducees — whom the first-century writer Josephus described as an aristocracy ruling over the Zion Temple — rejected angels .... and eternal life and the spiritual world.

What?! You mean the highest and ultimate authority in the Zion Temple did not believe in a spiritual world or angels or eternal life?! You know Christianity does not just fall out of the sky! Jesus is the fulfillment. He is the everlasting desire of the hills, certainly of the hill country to the north of Judea. Many scholars have rightly said that this explains the rapid acceptance and growth of Christianity.

The religion of the Sadducees was centered on animal sacrifice. Like the Mesopotamians who paid for and supervised the construction of the Zion Temple, the Temple rulers Jesus met were "this-world" oriented. Their only contact with any "Divine order" was to offer animal blood to an idol expecting in return favors: rain, fertility,or protection from enemies, ..... Is this not the mindset of the Temple high priest, Caiaphas, who sees the crucifixion of Jesus (Jn 18:14) in precisely this light .... or should I say, darkness?

We might say, "How odd!" How could the Christian faith have proceeded out of this world of spiritual deadness? One possible answer is, "It didn't."

The wider story begins to be revealed in the Book of Isaiah, whose first chapter depicts foreign religion, with its animal sacrifice, creeping into the ancient worship of Israel. We know that King Josiah launched a profound reform of Hebrew religion, pulling down altars scattered throughout the Levant, so he could concentrate power, not to say, money unto himself in Jerusalem. The new religion would center on animal sacrifice creating an enormous industry in the sale of animals. Meantime, Josiah would align himself with the Neo-Babylonians in suppressing the ancient religion of Israel, which, by contrast to all of this, was focused on personal transformation and by that very fact scattered everywhere people are scattered.

You see the problem: how could Josiah consolidate power, when individuals everywhere were surrounded by God's Kingdom, whose worship had nothing to do with offerings to idols?

Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals that the Exile to Babylon had been in progress generations before one-third of the Judean elite was physically removed. A whole program was up and rolling long before that .... as just about every scholar of the Old Testament will tell you.

A Hebrew religion that had been abundant with angels, even dominated by angels, indeed was suppressed. The Hebrew Bible would be revised inserting an alternative religion, which had little to do with the immediacy of Heaven's Kingdom on earth .... but rather the opposite: a most abstract, distant God Whom no one could see or hear or comprehend, to Whom terrified animals were offered in an unending blood bath. How different was this from Heaven's Kingdom and the transformation of yourself in the light of that godly goodness!

Judging by the number of manuscripts (actually fragments of manuscripts) found near the Dead Sea, a dominant tradition of the Hebrew religion was the Book of Enoch. Quoted in the Epistle of Jude, the Book of Enoch was known to the Early Church and undertood to be Sacred Scripture, as Margaret Barker has suggested. Named for the first figure in Holy Scripture to be assumed directly into Heaven, the Book of Enoch is named for this "lost prophet" (see Barker, The Lost Prophet):

The Books of Enoch (actually, three have survived in fragmentary form) depict a world that is thickly inhabited by angels. This would have been fully in accord with the sensibilities of the ancient Hebrew religion, a religion in which angels are primary figures. Indeed, the Hebrew word for "angel of the Lord" (malakh), appearing sixty-five times in the Hebrew Bible, is the same word used for YHWH, the Name of God, Whom Moses encountered on Mt. Sinai.

Does this mean that we have not rightly understood angels? Surely, the intellectual technology brought to bear by Thomas Aquinas has all but totally eclipsed the meaning and significance of angels for Christians in the West.

Sisters, have you ever experienced a powerful Presence and Concentration of God's Energy in a room which is then rapidly dispersed when very unheavenly people come in?

The scene of our Gospel story is surely dark, for here is depicted Judeans seeking healing powers from a pagan god, Asklepios. Indeed, the waters we see are at the center of an Asklepion, a pagan temple, where animal sacrifice is offered up.

Let us pause for a moment to recall the psychology of animal sacrifice. You know, its essence is "Him! Not me!" Isn't this the whole idea of animal sacrifice: "Here, take this life! But leave me alone!" And isn't this what we see as a paralytic man is trampled by a crowd madly competing for "angel water"? Is not the paralytic being offered up as a kind of sacrifice? "He must die so that I may live! He must have none so that I may have all!" This helpless animal, we might say, .... offered repeatedly, has become a kind of fixture in this temple, for thrity-eight years.

The precise opposite sensibility pertains in the ancient Hebrew religion. In a spirituality of personal transformation, we are the sacrifice offered: as Jesus emptied Himself ( κένωσις / kénosis ) to become one with us, so we empty ourselves to become One with Him. As we have prayed in past years,

.... meaning that we pledge to love God completely with all of our mind, with all our of soul, and with all of our bodily strength. And does this not respond to Jesus' invitation to empty and discard ourselves so that we may follow Him? Pick up your cross!

But the paralytic has forgotten all of that (have I not just quoted the Shemah?). He has forgotten all of that and instead seeks Asklepios — which is a kind of deadly paralysis all its own. No wonder, Jesus admonishes him to

And does the paralytic not describe our own situation, living in dog-pack-think? Forgetting the teachings of God, forgetting the Kingdom of Heaven, choosing instead our "little heaven," or should I say "little hell" here on earth.

You see our own world, like the scene in the Aslepion, is in a state of near-complete spiritual paralysis. We claim that we need to "unwind with weed," that we have discovered what the culture calls "sexual healing," that we have become liberated discovering our inner animal. All of these things and many more are cruel idols, to whom we end up offering sacrifice .... nothing less than our souls .... until we can no longer save ourselves. The callous over our heart is so thick that we cannot even pray any more. We cannot pray with sincerity. We are unable speak to our Guardian Angels. What was once a lively inner life, inner space, has become numb .... paralyzed.

We live in a fluid situation. God has given His angels charge over us. Divine life is always already around us. Yet, we filter it out .... because it interferes with the focus we have come to wish for ourselves. Like the paralytic, we are fixed on Askepios. We are fixed on a different way. We are sick at heart. And we are in grave danger. For the light and sound we filter out is the only Life we shall ever know. As St. John wrote, "And the darkness comprehended it not."

My brothers and sisters, let us sin no more lest a worse thing come upon us. Let us be open to the light and goodness and abundance that surrounds us, even the heart-bursting love of God: His love for us, and, yes, our love for Him.

This is how He brings us home — with His light, with Him love. Will you please put down these distractions! Will you please stop habituating these dangers! .... spending all the day poisoning yourselves. All we need do is empty ourselves of every unworthy thing. All we need do is follow Him, Who emptied Himself to be one of us. Let us now empty ourselves that we may be One with Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.