"You mighty ones": Concerning the angels

Icon, Archangel Michael (Novgorod, Russia, 21st c.)

"The LORD has set his throne in heaven,

    and his kingship has dominion over all.

Bless the LORD, you angels of his,

you mighty ones who do his bidding,

    and hearken to the voice of his word.

Bless the LORD, all you his hosts,

    you ministers of his who do his will.

Bless the LORD, all you works of his,

in all places of his dominion;

    bless the LORD, O my soul."

— Ps. 103:19–22

If Christian ministers are “ambassadors of a disputed Sovereign,”[1] the feast of St. Michael and All Angels [2] reminds us that humans are not the only ministers of God.  For on this feast, we praise God, “who hast ordained and constituted the ministries of angels and men in a wonderful order.”  Angels also are “ambassadors of a disputed Sovereign,” creatures witnessing to the rule of the triune Lord.

Angels are creatures.  This point is of fundamental theological importance, especially because it entails that the fallen angels are also creatures.  Thus, “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12:9), is not an embodiment of evil balanced equally against the good, but one of God’s good creatures who, in turning away from God, became deeply damaged.

The holy angels are messengers (which is what the Greek word angelos means), servants of God who bear witness to the surprising power of God.  In the biblical narrative, angels appear at critical junctures (especially at the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, during the precarious first days of the church, and at the Eschaton), participating in the accomplishment of that to which they bear witness.  Thus, Gregory the Great writes that “whenever some act of wondrous power must be performed,” the archangel Michael (whose name means “Who is like God?”) is sent, “so that action and name may make it clear that no one can do what God does by his own superior power.”[3]  Likewise, when Gabriel (“The Strength of God”) was sent to Mary “to announce the One who appeared in humility to quell the cosmic powers,” then “God’s strength announced the coming of the Lord of the heavenly powers, mighty in battle.” [4]  Perhaps we might even say that angels are the witness they bear:  “That a Virgin conceives is not merely what Gabriel talks about but is the very reality of Gabriel.”[5]

The holy angels enjoy unbroken fellowship with the triune Lord, and through Christ Jesus the Mediator we humans are also restored to fellowship with the same Lord.  Therefore, the communion of saints includes both humans and angels.  Augustine puts it well:  “[W]hen the Scripture says, ‘As for me, my true good is to cling to God’ [Ps. 73:28] it refers not only to the good for mankind, but first and foremost, to the good of the holy angels.  Those who share in this good have holy fellowship with him to whom they adhere, and also among themselves; and they are one City of God, and at the same time they are his living sacrifice and his living temple.”[6]  Our fellowship with the angels is most evident when, “with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven,” we give thanks, saying,

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts:
Heaven and earth are full of thy Glory.
Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High.”

[1] Richard John Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry.

[2] September 29.  Marked today because this year September 29 fell on a Sunday, which is always a feast of our Lord.  The date of the feast commemorates the dedication of a sixth-century (?) basilica to St. Michael on the Salarian Way outside of Rome.

[3] Gregory the Great, Homily 34 on the Gospels 8–9, in J. Robert Wright, Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, p. 491.

[4] Ibid., p. 492.

[5] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:125.

[6] Augustine, City of God 12.9.2.

St. Christopher the Dog-headed

Icon, Мученик Христофор (Matryr Christopher) (20th c., Suzdal, Russia)

This summer in a monastery museum in Suzdal, Russia, I came across something strange: an icon depicting a military saint with the head of a ferocious-looking beast.  And, as if this wasn’t strange enough, the saint in question turned out to be none other than St. Christopher!  Of course, I had to find out what this was all about.

According to the earliest accounts, St. Christopher was a soldier martyred for his faith in Syrian Antioch round about the year 300. [1]  According to all the accounts, he was named Reprebus (or, Reprobus, literally, “wicked”), but after his baptism he was named Christopher (literally, “Christ-bearer”).  By 452 there was a church dedicated to him in Bithynia; the earliest Greek passions likely date from the sixth century and the earliest Latin passions from the ninth century in France.  These early accounts gave rise to the depiction of St. Christopher with a dog’s head, because they describe him as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people.  For example, a late ninth-century Latin manuscript describes him thus:  

“There was a certain man who, since he was a foreigner from the land of man-eaters, had a terrible appearance, a dog's head as it were [qui habebat terribilem visionem et quasi canino capite].”

