What is God like?

‘What is God like?’ This is the question provoked by the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. The name ‘Michael’ means ‘Who is like God?’ Of course, we are familiar with St Michael. At home, I have a copy of the King James Bible, with St Michael on the spine. For many years, St Michael was one of the trade names of Marks and Spencer. So if you wanted a Bible with a bit of magic and sparkle, the St Michael edition was exactly what you required.

And of course, we are familiar with angels. They populate pop songs, and novels, and films. Whether it is the lyrics of Robbie Williams or the terrifying stone angels in Dr Who that pursue you when you are not looking, our culture is fascinated by angels. I’m told there are such things as angel therapy and angel healing. You can attend angel workshops in Milton Keynes, where for a modest fee you will learn about archangels, angel messages, and how you can work with angels in your daily life to bring in love, happiness, abundance and peace. Healing crystals are also on offer. But before you are too hard on Milton Keynes, you can wander into the Natural History Museum in the heart of this august University city, and you will see above the door an angel with a copy of the Bible in one hand and the figure of an atom in the other. 

And yet, it is a curious paradox that when it comes to angels, the contemporary church is often silent, slightly bemused, if not rather embarrassed. To speak of angels sounds like a surrender to the credulous, or worse, like a curious dabbling in the occult. 

Tom Holland, the historian, recently lamented the fact that too often rather than celebrating its distinctive theological character, the contemporary Church was often too ready to dissolve into a ‘secular mush’, obsessing about mundane matters while ignoring the transcendent quality of faith, - the heavenly, the celestial and eternal. And yet, when writing about his own return to the Christian faith in recent years, he speaks of a sense of transcendence, a sense of the numinous. He quotes R S Thomas, who describes a moment in church like this: “in the darkness that was about / his hearers, a preacher caught fire / and burned steadily before them / with a strange light.”

‘What is God like?’ Rather than pressing social commentary from the pulpit, tempting as it is to lament the conflict in the Levant or to wonder at the obligations of conscience in the face of climate change, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels challenges the preacher to be resolutely theological, to speak about the reality of God. For that is the question with which St Michael confronts us.

The scriptures are full of accounts of angels. There are the angels ascending and descending on Jacob’s ladder in the book of Genesis. An angel stayed the hand of Abraham as he prepared to sacrifice his son. The Psalmist speaks of human beings as being little lower than the angels. The disciples of the prophet Elisha see the regiments of angels ready to rescue their master.  The Archangel Raphael accompanies Tobias and brings healing to Tobit. In the New Testament, the Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will conceive a child and call him Jesus. The priest, Zechariah, is rendered speechless by Gabriel because of his lack of belief. The angels rolled back the stone to reveal the empty tomb. And in the Book of Revelation, Michael confronts Satan and throws down the dragon from heaven. 

Of course, the Book of Revelation uses the language and imagery of apocalyptic to talk about the way in which so often human beings succumb to different forms of idolatry. And idols are simply false gods, the things that we worship, that we desire, that we imagine will save us and make us happy: wealth, beauty, success, celebrity, power, money. These are the snares of the devil. We can spend all our time pursuing these false Gods and never be happy. And of course, the real problem with idolatry is this: human beings are still sacrificed to idols. It is sobering to consider the harm people can do to others when they are captivated by an idol, one of those evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. 

But in the Book of Revelation, the Archangel Michael, the one who challenges us with the question, ‘Who is like God?’, defeats the dragon, that great pretender, and dislodges him from the heavenly places. Because the truth is that no one is like God. God is absolutely and completely transcendent and other. He is not a thing that we can compare with other things in the universe. He is not a projection of our desires, or even our virtues. God is God, and that is a conclusion which is resolutely theological. 

But this conclusion also provokes a question. For if no one is like God, can we begin to answer the question, ‘What is God like?’ It is perhaps at this point that we need to turn to the gospel reading. Jesus sees Nathanael under the fig tree. The passage is filled with allusions to the Old Testament. Jesus is identified by Philip earlier in the passage as the one ‘about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote’. Nathanael alludes to the psalms when he recognizes Jesus as the Son of God and the King of Israel. And then at the end of the passage, Jesus says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ The phrase about angels ascending and descending is an allusion to Jacob’s ladder in Genesis 28. Jacob falls asleep and dreams about a ladder on which angels ascend and descend. It is an image which speaks of the presence of God, for when he wakes, Jacob looks around and recognizes that he is in a place where God is present, where heaven and earth meet. 

So the gospel is telling us that Jesus is the one where heaven and earth meet. In Jesus Christ, we discover what God is like. That is the mystery of the incarnation, that is the beauty of the gospel, that is the faith which we profess in the creed when we describe Jesus as ‘very God of very God, true God of true God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father’. In the face of Jesus Christ, we see the glory of God, and we discover that God reveals himself not as one given to manipulation and control, but as one whose power and strength is revealed in perfect love. 

And we celebrate that love every time we participate in this eucharist ‘with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’, as we give thanks for the one who laid down his life for us, the one whose love is never diminished by suffering, the one whose love can defeat the power of death itself, the one who teaches us that ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them’. That, my friends, is what God is like.