TRINITY · 29 SEPTEMBER
The Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels
Michaelmas · The Warfare in Heaven · The Ministry of Angels
Michaelmas — MIK-el-mas · Archangel — ARK-ayn-jel
O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order; Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so, by thy appointment, they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Scripture names Michael only a handful of times, and never once describes him. He has no face in the Bible, no recorded words beyond a single terse rebuke, no biography of the kind the Calendar gives its human saints. And yet no angel has gathered more devotion to himself across the history of the Church than this one, named exactly often enough to be unmistakably real and exactly rarely enough to resist every attempt to domesticate him. In the Book of Daniel he appears twice, once as "one of the chief princes" sent to reinforce an angel locked in a struggle against "the prince of the kingdom of Persia" — a glimpse of contest happening behind the visible events of history, out of sight of the kings and armies who imagine themselves to be the only actors on the stage — and once as the great prince "who standeth for the children of thy people," set to keep watch over Israel in a time of trouble still to come.
The Epistle appointed for this day carries the same picture further. War breaks out in heaven; Michael and his angels fight against the dragon, and the dragon is thrown down, defeated, his place in heaven found no more. It is the most overtly martial image the Prayer Book calendar offers all year, and it would be easy to let the feast stop there, at the drama of the battle. But the song that follows the victory in Revelation gives the credit for it not to Michael's strength but to "the blood of the Lamb" — Michael fights, and wins, as a minister of Christ's victory, not as its author. The archangel's whole significance is that he is not the point. He serves.
Which is why the Gospel set beside that Epistle is so exactly right, and so easy to miss the reason for. The disciples are arguing about which of them is greatest, and Christ's answer is not an angel in armor but a child set in the middle of them — except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven — with the promise, almost in passing, that the angels of such little ones "do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven." The warrior and the child are given to the Church on the same day on purpose. Whatever unseen contest Michael wages, its fruit on earth looks like humility, not conquest; the feast that sounds the most triumphant in the whole Kalendar exists to correct any notion that triumph is what the Kingdom is chiefly about.
Michaelmas falls late in Trinity-tide, when the light is failing and the harvest is coming in, and the old quarter-day associations — rent due, accounts settled, the year visibly turning toward its close — are not incidental to the feast but part of its sense. It is a reminder issued at exactly the point in the year when the ordinary work of living presses hardest: that the daily round, however unremarkable it looks from the inside, is held inside a much larger contest already decided, watched over by servants we do not see, on behalf of a Kingdom whose greatness looks, from where we stand, very much like a child.
Almighty God, who hast given thine Angels charge over those who fear thee, to keep them in all their ways; Grant that we, who cannot see the warfare waged on our behalf, may nonetheless walk humbly and trust watchfully, until we come at the last to join our voices with Michael and all the company of heaven, in the everlasting song of him that overcame; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.