A reading of the holy gospel according to John. When Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him, Jesus remarked, this man is a real Israelite. There is no guy in him. How do you know me? Nathaniel asked Jesus.
Before Philip called you, Jesus answered, I saw you under the fig tree. Rabbi, said Nathaniel, you are the son of god. You are the king of Israel. Jesus responded, do you believe just because I told you, I saw you under the fig tree, you will see much greater things than that. Then Jesus went on to tell them, I solemnly assure you, you shall see the sky opened and the angels of god ascending and descending on the son of man.
And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. About the only reason that this text from Saint John is here is that last sentence that our blessed lord says to his to this handful of disciples, including Nathaniel, I solemnly assure you, you shall see the sky opened and the angels of god ascending and descending on the son of man. So obviously, there's something here about angels.
Well, angels, it's a very mysterious concept, really. I years ago, I spent some time on it. It's you see, this idea of angels goes back before the new old testament. And then secondly, the the the Old Testament features angels a lot more than the New Testament. A lot more.
All kinds of angels crop up in the Old Testament. And then, of course, we have in the New Testament some very significant instances of angels appearing. They appear in different ways under different guises. They had different names. By that, I don't mean Rachel and Michael, but they had different appellations, son of man, man, apparition.
The word angel itself is just one of the names given to this the this group or category of beings, and the word angel simply means messenger. It's a Greek word for meaning something's been sent. Now, I'm Saint Thomas, for example, in his summa, the first thing he deals with is creation and god almighty and the trinity. And then he deals with angels. And he has 60 some pages on them.
I just looked it up. 60 some pages on angels. And more than any other philosopher, and certainly more than any theologian, he has incorporated the concept of angels in his cosmology and into his psychology. Now, you'll say, what what's this all about anyway? Well, of course, I second your question.
It it it's a very mysterious thing. It goes way way back into into religions that antedate the the Hebrews. That in some way, man's concept of the supreme god and man, in some way they felt the need of having intermediaries there, some kind of intermediaries. So you had half gods and minor divinities. Look look at look at your whole Grecian hierarchy of gods and goddesses, all the way from the supreme god through multitudes of minor gods and goddesses, some more attractive than others, depending on your particular inclinations, all the way down to godlike men and women who, if in some instances, have been are taken up and subsumed into the the divinity.
Now, you don't find that in the Old Testament, but you do find both good angels and bad angels. You certainly do find that, especially in the Old Testament, especially. Now when you come to the New Testament, the angels are not so prominent by a long shot, but they're still there. They're very much there. So the church has never, for one minute, rejected this concept.
Never once. On the other hand, if you wanna ask what is the deep what is the official teaching of the Catholic church about this, there's very little has been formally and officially pronounced. You don't have anything comparable to angels as you have about the divinity of Christ, his human nature, the virginity of Mary, the motherhood of Mary, or the trinity, how you had three in one or one in three or the emanations, you have nothing like this about angels. Nothing like it at all. But they're still with us.
And many people have a very strong devotion to angels. Now there's one thing that is Catholic doctrine about angels, and that is we have a guardian angel. That doesn't mean that we each have a personal guardian angel. Church never defined that. It's it's a common belief, but it's not an article of faith.
But the existence of a guardian angel in some sense is very is is part of Catholic faith. And down the ages, down in the Catholic church, there's been in many instances strong devotion to angels. It's one of the earliest little prayers that I knew was that angel got my guardian dear. And I remember on the wall of my room, I guess it's the first painting I became attached to as a great artist, you know, was this was a big huge chasm with a plank across the chasm and this little kid walking on the plank and this had this huge guardian angel holding the kid up by its wings. Well, you see, that's that's all fine and dandy.
But how much of that is theologically authentic? I don't know. I know that the church tells me that between God and me, there's this multitude of beings that you can call angels or any other words you want. Now, when I talk about Aquinas, I I am not talking about official church teaching. Keep that in mind.
But he has a very rational explanation of these angels as pure forms without any matter. Now this may not this won't mean much to you, but in the whole concept of of Aquinas's philosophy of the hylomorphic theory, this makes eminent sense. It's deductive, I know that. But on the other hand, it makes sense, it's consistent with the whole system. And he has a whole psychology of angels based upon deductions on the principle that the angels are pure spirits, pure forms.
In other words, they have not been degraded in some way from material beings. They are superior in some ways to a to the human being who is made up of matter and for the immortal soul and matter. I only mentioned this what it if it's confusing, I want it to be a bit because that's that's the picture we have of angels. But on the other hand, we can debate this all we want and read about it. A lot of it's fascinating.
But we come back to this very solid fact that in the New Testament, something appeared to our blessed lady. Something did. That's just one instance. And so I think that we are in good company when we renew our confidence in this concept of angels. That between we're not talking about demi urges or demigods or half gods or anything.
We're talking about a concept of a being, a reality that exists in the order of beings from man who is a a composite of matter and form between him and God who is absolute pure action act. We have an intermediate of of a a being, pure form, with no admixture of matter whatsoever. You see, to the medieval mind, this was important because if you didn't have this, you would have a huge vacuum in creation. Now I'm not saying they created the angels to fill the vacuum. I told you the concept of angels goes way back before the old testament.
But this fitted into their cosmology, to their whole view of god's creation. That god's creation begins with the absolute supreme being of God who is pure act, down to the lowest possible kind of matter which they thought of as the four or five elements. And so whatever we may think about this in our very sophisticated twentieth century, Let's not just dismiss it all as a myth because we can't afford to do it. There is empirical evidence to the contrary. I said empirical, and that's the kind of evidence of birth that we all love today.
If you can't get a hold of it through experience, throw it out. But we have a right then. I think in the in the church bringing these three archangels, Gabriel, Michael, and and the other one to our minds, We we have to reaffirm our faith in this. Not to overdo it, not to become emotional and sentimental about it, but to realize the vastness, the magnificence of God's creation. And that's the reason that first reading today is important because the emphasis there isn't upon those multitude of angels.
It's upon that supreme being, the ancient one as Daniel says, that this multitude of beings is giving their worship to. That's the point. The point isn't the multitude of angels. The point is the magnificence, the splendor, the absolute supremacy of god almighty, who while we can talk about him and think about him in human terms, it's the best we can do, nevertheless, cannot be captured by the human mind. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.