And again:

“His head was terrifying, like that of a dog [Caput ejus terribile ita ut canis est].  His hair was very long, and gleamed like gold.  His eyes were like the morning star, and his teeth like the tusks of a boar.  Words are not sufficient to tell of his greatness.” [2]

The Latin tradition appears not to have taken the description literally.  (It did, however, add embellishments, so that the medieval western accounts—which reached their final form in the wildly popular thirteenth-century Golden Legend—depict the saint as a giant who carried the child Jesus across a river on his shoulders.)  In contrast, the Greek tradition did take the description of the martyr quite literally—hence the icons depicting St. Christopher as dog-headed (Gk: κυνοκεφαλος, kunokephalos).

But why do the ancient accounts describe Reprebus/Christopher as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people in the first place?  The short answer is that they do so in order to emphasize his foreignness.  

In the earliest accounts, Reprebus is captured and forced to serve as a soldier in the numerus Marmaritarum (“Unit of the Marmitae”), which means that he was one of the Marmitae, a people who lived in the region in northern Africa known to the ancients as Marmarica. [3]  This fact is significant because, in ancient literature, mythic characteristics accrued to Africa (and India) owing to their location at the edge of the known world, the oikoumenē.  Both continents were defined by their supposed abundance of natural wonders, of bizarre and inexplicable phenomena.  The Greeks even had a proverb about this: “Libya always brings forth some new thing.” [4]

Icon, Christopher "Cynephelous" (17th c., Asia Minor),
Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens

Ancients and medievals delighted in cataloguing the reported wonders of Africa and Asia.  In these catalogues of wonders, Cynocephalics (Dog-heads) appeared alongside other “monstrous races”—One-eyes, Ear-sleepers, Shadow-feet, and No-noses; races of hermaphrodites, of pygmies, and of anthropophagi (cannibals).  For example, in the fifth century BC the Greek physician and historian, Ctesias of Cnidus, wrote of a people living in the mountains of India who have the heads of dogs and who communicate by barking.  Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) drew on Ctesias’ account, including the Dog-heads in his Natural History in a section on “the wonderful forms of different nations.”  They even make an appearance in Augustine’s City of God under his discussion of whether “certain monstrous races of men [quaedam monstrosa hominum genera], spoken of in secular history,” are also descendants of Adam, that is, are truly human (civ. 16.8.1).  And the late fifteenth-century Nuremberg Chronicle contains a section on “strange peoples”, in which Dog-heads figure prominently.  (Here is Beloit College’s edition.)

Interestingly, although Augustine was skeptical about the truth of the reports of Pliny et al., he stands in a long tradition of philosophical and theological consideration of the “monstrous races” in order to ask what it means to be human.  This tradition extends at least through the Enlightenment, especially with respect to that most monstrous of races, the anthropophagi.

Reprebus, the cynocephalic cannibal from the edge of the world, is the Other par excellence.  The story of his conversion and martyrdom serves in part to illustrate the liberality of God’s love extending even to those whose very humanity is contested.  Indeed, the author of the eighth-century Passion from which I have been quoting states explicitly that he is relating the saint’s story in order to teach that the Lord rewards even converts from “nations who are only recently converted to the Lord,” and frequently refers to God as diligens humanum genus, “the lover of the human race.”  St. Christopher the Dog-headed, however fantastic, bears witness to the power of God’s love to transform even the unlikeliest, to do more than we can ask or imagine.

[1] David Woods, professor of classics at University College Cork, has an excellent page devoted to St. Christopher on his website, The Military Martyrs.  

[2] “Passio Sancti Christophori, martyris” [= BHL 1764], Anal. Boll. X (1891), pp. 394ff.  Translated by David Wood (here).  The passion is well worth reading.

[3] David Woods, “The Origin of the Cult of St. Christopher" (October 1999), The Military Martyrs.

[4] James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, 1992), p. 88.

Notes on the Transfiguration

Icon of the Transfiguration, attributed to Theophanes the Greek
(15th c., Moscow) (Tretyakov Gallery)

"…and on the mountain he flashes like lightning, and becomes more luminous than the sun, revealing the mystery of the future"—Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration (Oration 29), 19

I

While praying on the mountain, the Lord Jesus was transfigured before Peter and John and James.  They saw his glory when “his face shone like the sun” (Mt. 17:2) and his clothing became radiant white, flashing out like lightning (Lk. 9:29).  Although “Peter and his companions were weighed down by sleep,” they stayed awake and saw his glory and Moses and Elijah talking with him (9:32).  Did the disciples hear what was said?  Did they comprehend what was said of the Jesus’ departure?  Or were they like infants listening to the speech of adults?

When Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus of his departure, did they speak of what they and all the prophets had declared concerning him?  Did they speak of how it was necessary that the Messiah should suffer betrayal and death before entering into his glory?  (Lk. 24:25–27)  Did speaking with them strengthen Jesus as the days drew near for his departure?  Did they strengthen him now as he set his face toward Jerusalem as the angel would at his agony in the garden?  (9:51; 22:43)

Yet the voice from heaven—”This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”—spoke for the benefit of Peter and his companions, confirming Peter’s confession of Jesus as “the Messiah of God” and commanding they heed what he says (Lk. 9:35, 20).  For what Jesus had said recently was not easy to hear.  Only a week ago he had told them he must suffer and die and afterwards told them, “If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:22, 23).

II

St. Thomas Aquinas on the transfiguration:

“After having foretold his Passion to his disciples, our Lord had persuaded them to follow the path of his Passion.  Now in order for someone to go straight along the way, he must have some foreknowledge of the end; just as an archer will not shoot the arrow straight unless he has first seen the target he is aiming at. […] And this is especially necessary when the way is rough and difficult, the journey wearisome, but the end delightful.  Now Christ underwent the Passion in order to obtain glory […]; according to Luke, Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?  To which glory he leads those who follow in the footsteps of his Passion; according to Acts, We have to endure many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God.  And so it was fitting for him to manifest his glorious splendour (which is to be transfigured), according to which he will configure those who belong to him; as it is written, He will configure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body.  For this reason Bede says, By his loving foresight he prepared them to endure adversity bravely by allowing them to taste for a short time the contemplation of everlasting joy.”*

III

Peter sees the manifestation of the glory of the resurrection and finds it desirable, so he proposes staying on the mountain with Moses and Elijah.  But he spoke, “not knowing what he said” (Lk. 9:34), for his proposal entailed Jesus not going to suffering and death in Jerusalem.  In other words, Peter’s proposal is effectively the same as his rebuke of Jesus predicting his Passion, to which Jesus responded:  “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mt. 16:23).  Accordingly, Origen speculates that Peter was unwittingly playing into the hands of the Tempter, who sought to turn Jesus aside “from the dispensation whose characteristic was suffering that brought salvation to men” and “to draw away Jesus, as if calling upon him no longer to condescend to men, and come to them, and undergo death for them, but to abide on the high mountain with Moses and Elijah.”**

Following a similar line of thought, Augustine says that Peter did not understand that he would receive the rest he sought on the mountain through the work of love.  To remain with Christ is reserved for Peter after death, but he should come down from the mountain to follow his Lord in the way of suffering: “Come down, Peter…For now, Jesus says: "Go down to toil on earth, to serve on earth, to be scorned and crucified on earth. Life goes down to be killed; Bread goes down to suffer hunger; the Way goes down to be exhausted on his journey; the Spring goes down to suffer thirst; and you refuse to suffer?’”***

IV

The voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; Listen to him!”  The Son, that is, who commands, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (Jn. 13:34).

* Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, 45, 1, co. [Blackfriars edition quoted.  Link to Benzinger edition here.]

** Origen, Commentary on Matthew 7.40.

*** Augustine, Sermon 78.6.

"Lord, teach us to pray": A sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gloria, Lord's Prayer, and Creed (plus alphabet!),
'Shaftesbury Psalter' (12th c., England)

Preached at St. Andrew's Anglican Church, Moscow, Russia, on 28 July 2013.  (In preparing this sermon, I was surprised to learn that the readings—Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13—were the same as those for one of the first sermons I preached as a seminarian [here]; the three year lectionary cycle has gone by quickly!)

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“Lord, teach us to pray.” — Luke 11:1

When the Lord Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he gives us a prayer that contains and patterns all other prayers.  It has been called “an epitome of the whole Gospel,”[1] a summary of the teaching of Jesus.  As “an epitome of the whole Gospel” the Lord’s Prayer shows us how to order our desires toward the love of God and neighbor.  In it our Lord teaches us what to ask for and what to desire.  To pray his prayer is to ask for what he wants us to ask, to seek what he wants us to seek.  Put differently, in the language of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer is one of the ways in which we who have “received Christ Jesus as Lord” continue “to live in him” (Col. 2:6), because in praying this prayer we are drawn close to the heart of Jesus, close to the heart of God.  As we learn from the Lord Jesus how to pray, he makes us more like himself.  So this morning, I want to look with you at how our Lord teaches us to pray, in order to see what he would have us desire, what he would have us love.

