A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. When Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him, Jesus of word is is Philip called you. I saw you under the fig tree. Rabbi, said Nathaniel, you are the son of god. You are the king of Israel.
Jesus answered, do you believe just because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see much greater things than that. He went on to say, tell them, I solemnly assure you, you shall see the sky opened and the angel of god descending and ascending on the son of man. And this is the gospel of the lord. The In name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
A good friend of mine whose relationship to the Catholic church is questionable, he was born a good Irishman. Practically, every time I see him tells me that the finest sermon he ever heard was in a church in London on the subject of angels. John's a he's a mathematician, PhD in mathematics. He's a scientist. So I said, well, what why was that such a wonderful sermon?
He says, Well, first of all, because you can't know anything about angels. And secondly, that man was very eloquent. Now, that an uncommon view. What he what John was saying was this, that matters of religion are not a matter of truth. It's a whatever else you wanna call it, but, you know, it's not a matter of verifiable truth.
And it and as he uses the word truth, he's absolutely right. Absolutely right. Because if there's any such thing as a spirit, you certainly can't get ahold of it with your hands or see it or feel it or taste it or hear That's for sure. Now whatever you may think or I may think about angels, whatever they're the the Greek word needs to be sent. You can't avoid the fact, can't deny the fact that they crop up all over the place in the Old Testament, and they're very prominent in the New.
How people recognize them, I I don't know. For example, you know, when they tell you the story of the of the disciples coming and finding the open tomb on Easter Sunday, and they see angels in there. How do they know they were angels? How would I recognize an angel? I've never seen one.
I mean, except blue eyed blondes. What does an angel look like? I have the faintest idea what an angel look looks like. But let me tell you, in the days when you used to daily read Saint Thomas Aquinas' Sumer, you will remember, I am sure, vividly, I am equally sure, the amount of space he gives to the subject of angels. Why?
Because he didn't think angels were beyond human knowledge. First of all, we have a lot about angels in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And, of course, we know about angels outside of of the scripture. They go way back into Babylonia and goodness knows where. I remember writing a very learned paper on that years ago.
Now what Aquinas does and it gets you'll say this is very artificial, but it wasn't artificial with him. Because Aquinas had a view of the universe which was a totality, an integrated integrated means a whole thing, totality. And from the lowest form of non living matter, which he would have called the elements, although his idea of elements were the four, you know, earth, air, fire, and water. But his concept of the universe outside of god, because he was no pantheist, goes all the way from non living, what we call matter, all the way up to divinity. In between, you have all of creation.
Creation. Everything else depends upon god. And so you have, as Aquinas saw it, a continuity of existences, things. The highest form of matter sort of melts into the lowest form of living things, and we all know how true that is today. We can verify this.
And then the highest form of merely living things, vegetative life, goes into the lowest form of sensitive life. Then the highest form of sensitive life goes into the form of intellectual life. Think think of, of course, of a very smart dog or the chimpanzees. And then the highest form of sentient physical life goes into the form of pure spirits. Pure spirits.
A human being is a mixture, but then you have the pure spirits, and that's what Aquinas thought. That's his definition of an angel, a pure spirit, but still created by god. You don't have a lot of gods running around. And so he came to the conception of angel, not merely from from what he knew from scripture or revelation of god, teaching of the church, but he also knew a lot about angels on a on on a deductive basis from his conception of the universe. And a lot of Thomas's psychology is found in the Summa dealing with angels, pure spirit.
I know this is fascinating, but the point I wanna make is this conception of angels is not a total, unknown quantity. It surely isn't. As contrary to my dear friend John, it's not a totally unknown area. Today, we don't think enough about angels. When I you know, when I was a kid, you could go into anybody's house and see the the bedroom where the kids slept or tried to sleep, and what would you see?
You would see a picture on the wall. I know it was kind of, you know, camp. The log across the deep ravine, you know, and the little kid toddling across the log and over overseeing the child holding him on to the log is this great big angel. Well, let me tell you, the doctor of the church is we do have guardian angels. Whether each one has one angel or whether we have one angel for the whole crowd of us, I don't know, but the it's a defined doctrine of the church.
There's a there's consolation in this thought. A great deal of consolation. You'll say, oh, well, this is fiction. It's no more fiction than you're sitting in those pews and and waiting for the Eucharist where you I'll hold a host up and you I'll say, God, do you believe that? Why do you believe that?
In the last analysis, because the church says so. And and the church says equally so, there's such a thing as angels, and they have something to do with us. Now it's not very definite, but there's something there, and there's a lot there. And there's something there we ought to cultivate cultivate and think about. Of course, the whole thing is we talk about sin, but we don't talk about temptation anymore.
We don't talk think about being delivered from temptation. Most instances, the idea of getting rid of sin is to give into it. Of course, that's a very good way of doing it, I guess. It works. But that's not the idea of the church.
And that certainly is not the idea of Jesus Christ when he gave us the bread. Lead us not into temptation. We're supposed to avoid the temptations of sin. Sin doesn't happen out of the blue. We need protection.
We need help, and we need it when we need it most. Remember, temptation is attractive. Why people think that sin is ugly is beyond me. It's only ugly insofar as you have a conception of god's holiness. Nobody would commit sin if it was repulsive and ugly and all these adjectives they throw at you.
Sin's attractive. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as temptation, and we need a counterbalance. We need something to hold us together. Because as Newman said, when you have a conflict, as we have all the time, between a choice of god who has seen god, A choice between the abstract, principles, truths, all of this universal, you can't see it, touch, taste, or feel it. When you have that on the one side, as Newman said, and on the other side, all the attractiveness that comes through the senses, colorful, dynamic, moving, which one's going to win if we're left to ourselves?
It's it's it's not even the beginning of a fight. We're lost without Jesus. And he but how does our lord come to us? He doesn't come and grab us by the hair of our head, lift us out of temptation. First of all, he wants us to do our part.
And secondly, he gives us helps. And one of those helps has been the idea of angels. We call them guardian angels. Angel of god, my guard guardian dear. Let's think of that.
Let's think of that. I do not know do you see? When you talk about Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, you're talking about functions. Functions. They're called angels because they were sent.
These these words don't describe their essence or their substance at all. But because we can't know everything about something, it's perfectly ridiculous to say we can know that what we know is nothing and useless because what we know may be of the utmost utility, utilitarianism, if you wanna use the word. And so on this feast of these three great archangels, Rachel, Gabriel, Michael, let us renew our faith in this these re creatures. They are creatures of god. They are pure spirits, and they are part of our existence.
And when we need the most, they're there to help us. That's there's we need this encouragement, and it's not a fiction. It's based solidly on the word of god. He knows we need help. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit.
Amen.