How do you know me?

Feast of the Archangels: Readings
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Holy Rosary Priory, Houston

Back in the Bad Old Days before I came into the Church, I had friends who dabbled in angel worship, or more specially, angelic magic. Using books they had purchased from Borders, these friends constructed elaborate angelic altars and performed rituals designed to summon and command God's heavenly messengers. As a nascent neo-pagan myself, I found their obsession with angels to be both intriguing and weird. Despite being intrigued and weirded out, I found the whole enterprise exhausting. Worshiping angels is hard work. You needed the right colors for specific angels; the right kind of incense, and candles made with the right ingredients. You had to worship certain angels only on certain days and only at certain times of the day. You had to translate your prayers and spells from plain old pedestrian English to the curly abstracted glyphs of the Angel Alphabet. And on and on. It was all so detailed and tedious. It didn't take me long to figure out that my friends—all living chaotic lives on the edges of unemployment and various substance addictions—weren't really interested in offering praise and thanksgiving to angels. They were grasping for control of their lives by attempting to control something much bigger and more powerful than themselves. The idea seemed to be: since I have no self-control, maybe if I figure out all these tedious rules and ritual requirements, maybe, just maybe, I can actually find some stability and peace in my life. What eluded them—and me!—at the time was that it was our failed attempts at control that had lead to our chaotic lives in the first place. For a soul made foolish in disobedience, there's not much to like about surrendering to God's grace.

We can easily imagine Nathanael's surprise when Jesus announces: “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.” Why would Jesus say this to a man he had never met? Remember: Philip finds Nathanael in Bethesda and tells him about Christ. Nathanael is skeptical. Philip, being ever practical, encourages him, “Come and see.” When Jesus calls him “a true child of Israel,” Nathanael, probably a bit unnerved, asks, “How do you know me?” How indeed? We know the answer, of course, but Nathanael's confusion is perfectly understandable. Jesus answers him, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.” Nathanael came and he saw. And because he came to see, he believed: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God...”

For us, Nathanael exemplifies one form of surrender that control-freaks cannot quite manage: he believes the improbable on the evidence of his experience alone. He doesn't try to manage his encounter with Christ. He doesn't ask for a miracle or empirical evidence. He doesn't test Jesus' knowledge of prophecy or question him about his lineage. He came. He saw. He believed. Contrast this with Jesus' many confrontations with the Pharisees and scribes. Always clamoring for signs and wonders, these control-freaks needed proof, evidence to overwhelm their fear and doubt. They too came. They saw. But they did not believe. Saddled with the ancient weight of tedious laws and rituals, they could not surrender to the presence of Christ among them. They refused to allow the seed of the Word to be planted. And so, for them, nothing bloomed, nothing came to fruit. No fruit, no harvest. Their spiritual ground lay fallow.

My friends grasped at occult control of their lives because they could not come to Christ and see him as he is. That requires surrender. Surrender of sin to grace. For their politics, their relationships, their daily lives, the implications of surrendering to God were overwhelming. For them, it was easier to try and control angels than it was to give control to God. Perhaps we should let Christ ask us, “How do you know me?”