With which friend have you shared the most secret parts of your life? To whom have you confided your deepest shames as well as your most transcendent experiences? Before whom do you stand naked at all times and in all ways and given your trust without hesitation or doubt?
You might answer, "To the Lord I have entrusted everything." Certainly, that would be true for all of us. God numbers the hairs on our heads; His eye is on the sparrow; and He is with us in our most secret places .... whether we ascend to the Heavens or make our bed in Hades (Ps 139).
Yet there are ones closer to ourselves, to our place in His Creation, — who are with us as we pray, who are beside us as we go to bed, who are present when we arise each morning. These are .... the angels of Heaven.
Surely, each of us is a favored daughter or son of God. Nonetheless, the Lord Jesus has revealed hierarchy to us. In our Gospel lesson this morning we behold a hierarchy from the bowels of Hell, up to the world of scorpions and venomous creatures, thence to the human order, reaching unto the order of angels, and finally to the Father Himself. We learn that the Twelve Apostles are to preside from assigned thrones (Mt 19:28, Lu 22:30). Among these Twelve, there are Three forming an inner circle: John, James, and Peter. Among the Three there is one, whom Jesus loved (Jn 13:33) and whose writings constitute the theological norm for Holy Orthodoxy.
Beyond the ranks of humans, though, as our Epistle reading discloses,
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.... one testified in a certain place, saying: "What is man that You are mindful of him,
Or the son of man that You take care of him? You have made him a little lower than the angels; You have crowned him with glory and honor, And set him over the works of Your hands. You have put all things in subjection under his feet." For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. But now we do not yet see all things put under him. But we see Jesus, Who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor ..... (Heb 2:6-9) |
A fearsome symmetry .... a hierarchy including ourselves, the angels, and the God of Heaven and Earth. We behold higher and lower ranks, even a ladder reaching from earth unto Heaven with individual rungs signifying states of lesser and greater spiritual perfection.
Our Epistle reading the Letter to the Hebrews (significantly, not the Letter to the Jews) establishes this important teaching. We live in a continuous Divine space, both time-bound and eternal, in which the sons and daughters of man, all ranks of angels, and the Triune God are united — a space in which the Creator of all can occupy the lowest ladder wrung and far beyond the highest reach of any ladder. And all that coheres in this mind-bending space are united in bonds of Divine love. When He inaugurates His ministry of teaching and healing, He announces two things: the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near and be transformed both in heart and soul that you might have a share in it. The one always already announces the other. For who could contemplate becoming united to the Holy One without first being emptied of all that is unholy? And among the very first things Jesus announces in this Kingdom-of-Heaven religion are the angels of God:
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Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree,
believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see Heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. (Jn 1:50-51) |
We can only imagine the electric effect upon them .... like the first discovery of a vast beauty
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.... like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer") |
The Disciples looked at each with a wild surmise, all sharing a single thought: Angels! The traditions of the Patriarchs! Father Abraham! Their minds were afire. For these men, raised in Hebrew families, had been forbidden to live the cherished beliefs of their forebears. Angels and Paradise and the nearness of Heaven had been banished by the Jerusalem Temple to be supplanted by an uninspired civil religion which regulated all aspects of social life, and which ordered blood sacrifices to be carried out where purity and intimacy with God had once been held in highest honor.
Have you ever searched for the word angel in Deuteronomy or Leviticus? Or the words seraphim or cherubim? (It's so easy to do these days.) You will not find a single match. For these books were prepared in order to stamp out intimacy with God. These books, whether revised or new, are part and parcel with a project to wipe out the religion of the Patriarchs and to destroy the scattered altars, high places, holy pillars, and sacred groves, raised by men who had been inspired by encounters with God or with His angels:
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And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to Heaven:
and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. (Gen 28:12) |
As those who follow the Hermitage know, during the reign of King Josiah on the eve of the Babylonian Captivity and after the Return from Babylon, Judah had become a vassal state of the Achaemenid Empire — the greatest force the world had ever known. This empire, stretching from the western edge of India, thence northward to the Steppes of Scythia, thence southward to Babylon, and westward unto Ionia in the sphere of Greece. It enveloped the Levant naming Judah the "Province of Yehud." In Jerusalem the Persians order a Temple to built on Mt. Zion which would be the administrative center of this province: collecting taxes, administering laws, convening tribunals, and ensuring the continuity of orderly worship, for these things were the first duties of a Persian king. Writes Prof. Yihai Kiel of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
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A close examination of the different functions of the king according to the Old Persian
inscriptions [were] first and foremost, sacrifice to Ahura Mazda [God] and the preservation of the cosmic and political Order .... ("Reinventing Mosaic Torah in Ezra-Nehemiah ...." Journal of Biblical Literature No.2, 2017) |
This, of course, is exactly what we find in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: two books reflecting the Persian Scriptures with their attention to diet, personal hygiene, and acceptable social conduct.
