Please read the passage before the homily.
We take a break from Luke’s Gospel to reflect on angels. In the literature of the Bible and of the Church, our understanding of angels has grown. In the incident of the burning bush in Exodus, angel of the Lord seems to be a respectful way of referring to God without using the name of God directly. In our day, we use gosh and gee whiz as ways of referring to God without saying God. So, the angel of the Lord covers for the Lord out of respect for God.
Eventually we came to use angels to refer to the wise and valiant persons who make up the heavenly court. Gabriel serves as one who speaks for God; Rafael heals for God, and Michael is the Five Star General of God’s great army. Sometimes we have spoken of Jesus as God’s Angel. We have given them names and we have used them as signs of how God protects and guards us.
Among Christian philosophers, angels stand between God in his uncreated bodyless divine nature and humans with our bodily created nature. The angels are between us and God as having created natures, but without bodies.
Today Jesus said that he saw Nathanael under a fig tree studying the word of God. Jesus promised him that Nathanael would see the heavens opened and God’s angels coming and going between heaven and earth over the Son of Man, just as the patriarch Jacob had experienced in his escape from his brother Esau.
We celebrate angels because we celebrate God’s presence among us in many ways. Sometimes we have experienced God in a burning bush of nature, in sacred dreams at night, in narrow escapes from danger, in unexpected messages from somewhere not known, or in other angelic ways that God has of communicating with us.
Some may doubt the existence of angels, but I hope that everyone experiences the presence of God in their lives.