Michael the Archangel, Climate Messenger (Rev 12)

by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership

(This Climate Bible Study was first published in the October 2024 newsletter of Climate Intercessors)

Happy Michaelmas! Sunday, September 29 was the Feast of St. Michael and All the Angels. How many archangels can dance on the head of a feast day? Roman Catholics recognize three: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Anglicans add Uriel. Raphael and Uriel are mentioned only in the Apocrypha (Tobit and 2 Esdras). In her homily, our rector said that angels are not talked about much nowadays but should be—largely to honour their protective function among us. For my part, if one believes in the existence of God, it isn’t a hard leap to also believe in the existence of angels, particularly as we give credence to biblical support. The bigger question is salience—the importance of a fact to one’s current situation. How are angels salient to the climate crisis?

(A quick reminder about these Climate Bible Studies: despite our tongue-in-cheek, click-baitable headlines, I don’t believe that any messages from Michael are or were about climate change, a phenomenon that did not exist in the same way for the ancient audiences to whom the biblical authors wrote. Nonetheless, to the extent that the Scriptures were written for human beings living out their lives in Creation and in relationship with a loving God—then all of Scripture is fair game to the question: how is this story or passage salient to what we are experiencing now in the Twenty-first Century?  This is the hard work of exegesis and homiletics in every age, including the Anthropocene.)

Our rector quoted the late Rev. Stephen Reynolds whose final project for the Anglican Church of Canada was The Book for All the Saints. He writes,

Angels are messengers from God. They can be visible or invisible; they can take human or non-human forms. Christians have always felt themselves to be attended by helpful spirits—swift, powerful, and enlightening. In Christian art, these spirits are often depicted in human form, with wings to show that time and space do not constrain them, swords to signify their power, and dazzling attire to represent their ability to enlighten faithful humans.

Angels are swift and powerful—ready to come to the aid of those to whom they are appointed as guardians, whether specifically (as may be indicated in Matt 18:10) or generally, as in the New Testament Reading last Sunday which began:

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him (Rev. 12:7-9).

Is Michael doing the same work “in the heavenlies” against the “principalities and powers” coming against the climate agenda at COP29? I hope so. Regardless, I’m just as struck by what got relegated by Reynolds to Michael’s “dazzling attire,” and to the angels’ third function: “their ability to enlighten faithful humans.” The word angel is derived from the biblical Greek word angelos which simply means “messenger.” The Hebrew counterpart is mal’akh, which also means “messenger.” The Old Testament will even use the term for flesh-and-blood messengers, such as “And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir, the country of Edom” (Genesis 32:3).

For that matter, half of Sunday’s reading in Revelation 12 is given to proclaiming a message from heaven, and not just to Michael’s sword-wielding:

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have come the salvation and the power
 and the kingdom of our God,
 and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
 who accuses them before our God day and night,
 has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
 by the blood of the Lamb
 and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
 as to shrink from death.
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
 and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
 because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
 because he knows that his time is short.” (Rev 12:10-12).

Was that “loud voice from heaven,” Michael’s? There is no indication that it was Yahweh’s. Nonetheless, it was a message, and an important one: salvation and power and the kingdom of God has come! So has the authority of his Messiah!  I am also struck about how this message makes reference to us as messengers too. “They triumphed over [the Accuser] by the blood of the Lamb and by the world of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” In normal parlance, the word “testimony” refers to spoken speech, the “word of their testimony.” In this occurrence, we recognize the physical act of their martyrdom as part of what constitutes their testimony. Nonetheless, just as the Greek word for angel literally means “messenger,” so the Greek word for martyr literally means “witness; or, one who bears witness.” The martyrs of the Book of Revelation were not martyrs because they were bloodied; instead they were arrested and tortured and executed because they were already martyrs, because they were already witnesses, because they were already proclaiming the message that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not!

So much of our prayers in the Climate Intercessors network are, in the words of Rev. Reynolds, that human beings might be “enlightened” to the scope, speed, and severity of the climate crisis, and to our moral responsibility to respond to it in Christlike ways. It’s reassuring to know that God is willing to deploy the resources of heaven as he hears our prayers for widespread and urgent enlightenment. And we can recommit to faithfully fulfilling our own angelic duties: to keep messaging on! Some of our colleagues, particularly in Brazil and Latin America, are already paying the price with their own lives for their climate messaging. In whatever form the modern Caesar may take—he is not Lord!