In every celebration of the Holy Eucharist, we acknowledge their songs of praise, but most of us never hear them. We imagine their appearance without ever having seen them. We don’t pray to them, but we believe their help has saved many a day. “They” are angels, some of the most overworked and least understood of all God’s creatures. On September 29, we celebrate their presence and their blessed ministry on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, traditionally known as Michaelmas.

The word for angel in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament (malak) and the Greek of the New Testament (aggelos) translates as either “angel” or “messenger.” But delivering messages is only part of an angel’s job description. Above all, they praise God continuously, and in so doing, are prototypes for the Church. Then they go to work assisting God’s people and punishing God’s enemies. They were created as intermediate beings, between heaven and earth. Psalm 8 reminds us that we are “but little lower than the angels.” Yet even at death, we do not become angels, despite popular belief. Humankind is a separate order of being, “angelic” at times perhaps, but destined never to be angels.

Angels in Scripture
Angels make their appearance early in scripture, in the first chapter of Genesis. God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and in that mysterious “us,” the company of heaven makes its presence known. In the Old Testament, these heavenly beings are variously called “sons of God,” “heavenly host,” even “morning stars.” Clearly they kept close company with the Almighty in the days when God walked and talked with God’s people. Later in scripture, when God becomes more transcendent, the angels seem to appear more frequently.

Scripture describes angels as everything from winged creatures with several heads to human-looking men. The most fanciful among them are the cherubim, mentioned dozens of times, and the seraphim, mentioned only once. Cherubim came in a variety of shapes but always with wings. They sometimes each had one face, sometimes two or four — faces of men, or of a bull or an ox or an eagle. Clearly, these were not the cherubs of Renaissance Christian art! Cherubim guarded the gates of Eden with a flaming sword so Adam and Eve could not return (Genesis 3), and cherubim appeared in the sky in Ezekiel’s visions (chapters 1 and 10). Images of cherubim decorated the arc of the covenant and Solomon’s temple. Their close relatives, the seraphim, appear only once, in Isaiah 6, where they attend the throne of God. These creatures had six wings: “With two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.” When Isaiah protested that he was a man of unclean lips, one of the seraphs flew to him with a piece of coal, touched his lips and announced that his guilt had departed and his sin was blotted out. These angels also spoke the words that Jews and Christians still repeat in faith, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Fallen Angels
To the surprise of many Christians, Satan first appeared in the Bible as one of these “heavenly beings” (or in some translations, “sons of God”) in the book of Job. He came before God fresh “from going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it” — just like an angel. In this first appearance, he is Job’s “accuser,” but Satan’s persona eventually evolved into the personification of evil we meet in the New Testament. He is not the first of the angels to go bad. In Genesis 6, we meet the nephilim, the “sons of God” who rape the “daughters of humans.” The word nephilim may have come from the Hebrew root for “to fall.” Were the nephilim the first fallen angels?

Archangels
In later biblical writings — in Daniel (written after the Israelites return from exile), in the Apocrypha (the inter-testamental writings) and in the New Testament — we first meet the archangels. Legend has it that there were seven, but only three are named in scripture: Michael (the warrior angel, pictured with a sword), Gabriel (“man of God,” the bearer of good news, who announces to their mothers the coming births of John the Baptist and Jesus), and Raphael (“God has healed,” associated with healing). Scripture does not explain the difference between angels and archangels, but in medieval angelology (listed in the hymn “Ye watchers and ye holy ones,” #618 in The 1982 Hymnal), archangels are listed second from the bottom, just above angels, and followed by virtues, powers, princedoms, dominions, thrones, cherubim and seraphim.

These human-like spiritual creatures, the archangels, appeared in Jewish literature at the same time that Greek culture began to influence Hebrew thought with its many gods who looked human but had divine powers for both good and bad. It was at this same time that Satan, who walked the earth and appeared before God in the Book of Job, became known as the devil. Certainly a contributing factor was that Greek language allowed for more abstract thinking about the supernatural than did Hebrew, but perhaps it was also a sense that God was further away than had once been true in the days of Adam and Eve, or even Abraham and Sarah. In the New Testament we hear the voice of God only rarely: at the baptism of Jesus and at his transfiguration. Instead, angels carry messages and do God’s bidding with some regularity: to Elizabeth, to Mary, to Joseph, to Jesus in the wilderness and again at Gethsemane, at the empty tomb after the resurrection, even to Peter in prison.

Guardian Angels
The tradition of the “guardian angel” in Church tradition has only a few sources in scripture. In Matthew 18:10, Jesus tells the people, “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.” In the apocryphal book of Tobit, Anna weeps for her departing son but Tobit reassures his wife that he will return to them: “For a good angel will accompany him; his journey will be successful, and he will come back in good health” (Tobit 5:22). Despite the paucity of biblical evidence, however, Church scholars gave these personal angels considerable attention. St. Ambrose believed that the righteous person was deprived of a guardian angel so that in the harder struggle against evil, this person would attain greater glory. Honorius of Autun in the 12th century taught that every human soul, when embodied, was entrusted to an angel. Thomas Aquinas believed that these busy guardians were of the lowest class of angels. In the Roman Catholic Church, guardian angels have their own feast on October 2.

Christian artists in the Renaissance turned the powerful, sometimes frightening angels of scripture into the chubby, charming children that adorn teacups and T-shirts today, but these cherubs have no basis in scripture. The angels of the Old and New Testament did not dance on the heads of pins, but fittingly represented the glory and power of the Almighty, whom they served well.

There are those among us who have seen angels, or felt their presence — others who know for certain that they were rescued from disaster by a protective angel. A sister in an Episcopal religious order once explained that during the Eucharist one morning, she clearly saw angels filling the chapel where they worshipped. “I never saw them again after that day,” she said, “but I always knew they were there.”

And so on September 29, we pray: