A reflection for Tuesday within the Eighteenth Week after Pentecost — In Dedicatione S. Michaëlis Archangeli, I classis (29 September)
The Mass of this day opens not with the voice of men but with a command addressed to the angels themselves: Benedicite Dominum, omnes Angeli eius: potentes virtute, qui facitis verbum eius, ad audiendam vocem sermonum eius — “Bless the Lord, all ye his angels: you that are mighty in strength, and execute his word, hearkening to the voice of his orders” (Ps. 102:20). The Church on earth turns to the Church in heaven and bids it do what it has never ceased doing. And by the time the Mass ends, in the Communion antiphon Benedicite omnes Angeli Domini Dominum (Dan. 3:58), she has taught us that the angels’ whole existence is summed up in two acts: they execute His word, and they bless Him. They go out on His errands, and they return to His praise. That rhythm of going out and coming back is the key to everything the Church sets before us today.
I. The feast and its title
The title of the feast is worth noticing, because it is not simply “St. Michael.” It is the Dedication of St. Michael — the anniversary of a church. The oldest Roman witness to the day, the Leonine Sacramentary, keeps the dedication of a basilica of the Archangel on the Via Salaria outside the city, and from that local Roman anniversary grew the universal feast of Michaelmas. The Church, in other words, honoured the Prince of the heavenly host first by consecrating a place on earth where men might pray under his protection. It is fitting: the angels are not remote spectators of our worship. The Offertory of this Mass shows us an angel standing at the altar with a golden censer, “and there was given to him much incense… and the smoke of the incense of the prayers of the saints ascended up before God from the hand of the angel” (Apoc. 8:3-4).
Since the reform of the rubrics in 1960 the older spring feast of the Apparition of St. Michael has been removed from the General Calendar, so that the whole of the Roman Church’s liturgical devotion to the Archangel now gathers on this day, kept as a feast of the first class. Within a few days the Church will keep the Holy Guardian Angels (2 October), and the two feasts should be read together: today the captain of the host, on Friday the guardian at each man’s side.
II. The Epistle: revelation comes down by a ladder
The Epistle (Apoc. 1:1-5) is the opening of the Apocalypse, and at first sight it seems to say little of angels. Look again at its first sentence:
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to make known to his servants the things which must shortly come to pass: and signified, sending by his angel to his servant John.”
Count the steps. The Father gives; Christ receives; Christ sends by His angel; the angel shows to John; John writes to the seven churches; the churches read and hear. Truth descends from the Father of lights by a ladder of ministry, rung beneath rung, until it reaches the ear of the least believer in the least church of Asia.
St. Bede, in his Explanation of the Apocalypse, draws attention to this order and notes that the revelation is said to be given to Christ according to His humanity, since as God He possesses from eternity all that the Father has. The Word made flesh receives in order to give; and He chooses to give through the angels. This is no accident of the text. St. Paul asks of the holy angels, “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall receive the inheritance of salvation?” (Heb. 1:14). St. Augustine gives the classic definition that the Church has repeated ever since: angel is the name of an office, not of a nature. By nature they are spirits; they are called angels — messengers — because they are sent (Enarrationes in Psalmos 103, sermo 1). St. Gregory the Great takes this further in his thirty-fourth homily on the Gospels: the names of the individual archangels, he teaches, are given not for what they are in themselves but for what they do among us. Gabriel, “the strength of God,” is sent to announce Him who came to overthrow the powers of the air. Raphael, “the medicine of God,” is sent to heal. And Michael, “Who is like God?”, is sent whenever something of marvellous power is to be done, so that by his very name it may be understood that no one can do what God alone can do.
The Epistle then passes on the greeting of grace “from him that is, and that was, and that is to come, and from the seven spirits which are before his throne.” The Fathers read these seven spirits in two ways. Many, following the sevenfold gifts of Isaias 11, understand them of the one Holy Ghost in the fullness of His operations; others see in them the seven angels who stand before God, of whom the Archangel Raphael says, “I am one of the seven, who stand before the Lord” (Tob. 12:15). The Church has not bound us to one reading, and on this feast the second has an evident resonance: grace comes to the churches from the throne, and the throne is surrounded by ministers who stand and who are sent.
