Ascending and Descending with the Angels, Feast of the Archangels, September 29, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael
September 29, 2015
Rev 12:7-12, Ps 138, Jn 1:47-51

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Gospel, Jesus describes for us the activity of angels: “ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” They “ascend” in order to serve the Lord and “descend” in order to serve us on behalf of God.
• Their first and most important activity is to praise God. “Praise him, all you angels,” the Psalms say (Ps 148:2). They want to help us to learn how to praise God with them. We prayed together in today’s Responsorial Psalm, “In the sight of the angels, I will sing your praises, Lord!” Under their watchful gaze, they want to help us to be able to say, both in this world and forever, “I will give thanks to you, O Lord, with all my heart, for you have heard the words of my mouth; in the presence of the angels I will sing your praise; I will worship at your holy temple and give thanks to your name.” They help us to do that obviously in the Mass, which features two great angelic hymns, the one that that derives from what the angels chanted on Christmas morning, the “Glory to God in the Highest,” and the one that comes from what the Prophet Isaiah saw in an angelic vision, the “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Today is a day in which we recognize that we’re not praying alone, but that the angels are helping us to praise and thank God with all our being.
• Their second activity is to descend upon us to bring us God’s assistance. The Archangel Gabriel brought Mary God’s word, Raphael brought Tobias God’s accompaniment, Michael has brought the Church protection. Their names say a lot about how they seek to serve us. Gabriel means God’s strength and he seeks to strengthen us, like he strengthened the sinless Virgin Mary, not to be afraid of responding to God’s call. Raphael means “God’s medicine” and he strives to heal us not of physical cataracts like he did Raguel but rather everything that hinders our seeing God. Michael means “He is who like God” and he strives to defends us from all evil that renders us dissimilar to God who is holy, holy, holy. Their presence accompanies us in a particular way throughout every daily Mass. We invoke Gabriel before every Mass beings as we pray the Angelus together and ponder the Good News that never becomes old news. We invoke St. Michael at the end of Mass asking us to defend us together with Jesus whom we now bear inside. And St. Raphael seeks to help us to live the Mass, the medicine of God, the medicine of immortality, through the day into eternity.
• I’d like to ponder together a little the prayer to St. Michael that we say together to conclude every Mass. This prayer was decreed by the erudite Pope Leo XIII in 1886 because he saw the work that the devil was trying to do in the Church and in the world. He wanted everyone in the Church to grasp this reality and receive protection. We need to be far more worried about these spiritual assassins than we do about ISIS or Al-Qaeda, but few of us are. The prayer to St. Michael was said after every Catholic Mass until 1964, when it was made optional. Many of us, seeing what has happened in the last fifty years, have been bringing it back after Mass. By praying this prayer, we acknowledge publicly that not only do the good angels exist but also Satan and the evil ones. In the Book of Revelation that was our first reading today, we saw what St. Michael has already done, throwing  Satan and his angels “down to earth.” We pray together that he do some further: to throw them down from earth to hell. “St. Michael the Archangel,” we pray, “defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust down to hell Satan and all his evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.”
• The way for us to respond to that protection is given to us immediately after by the “loud voice” that resonated in heaven. “Salvation and power have come” with the casting out of the “Accuser” who “night and day accused [us] before God.” As we see in the Book of Job, the devil is always accusing us before God and accusing God before us. But he was defeated by God through Michael in a special three fold way: “They conquered him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death.” Three things:
  • The blood of the Lamb — This points not only to Christ’s triumph on the Cross but our sharing it through receiving his body and blood in the Eucharist, being washed by it in baptism, by being repeatedly bathed in it through confession. St. Michael wants to defend us and lead us to victory by uniting us to the blood of Jesus.
  • The word of their testimony — This is first the word of God that those who triumph had heard, received, treasured, enfleshed, lived and proclaimed. This is the word of faith they proclaim through white and red martyrdom or witness. This points to how Michael wants to lead us to God’s word. Jesus defeated the devil’s temptations in the desert precisely by his knowledge of God’s word, so that he would not be vulnerable to the devil’s manipulation of the word by half-truths. Michael wants to defend us by the same shield of the word of God and to make us witnesses cooperating with him in shielding others from the devil’s lies by the truth God has given to us.
  • Death instead of “love for life” — Jesus is clear to us that in order to save our life we must be willing to lose it. The greatest weapon in Satan’s arsenal is our love for this-worldly life. If we’re too afraid to die for Christ who died for us, he will have found our price and sooner or later he’ll seek to make a Judas. It’s only when we, like the martyrs, are willing to give all that we can be protected from his wiles, whether we face martyrdom or not.
• The great way Michael, Gabriel and Raphael help us to enter into their victory is here at Mass, when we hear God’s word in testimony, where we call out them and all the angels to “pray for us to the Lord our God” for mercy in the Confiteor, where we receive Jesus’ blood shed for us in remission of sins, in remission of all our complicity with the devil, in which we respond to God’s help to decrease so that Christ in his risen life will increase within us, giving fruit to our life after we’ve fallen to the ground and died like a grain of wheat, and finally in strengthening us to go as Gabriel’s announcing the word, accompanied by Raphael, and defended by Michael. This is where we receive God’s strength, his medicine, and his protection, to help us to do our own double service, ascending to God and descending to serve others, as they do for us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: