I'm loving Jesus instead

Christmas Eve 2011

I suppose most of us give little thought to angels for most of the year. It is only at Christmas with carols such as Hark the herald angels sing and with images on Christmas cards etc. that we think about angels. And for most of us any thought we give to angels is brief. But for some people angels are really important.

A few weeks ago I was on a course looking at how to get people of the baby boomer generation interested in church once again. The baby boomer generation is seen as those people born between 1946 and 1964. For the most part these people attended Sunday School as children and in surveys express themselves as spiritual people. But they do not attend church and the conference was looking at ways of addressing this.

As I say, surveys find that Baby Boomers are spiritual people but they don’t always look to the church for answers. Very often they are looking to so called “new age” religions.

We were shown a film about this and clearly some people feel angels are real and present part of their lives. In one film clip a woman had gone to an “Angel reader” who apparently has the ability to put people in touch with their guardian angel!
The word angels simply means “messenger” coming from the Greek “angelos”. So given this why would people want to focus on the messenger rather than on the message?

Angels have always lain at the edge of Christian faith and not at its centre. And therefore it seems odd that the writer of Hebrews spends so much time writing about angels in the first chapter of his letter. Was the writer himself interested in them? Or was it more the case that some of his readers were interested in angels and he felt the need to address the issue? Was it the case that for some of the writer’s readers, angels had moved from the edge of the Christian faith to the centre and he felt he needed to talk about this?

The answer is we do not know why he wrote in this way. We do not know how important angels were to the people in the early church. We do not know whether they worshipped them or not. We do not know whether in the early church Christians believed in angels and tried to appease them in some way.

That said, for Jewish people – and remember of course this letter is written to the Hebrews – angels did have a part to play.

For Jewish people angels were the beings who brought God’s word and the working of God’s will in the universe to men. And Jews believed a whole lot of things about angels. Angels were said to be made of some ethereal fiery substance like blazing light. Angels were said to be immortal though God could annihilate them. They did not eat or drink and they did not have children.

The cherubim, seraphim and ofanim were always around the throne of God.
They were thought to have more knowledge than men, especially of the future. But only because they were part of God’s entourage.

There were millions and millions of angels. But it was not until quite late in time that Jews assigned names to some angels. And the angles who were named were the arch angels the principle ones being Raphael, Uriel, Phanuel, Gabriel – the angel who brought God’s message to Mary – and Michael the angel who presided over the destinies of Israel.

In the Jewish faith angels had many duties; They brought God’s messages to men. They intervened for God in the events of history. Two hundred angels controlled the movements of the stars. Another angel controlled the never-ending succession of years, months and days. There was an angle in control of the sea. Another angel for frost, the dew, the rain, the snow, the hail, the thunder and lightening. Every nation had a guardian angel. Even little children had their own angels. IN fact according to the Rabbis there were so many angels that “Every blade of grass has its angels.”

At the time of Jesus, and the time of the writer to the Hebrews, Jews were more and more concerned with what is called the transcendence of God. That is that God is completely outside of and beyond the world. As contrasted with the notion that God is manifested in the world God is present in the world in other words. Jews felt more and more the distance and difference between God and people. Consequently Jewish people thought of as angels as intermediaries between God and people.

The writer to the Hebrews is telling his readers this has changed. In Jesus God is manifest. God is here! There is no gap. God is Jesus and Jesus is God. The writer is saying why put your faith in angels and ask them to be go betweens between you and God when Jesus us God and Jesus is here!

Given this you’d think wouldn’t you that today people would have no need for belief in angels? But they do. It’s no coincidence I feel that in 2005 Robbie Williams’ song angels was chosen as the most popular song to have at a funeral.

Why this obsession with angels?

I can only assume that for people in this day and age who are obsessed with angels it is because they do not understand or do not know that in Jesus we now have the means of bridging that gap between earth and God. IN Jesus, God is present in the world. We don’t need angels to be in touch with God for we have Jesus. And yet many people think we do. And whilst Robbie Williams’ song may be regarded as only a nice song – I must admit I like it – the words of the song perpetuate the false ideas people have about angels.

I sit and wait
Does an angel contemplate my fate
And do they know
The places where we go
When we're grey and old
'Cause I have been told
That salvation lets their wings unfold

Our fate is not determined by angels. Our fate is determined by the baby in the manger. Salvation comes through Jesus. Not through angels.

Once we grasp the importance of this relationship we have with Jesus, our brother, and once you come to the realization that through Jesus we are part of God’s family we are his own children, angels are nothing!

The author of the book of Hebrews says that Jesus is the mirror image of God.Let me read the exact words from the first chapter of Hebrews, the third verse:

"He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word."

That's pretty strong stuff to be said about a baby born in a stable. About a humble carpenter from Nazareth! It goes to prove you can't judge where a person will end up by where he or she began.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, it was not to affluent parents. He received no special education, though my guess is that Mary and Joseph were the most conscientious of parents. And yet He grew up to change the entire relationship between God and humanity. As the writers of the New Testament looked back on the effect Jesus had on everyone who met him, as they reflected on the nature of his resurrection and ascension, they knew that this was no ordinary man.

Who was Jesus? He was the very Son of God. Or in the words of the writer of Hebrews, "He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being....

That is something that angels aren’t. They are merely messengers. Jesus is God. If you have seen the Son you have seen the Father.

As John puts it in the prologue to his Gospel:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,[d] who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Our as Robbie might have put it “I’m loving Jesus instead”!

A dream of Christmas

One of the less well known Christmas pop songs is called “I believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake. It reached number 2 in the charts in December 1975 but because the lyrics seem quite bleak, it has not achieved the recognition of some other Christmas pop songs.

It is a song about an adult looking back at Christmas and remembering how as a child he was told that Christmas would be perfect. There would be snow and Father Christmas would come. So Christmas seemed like a magical time. But then the reality hits. On Christmas Day it rains and as a child he began to realise that Christmas wasn’t as magical as he’d been told.

“And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked to the sky with excited eyes
'Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise”

Something that marks this song out from many Christmas pop songs is that it mentions the real Christmas story. It is debateable whether or not Greg Lake is being anti-religious. (In interviews he has said he wasn’t.)

“They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
And they told me a fairy story
'Till I believed in the Israelite”

He claims that he was protesting more at the way Christmas is commercialised and the way everything – even the birth of Jesus – is sold like a product.

All of us know that very often the true Christmas story gets lost in the commercialisation of Christmas. But even if it is heard, very often people just have a romanticised image of the “little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay”. But we are not worshipping a cute baby. We are celebrating the birth of God’s own son who came bringing salvation to us all.

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die.
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.


Amen to that.