To begin, Jesus teaches us to address God as “Father.”  He teaches us to become what we are in him by grace.  That is, by the grace of adoption in Christ, we are made worthy to name our Creator as Father.  As St. Paul says, “God sent his Son….so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:4–6)  So when we say, “Our Father,” we remember the great love the Father has given us in adopting us as children, the love from which absolutely nothing can separate us.  So to pray, “Our Father,” is the greatest of gifts.

And it is also a great responsibility, for we show by our actions that we are God’s children.  “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return,” Jesus teaches, “...and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Lk. 6:35).  To pray “Our Father,” then, is to ask to become like God.  St. Maximus the Confessor put it this way: to pray “Our Father” is to be “eager to set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.”[2] “To set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.” We most truly pray “Our Father” to the extent that our lives are conformed to the life of Jesus the Son, the perfect image of God.  Jesus teaches us to seek to become a people whose entire lives say, “Our Father.”

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Notes on preaching

Detail of historiated initial 'P', Paul preaching (13th c., France)

Thinking about preaching recently, I returned to a paper I wrote for preaching class in divinity school in which the assignment was to develop a theology of preaching.  I found the exercise clarifying, so I thought I would share it here, with the caveat that the course textbook, Richard Lischer's The Company of Preachers, largely determined the figures with whom I engaged.

What is preaching?  To answer this question with a normative, theological account of the practice of preaching, it is clarifying to first look at how we use the word and then to see what theological claims follow.  The word “preach” entered the English lexicon through Middle English, deriving ultimately from the Latin praedicare (“proclaim”), a compound of prae- (“before”) and dicare (“declare”).  In ecclesiastical Latin, praedicare means “preach” and can carry connotations of praise, commendation, foretelling, and warning.  In Greek, the words most often translated as “preach”—kēryssō (“herald, proclaim”) and euangelizō (“gospelize”, “announce good news”)—carry the same connotation.  Etymologically, to preach is to declare before, both in the sense of saying beforehand and in the sense of announcing before others: preaching is public and preparatory.  Furthermore, that “declare” derives from declarare, from the combination of de- (“thoroughly”) and clarare (“make clear”), suggests that preaching involves making lucid what was once unclear.  This sense is that of the commonplace response to preaching in African-American congregations: “Make it plain!”  To preach, then, is a public and preparatory speech act of making something plain.

What Christian preaching makes plain is the gospel, the good news that the One who called light out of darkness and brought Israel out of Egypt has raised Jesus Christ from the dead.  To preach is to clearly proclaim the good news of God’s saving works, preeminently in the person and work of Jesus the Christ.  It is difficult to improve upon Luther’s succinct summary of the gospel as “a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things.” [1]  Preaching is proclaiming this gospel.  Put differently, the task of preaching is to steadily point to the risen Lord Jesus, and by so doing to point to the Triune Lord, to direct our gaze toward the only source of life and salvation.

That preaching points to the risen Lord does not mean that every instance of preaching, every sermon or homily, needs to explicitly articulate the entirety of the gospel or to unpack every element of the mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  However, every instance of preaching should fundamentally be about the Triune Lord.  Whatever else preaching does (e.g., encourage, convict, remind, lament) will be secondary to and derivative from what it says about God and God’s actions.  Preaching does all that it does by making plain God for us.  Luther made this point provocatively when he wrote, “…the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him.” [2]  Carl Michalson offers a helpful gloss when he writes that in preaching, “time is telescoped in such a way as to make the event of God’s turning to us in Christ a reality of the present moment.” [3]  Of course, the preacher’s words are not sufficient in and of themselves to make present the risen Lord.  But this Lutheran, sacramental conception of preaching does underscore preaching’s fundamental task to bring home, to make tangible and concrete for us today, the significance of God coming to us in Christ Jesus.

More concretely, preaching seeks to make plain the Word of God, proclaimed in the public reading of the Scriptures.  Rowan Williams puts it very simply:  “When the leaders of the congregation deliver sermons, their main purpose is, or should be, to help believers understand the unity and harmony of the texts that have been read at an act of worship; and then to encourage them to live lives worthy of the good news that they have received." [4]   Preaching, then, necessarily involves exegesis of the biblical text.  Karl Barth described well the type of exegesis preaching calls for, when he wrote, 

We should not try to master the text.  The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes.  They will see all the depths and distances.  They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon.  The True exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files. [5]

Preaching comes out of being mastered by the Word of God, and excellent preaching evinces the astonishment of a child at its wonders and depth.

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