Bible Study Reflection #21: Do Angels Laugh?

 “For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways” [Ps 91:11]

I’ll begin with a story, a true story about an event that happened almost 40 years ago.

For 25 years Diane and I and our four children lived on Cape Cod in a large 200-year-old house. Late one December 23^rd an ember made its way through a crack in the masonry of our old fieldstone fireplace and set the wooden wall between garage and family room on fire. Fortunately, the smoke alarm awakened Diane (who then shook me awake) and we were able get all the children outside. Well, almost all the children.

Diane sent the youngest, our two boys, along with the dog, out the main front door. Our younger daughter, Siobhan, was on a sleep-over at a friend’s house, but Erin, our eldest, was asleep in her room at the other end of the house. Diane awakened her and told her to go downstairs and out the other front door. (It was a rambling old house with four stairways, two front entrances, and another four or five outside doorways.) I had been in the kitchen calling the fire department when Diane found me. The two us then joined the boys who were trying to stay warm in our car parked in the driveway.

Moments later Erin arrived and asked if one of us had laughed at her when she almost fell off the porch. Of course, none of us had laughed because we were already outside. No one else was in the house.

We were having work done on that old porch and the steps had been removed, the reason why Erin almost fell. The outside door was also being worked on, and to keep it closed that evening we had put a screwdriver through the bolt lock at the top of the door. Suddenly recalling the screwdriver wedged tightly in the bolt, we asked Erin, who was about 12, how she had opened the door since she probably couldn’t reach the screwdriver. She knew nothing about a screwdriver and said the door opened easily. But forgetting that the steps were gone she almost fell off the porch. That’s when someone behind her laughed aloud. The next day I found the screwdriver in the center of a coffee table about 10 feet from the door.

Oh, yes, a fire engine happened to be just two blocks away on a false alarm at a local B&B and arrived at our home within minutes. We lost the garage – an old, dirt-floor one-car affair built back in the 1920s that we used for storage – but they saved our wonderful old home. We had a thankful, if a bit smokey, Christmas.

Do angels laugh? Oh, yes, they certainly do. And why not? After all, they spend eternity looking after the most laughable of all God’s creatures. I suspect the work of guarding and guiding us yields many laughable moments, which they occasional share with those they protect. Erin grew up, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, taught Navajo children at a New Mexico mission school, taught inner-city children in San Bernardino, then married and now has five children of her own. She was protected for a reason.

Do you believe in angels? I hope so because they are marvelous creatures. But far too many Christians never even think of them. Some years ago, I attended a seminar conducted by a highly respected scriptural scholar. It soon became apparent he didn’t accept the miraculous, the existence of angels, or any manifestation of the supernatural found in Sacred Scripture. He attributed all of these scriptural references to over-zealous piety among Jews and early Christians. Exasperated, I finally raised my hand and asked him what he did believe in?

“Do you believe in the Trinity, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in the Resurrection, in Christ’s Eucharistic Presence?”

He laughed and replied, “Of course.” And then proceeded to cast doubt on each. In humility, and infected perhaps with a touch of cowardice, I just shut up. But how sad for him, that the object of his life’s work had become essentially meaningless. After all, if he rejects so much of Sacred Scripture, believing it to be false, in what part of Scripture can he believe? Where does he draw the line between that which he accepts and rejects?

As for me? I’ve witnessed hundreds of miracles in the lives of so many people, including my own, that I am certain of the miraculous. And angels? Well, I’ve had encounters that remove all doubts.

But like our scholar, so many today, even many who claim to be believers, seem to think that God doesn’t (or can’t) act in the world. That a Christian could believe this is strange indeed, since the Incarnation, a central belief of Christianity, is God’s ultimate act. Through the Incarnation God enters the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the Lord of History, the Creative Word of God.

Sacred Scripture also shows that God uses others to carry out His eternal plan. Not surprisingly, when God calls on men and women, their sinfulness often gets in the way and He must exercise His power to ensure His will is fulfilled. But when God calls on His angels, it is God Himself who acts, for no creatures are more faithful doers of God’s Word than the angels.

Sacred Scripture is filled with angels. We even find them in Genesis doing God’s just work at the very beginning of human existence.

“The Lord God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life” [Gn 3:23-24].

And they appear as well in Exodus when God assigns an angel to protect His Chosen People and guide them to the Promised Land:

See, I am sending an angel before you, to guard you on the way and bring you to the place I have prepared. Be attentive to him and obey him. Do not rebel against him, for he will not forgive your sin. My authority is within him. If you obey him and carry out all I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. [Ex 23:20-22].

When God says, “My authority is within him,” He means exactly that: all that the angel does, he does in God’s holy Name. God extends His complete trust to His angels, even allowing them to wield divine power. We encounter this angelic protection manifested again and again throughout the Old and the New Testaments.  