Finally, the Epistle closes on Christ Himself: “the faithful witness, the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth, who hath loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood.” Here is the measure of the angelic office. Michael is a prince (Dan. 10:13; 12:1); Christ is the Prince of princes. Every rung of the ladder exists for the sake of Him who stands at its head and at its foot — the Son of Man upon whom, as He told Nathanael, the angels of God ascend and descend (John 1:51).
III. The Gospel: “Who thinkest thou is the greater?”
The Gospel (Matt. 18:1-10) is chosen for its last verse, but it begins with the Apostles’ quarrel: Quis putas maior est in regno cælorum? Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
We have heard this question before in this season, and we must hear it again today, because on the feast of St. Michael it takes on a startling new depth. For the first sin in all creation was precisely an answer to this question. The prophet puts on the lips of the fallen Lucifer the words, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the most High” (Is. 14:13-14). The Fathers read this passage, together with Ezechiel 28, as the portrait of the devil’s fall, and St. Thomas teaches that the sin of the angels could only have been pride: a desire to be like God in a way not ordained, to possess beatitude by the power of their own nature rather than as a gift of grace (Summa Theologiae I, q. 63).
Against that first and deadliest claim to greatness stands the Archangel whose very name is a question turned the other way: Mi-ka-El — “Who is like God?” Lucifer asked, in effect, “Who is greater than I?” Michael answers, “Who is like God?” — and in the answer the whole of the angelic fidelity is contained. “There was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon” (Apoc. 12:7), and the weapon of that war was not superior strength but superior humility. St. Jude records the same temper in a smaller encounter: when Michael contended with the devil over the body of Moses, “he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee” (Jude 9). The greatest of the created spirits will not even claim for himself the right to curse his enemy. He hands judgment back to God.
Now return to the Gospel. Our Lord calls a little child and sets him in medio eorum, in the midst of the disputing Apostles. St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, is careful to say that the Lord commands not the age of childhood but its innocence: that we should possess by effort and virtue what the little one possesses by his years. St. John Chrysostom describes that innocence in the child: free from envy, free from vainglory, untroubled by the desire for the first place. What the child is by nature, the holy angels are by a choice made once and for ever. The child in the midst of the Apostles is a small, earthly image of Michael in the midst of the host of heaven.
IV. “See that you despise not one of these little ones”
Then the Gospel darkens. “He that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.” And the Lord goes further: if hand or foot or eye scandalize thee, cut it off and cast it from thee.
Both St. Jerome and St. John Chrysostom read the hand, the foot and the eye not merely of the members of the body but also of those persons who are as close and as dear to us as our own limbs — friends, kinsmen, associates — when they draw us into sin. Better to lose even these than to lose God. The scandalizer, we should notice, does in miniature what the dragon did on the grand scale: he uses his nearness and his influence to drag the lesser down with him. The devil’s pride did not remain private. “His tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven” (Apoc. 12:4). Pride always recruits.
And so we arrive at the verse for which this Gospel was appointed:
“See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18:10)
St. Jerome draws from this the conclusion that has become the common teaching of the Church: great is the dignity of souls, that each has, from the hour of its birth, an angel deputed to guard it. St. Thomas treats the question at length and holds that every man, the baptized and the unbaptized alike, has an angel appointed to his guardianship for the whole course of this life (Summa Theologiae I, q. 113).
Chrysostom draws out the force of the argument: the Lord does not merely say that the little ones have angels, but that their angels always see the face of the Father. The guardian of the least child is not a lesser angel on the margins of heaven; he stands in the very presence. How then dare we despise one whom such a minister attends? St. Hilary of Poitiers adds a note that binds the Gospel to the Offertory of this Mass: the angels of the little ones, he says, daily offer to God the prayers of those who are being saved through Christ. That is exactly what the Church sets before our eyes at the Offertory — the angel standing by the altar, the incense of the prayers of the saints rising from his hand.
V. Synthesis: the angels go out and come back
The whole Mass may now be gathered into one movement. All things come forth from God and all things return to Him: this is the great pattern of creation that St. Thomas follows in the Summa, the exitus and reditus of the creature. The Epistle and the Gospel give us the two halves of it, and the angels stand at the hinge.
The Epistle is the going out. The revelation of Jesus Christ descends from the Father, through the Son, through the angel, to John, to the churches, to us. The Introit names this mission: the angels execute His word.
