Angel Envy – ChurchEdge

We were created “a little lower than the angels,” and life gives us daily reminders.

If the national bestseller lists are any guide, I [Philip Yancey] may be the only person in America who has not read a book about angels. Moreover, I do not own a single stuffed angel or lapel pin angel. In truth, our culture’s fascination with angels mystifies me, especially since the cuddly curios stocked in gift stores bear such faint resemblance to the majestic, terrifying beings described in the Bible. (Ever wonder why “Fear not!” were usually the first words out of an angel’s mouth?)

I do recall a childhood envy of angels, though. No fingers to catch in car doors, the ability to scare people at will, the magic of invisibility-angels seemed blessed with wondrous Kryptonic powers. Even now, in sober adulthood, a trace of that envy lingers. Angels never get cancer, never lose their jobs and go hungry; never having fallen, they have no apparent need for redemption. In contrast, humans seem frail and vulnerable. We were created, said the psalmist, “a little lower than the angels,” and life gives us daily reminders. Being human is hazardous to your health.

Perhaps for this reason a wistful stream of “angelism” has flowed through church history. When I read the mystical works of Jerome or John of the Cross or Michael Molinos, I sense a nagging resentment against the constraints of humanity. James Agee once described a human being as “A furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings,” and I detect some of that fury in the Christian ascetics-and also in contemporary evangelicalism’s discomfort with the body. We’d just as soon be angels, thank you; the body strikes us as a kind of prison.

In an astonishing inversion of rank, the author of Hebrews defines the role of angels this way: “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” These creatures before whom great saints fell to the ground aquiver are actually our servants. Even Hollywood seems captivated by that notion: in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for example, the apprentice angel Clarence helps restore hope and self-worth to a man on the verge of suicide.

Two of German director Wim Wenders’s films ( Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close ) cover the same ground in more detail. These angels move in a parallel universe from which, unseen, they reach across to offer human beings mild assistance. An angel who sits beside a young man on a ledge may caress him and subliminally soothe him, but may not prevent him from jumping off the ledge. In an interesting twist, after years of accompanying people with all their joys and sorrows, some of these angels choose to descend and join them.

Why would an angel choose to become a human being? In Wenders’s view – much of his philosophy comes through the mouth of Peter Falk, the most incongruous angel in cinematic history-angels grow attracted to materiality. An angel wonders what it would be like to hold an apple, or feel hot coffee sliding down his throat. He wants to feel newspaper print rubbing off on his hand, to trip someone who steps on his foot, to feel a skeleton moving inside as he walks. He wants to fall in love. He wants to feel now instead of just forever, to experience time in discrete packets of days, hours, and minutes, just as people do.

Wenders’s angelology is fanciful, of course, and yet the New Testament contains intriguing hints that being human has its advantages, which even an angel must acknowledge.

“We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men,” Paul told the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:9). A bit later in the same letter he gave a startling glimpse of the future: “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” (6:3). The apostle Peter, speaking of the mysteries of God’s plan of redemption, said rather breathlessly, “Even angels long to look into these things” (1 Pet. 1:12).

I hardly know what to make of these passages, which give mere hints and leave many blanks unfilled. It seems, though, that inexplicably God has chosen to invest the future not in angels but in us. We humans, frail and subject to death, prone to temptation, notoriously inconstant, feckless and forgetful at worship, we “the scum and glory of the universe,” in Pascal’s phrase, have a central role to play in the reclaiming of the cosmos.

I respect and admire angels, but I no longer envy them as I did in childhood. I can find no clear indication in the Bible how God feels about angels. Yet I do know how he feels about human beings: for some incomprehensible reason, he loves us. A familiar passage in Romans provocatively brings the two creations together:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (8:38-39, NIV)
Could it be that angels wear lapel pins and collect stuffed representations of human beings?

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