Perhaps my favorite angel passage in the Gospels is in Matthew where we find the disciples, once again displaying their pride, asking Jesus,

"Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?" [Mt 18:1]

But Our Lord, knowing their hearts, again calls them to deep humility, to kenosis – the emptying of self that Paul described to the Philippians [Phil 2:6-8]. Just as the divine Jesus humbled Himself through the Incarnation and His passion and death, so too must His disciples, and that's you and me, be childlike in our humility. We must empty ourselves of ourselves.

To emphasize this, Jesus calls a child to Him, just as He had once called His disciples, one after another, thus reminding them that it is God who acts, God who calls, while we either respond in humility or turn away in pride.

Now what had that small child done to humble himself? Nothing that we know of. Jesus is not talking about actions here; rather he's describing an attitude of being. Unlike the disciples, the child is aware of and content with his lowliness. He is "poor in spirit" as in the first Beatitude [Mt 5:3].

We encounter perfect humility, this attitude of being, manifested by Our Blessed Mother when she proclaims,

"My sould magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden" [Lk 1:46-48].

Indeed, the entire Magnificat [Lk 1:46-55] is a hymn of personal humility in the presence of God's greatness – a good reason for its daily recitation in the Evening Prayer of the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours. Yes, lowliness, emptiness, hunger – these all allow God to raise up, to fill, to extend mercy, to make the last first, to place us at the center of His divine life.

Returning to Matthew’s Gospel, we hear Jesus declaring something truly remarkable about the child He has called to Himself. He reveals that these little ones have angels assigned to them by God Himself:

"See that you do not despise one of thesel little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father" [Mt 18:10].

We are struck by the wonder of it all: Angelic beings, those closest to God Himself, who stand in His presence, are those whom God has appointed to serve His little ones. His children – and these, brothers and sisters, include you and me. For as St. John reminds us

"See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God" [1 Jn 3:1].

But to be a child of God is not to be childish. Not at all. No, God calls us to be child-like. To love Him as a child loves its parent, to trust in Him as a child trusts, to realize He wants only the good for us. In humility, then, the childlike experiences a radical freedom, seeing himself completely dependent on God.

That which is scorned on earth, the humility of the childlike, is raised up to the very highest level of being. We find a reference to guardian angels early in the Old Testament, when Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph

"The angel who has delivered me from all harm, bless these boys that in them my name be recalled, and the names of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, and they may become teeming multitudes upon the earth!" [Gn 48:16]

Do you see how greatly God esteems and honors the angel He has chosen to guard and lead you? Pray to your angel, asking that you remain always open to his guidance. Turn to him in prayer, plead for his protection and intercession, for this constant companion forever beholds the face of the Father. Can you imagine a better guardian and friend?

I think some people don’t realize how loving and kind their angels are, and how helpful they want to be. God didn’t assign them as guardians and tell them to do nothing. Our angels have been assigned to guard us from that which defies God’s will for us. Their guardianship, their protection, can be both spiritual and physical, and is much like a call from God Himself in that it seeks a response from us.

But angels do more than guard and guide us. They are also God’s messengers, revealing His Word to chosen men and women. We are perhaps most familiar with the archangel Gabriel, who foretold the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zechariah and later announced the Incarnation to the young Virgin Mary [Lk 1]. Similar events are described in the Old Testament. Perhaps my favorite is the angelic visitation to Manoah and his wife when the birth of Samson is foretold. Conversing with the angel, Manoah asks,

"What is your name, that we may honor you when your words come true?" The angel of the Lord asnwered him: "Why do you ask my name? It is wondrous" [Jgs 13:17-18].

In other words, even the true names of the angels are beyond human comprehension, beyond the limitations of human language. While many Christians give their guardians human names for the convenience of prayerful interaction, they should realize that God alone names each of these remarkable creatures. We will learn and come to appreciate these wondrous names when we join the angels in God’s presence.

Yes, the angels are carriers of love and messengers of God’s holy will. They protect us, lead us, guide us, and reveal God’s will for us. They encourage us to accept the gifts God offers us, and rejoice when we do

"In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents" [Lk 15:10].

Finally, a remarkable truth about our relationship with the angels. Tradition and Scripture hold that Lucifer led some of the angels to reject not just God’s creation of man but the revelation that God Himself would take on human nature. The angels, then, would adore the Son who, through the Incarnation, became one of these lowly creatures. This was too much for a proud creature like Lucifer who would not serve the Person of the Son in His human nature. The angelic choirs who chose God over pride accepted that Jesus Christ, the Son, is far greater than any angel:

"He took His seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high, as far superior to the angels as the name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs...Let all the angels of God worship Him [Heb 1:3,6].

This first chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews concludes with a verse that defines the human-angelic relationship

"Are they not all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" [Heb 1:14].

What a revelation! The angels are called not only to serve God, but also to serve you and me, “those who are to inherit salvation.” This is another amazing result of the Incarnation. Because the Son becomes man, humanity is exalted, raised up, called to inherit salvation, and to be served by choirs of angels. It’s enough to make an angel laugh joyfully.