There would be no angels ascending and descending upon the sons and daughters of man. For the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, could not have administrated so vast an empire granting such freedom and power to individuals. His goals were centralized government, centralized taxation, and centralized control of religion.
As we have explored through many dimensions, this resulted in a Levant that was balkanized into many varieties of Hebrew belief. But let us focus on Jesus and especially His Disciples. What would your prayer-life be without a Father in Heaven? (Very different!) What would your journey toward holiness be without a Holy Spirit? (Can you imagine it?) And what would your conception of life be without a Kingdom of Heaven? What would it be to have the Bosom of Abraham taken from you? All of these were proclaimed by Jesus. It was Jesus who restored to the Hebrew lifeworld intimacy with God.
It was Jesus who affirmed the primacy of that bright friend and intimate, your guardian angel (Mt 18:10) — the One who knows you better than you know yourself and who loves you with a deeper and wiser love than you could ever conceive.
It was Jesus who stormed the Temple castigating a religion that had devolved into an impersonal swap of blood for salvation. For blood sacrifice was the center-piece of Babylonian and Persian religion. With many among the diverse Hebrew groups, the Son of God abhorred animal sacrifice. Many Hebrews were appalled at the sight of animals being slaughtered as a form of worship. Many fled to Elephantine and built a Hebrew Temple there. But Cyrus the Great pursued them ordering them to offer blood sacrifice upon pain of destruction and death. You see, this is the first duty of the Persian king. He is going to make sure that orderly worship is followed through.
And why had these Hebrews resisted fleeing even to distant Elephantine in Egypt? Because what they understood to be religion, which was intimacy with God and finally unity with God, had been supplanted by a grisly ritual that caused God and His angels to depart.
My brothers and sisters, this horrible choice confronts us today. When we venerate the Holy Cross, let us reverence it for what it is — not an instrument for the offering of blood sacrifice but a meeting place, where the One Who loves us best has offered Himself as a ransom .... as Damon had for Pythias, as Pythias had for Damon. "No greater love than this" our Lord and God has said, "to lay down one's life for His friends."
To follow the Persian pattern of sacrificing to a deity would be to reduce our Precious Lord to little more than a bull or a goat. But to understand Him to be a ransom — the truest Friend who awaited the arrival of the ones for whom He stood in .... whom He had healed, whom He had loved, who had professed Him to be the Son of God .... but who never returned .... as Pythias had returned at the point of Damon's execution. Only this understanding of the Cross will enable us to grasp the nobility and heroic stature of Jesus' faithfulness and self-denying love.
Here, at this place angels descend and ascend. At this place, we hear supernal voices chanting Gloria in excelcis. For this is the place of the truest Friendship and the deepest Intimacy, for which Father Abraham and Mother Sarah turned their backs on glittering Babylon, roaming through wilderness after wilderness, and, on a day, coming to a grove of oaks where they would meet with Angels .... Who were much more than angels, even, the Radiant Glory of the Triune God, received in family closeness and familiar affection.
Awaken, and greet your bright friend each morning before you think or say anything else. Let your words "good night" be the final words of the day to your bright friend. And give thanks to Father God, Who sent to us His Son, reminding everyone born into the world that they are family and that a place has been prepared for them in the Kingdom of Heaven subject to angels.
My brothers and sisters,
the Kingdom of Heaven
has drawn near.
And even now we are surrounded by angels.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.