The Gospel is the return. The little ones — the humble, the childlike, those who have laid down the question “Who is the greatest?” — are the ones who come back; and their angels, who descend to guard them, never cease to behold the Face to which they are leading them. The Offertory shows the return in figure: the prayers of the saints ascending with the incense. The Communion names it: the angels bless the Lord.
Between these two movements stands Michael, and his name tells us the condition of both. No one is sent by God who has not first confessed “Who is like God?” And no one returns to God who still asks “Who is greater than I?” The Archangel’s name is the whole of the Gospel’s lesson compressed into a single cry. Pride is the refusal to descend and therefore the impossibility of ascending; humility is the ladder itself.
VI. A word for practice
The feast makes two claims upon us. The first is that we are not alone: an angel who beholds the Face of the Father has been given charge over us “to keep thee in all thy ways” (Ps. 90:11). The second is that we are not the centre: we are among the little ones, or else we are nowhere in the kingdom at all.
St. Bernard, preaching on that verse of the ninetieth psalm, asks what the angels’ charge over us should produce in us, and answers with three words: reverence for their presence, devotion for their good will, and confidence for their protection. Let those three words govern the day.
First, reverence. St. Bernard counsels that in whatever place, in whatever corner, we should bear ourselves with reverence toward our angel, and not dare do in his presence what we would be ashamed to do in ours. Examine yourself today on the sins you commit in “private.” There is no private.
Second, devotion. Greet your guardian angel by name of office each morning with the Angele Dei, and thank him at night. Consider, too, the guardians of others: the child you correct, the colleague you are tempted to despise, the stranger who annoys you in traffic. Each is attended by a spirit who sees the Father’s face. See that you despise not one of them.
Third, confidence. Where you are under attack — by temptation, by discouragement, by the slow grind of a long fight — do not rail. Imitate the Archangel: Imperet tibi Dominus. “The Lord command thee.” Say it, and hand the battle back to God.
And beneath all three, take into your own mouth Michael’s question, and let it be the examination of your conscience. Wherever you find yourself asking, in some room, conversation or rivalry, Who is the greatest?, answer it with his name: Quis ut Deus?
The Collect
Deus, qui miro ordine Angelorum ministeria hominumque dispensas: concede propitius; ut, a quibus tibi ministrantibus in cælo semper assistitur, ab his in terra vita nostra muniatur.
“O God, who in a wonderful order dost dispense the ministries of Angels and of men: mercifully grant that our life on earth may be defended by those who, ministering unto Thee, ever stand before Thee in heaven.”
The Collect is the whole feast in one sentence. The wonderful order is the ladder of the Epistle; those who ever stand before Thee in heaven are the angels who, in the Gospel, always see the face of the Father; and the petition is that their standing in heaven should become our defence on earth.
Aspiration
Sancte Michaël Archangele, defende nos in prœlio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio. “Holy Michael Archangel, defend us in the battle, that we may not perish in the dreadful judgment.” (the Alleluia verse of the day)
Suggested devotion: the Prayer to St. Michael appointed by Pope Leo XIII among the prayers after Low Mass, said slowly and with attention to its every clause; or the Sorrowful Mysteries, pausing at the Agony in the Garden, where “there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him” (Luke 22:43) — the Lord of the angels consenting to be ministered to.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the angels in the order of St. Thomas: their nature as pure spirits, their single and irrevocable choice, the fall of the demons through pride, and the guardianship of men — why the angels’ confirmation in glory makes them the perfect ministers of our return. The Sacred Liturgy path follows the angelic thread through the Mass itself: the Sanctus joined to the song of the Seraphim, the Supplices te rogamus in which the Church begs that the Sacrifice be carried by the hands of the holy Angel to the altar on high, and the Leonine prayers that closed the Low Mass for eighty years. The Guardian Angels on 2 October is the natural next step.
Sancte Michaël Archangele, ora pro nobis. Quis ut Deus?
A note on sources. Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims version. The Fathers are presented here in faithful paraphrase with their loci: St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 103; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 34; St. Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis on 1:1; St. Jerome, Commentarii in Matthæum on 18:1-10; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthæum on the same chapter; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthæum on 18:10; St. Bernard, Sermones super Psalmum Qui habitat, on Ps. 90:11. St. Thomas is cited from the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, qq. 63 and 113. That Michael’s name was itself his battle-cry against Lucifer is a devout reading of his name and of Apocalypse 12, not a matter of record, and is offered here in that spirit.