I WAS in my second yr of junior school. My teacher was Mrs Laverty. It should have been soon after the beginning of the varsity yr, September 1972, when she asked the category who knew about St Michael. I used to be excited that I knew a solution; so my hand shot up, Hermione Granger-style. “His name is in my clothes!”
For the advantage of younger readers, until 2000 “St Michael” was an in-house brand name for Marks & Spencer’s clothing. I feel Mrs Laverty should have laughed at me. How else would the memory be burned into my brain?
In my childhood, angels were merely story characters, with tinsel wings produced from coat-hangers. If I were seeking to the secular world to show me about angels today, my most accessible clues would probably be emojis: they show white clothes, wings (no tinsel), halo, smile. One angel emoji on my mobile is available in six skin-colour options. Now that’s progress.
Popular culture is at variance with the Bible in some ways. But angels are a firmly biblical element in our faith, and yet with a presence in the favored imagination which more doctrinal elements of Christianity cannot rival. Might they be a resource for mission? Testing scripture against popular culture could show whether angels might help us to speak faith to people who find themselves in search of God at work on the earth.
Setting aside “St Michael” clothing, I actually have chosen three angelic examples from outside the religion which may give us an insight into this realm of existence. First, an example from popular music: angels, it declares, offer us “protection”, “love”, and “affection”. These characteristics don’t surface within the reading from Genesis, or within the Gospel for Michaelmas. But, in Revelation, Michael — captain of the heavenly host, the warrior-angel — protects God’s children against forces of spiritual wickedness (Ephesians 6.12).
“Love” and “affection”, though, usually are not conspicuous angelic attributes in scripture, unless we judge by the standard of their actions, akin to the care given by angels in, say, Mark 1.13, and the reassurance that they provide with such understanding in Luke 1.30, 2.9, and a couple of.43. Protection and communication are their characteristic activities. The two other archangels named within the Bible are Gabriel and Raphael: Gabriel is the angel of excellent news; Raphael is the companion-angel (from Tobit).
My second secular example comes from television, from what is well essentially the most memorable episode of the brand new era of Doctor Who, with the nastiest, scariest baddies. The episode is titled “Blink”, and the baddies are the Weeping Angels, stealers of lives. Psalm 78.49 corroborates the concept angels may be baddies. The Weeping Angels make me consider Edington Priory Church, Wiltshire, and the marvellous Lewys tomb, with its weeping angel at one corner. But there isn’t any fear there: in church, even weeping angels may be only good.
For my final secular example, I turn to a movie from 1938, Angels With Dirty Faces. It starred James Cagney because the gangster, Rocky Sullivan, and made such an impact on me that I avoided watching it again. I won’t spoil its famous ending. To begin with, I believed that the “angels” of the title were the youngsters that Rocky risked corrupting by his glamorous bad-boy image — a nameless host, in other words, just like the hosts of angels in scripture.
Now, I feel otherwise. The angel with a unclean face is Rocky himself. He has a private name — like Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. He is an angel who represents complex human moral decisions, and ways wherein mortals can manifest and communicate the love of God. Not all those ways are apparent from every angle. We can readily describe a form or helpful human as being “like an angel”. But we may additionally make room for the converse possibility: that those we interact with could also be angels within the guise of human beings (Hebrews 13.2).
Angels ascend and descend on the Son of Man, Jesus says in John (1.51). This will likely be possible because heaven will likely be opened to permit access by the Son of Man — and Nathanael will see it occur. In this, he stands for us; for we, too, shall see “greater things” than the little that we now know of God’s love in Christ, which is already as much as we are able to bear. So, angels exist, to assist us see God in us, and us in God.
