ANGELS OF THE ROSARY

A SERMON FOR ROSARY SUNDAY

Today is the first Sunday of October, known as Rosary Sunday.  October is unique among the months of the year in that it has two dedications, to the Holy Rosary of course, and also to the Holy Angels. On Friday of this last week we celebrated the feast of St. Michael Archangel, and tomorrow is the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.  This year, we also commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Fatima, and so it is a special time to consider following more than ever our Lady's urgent counsel to say the Rosary daily, and make ourselves even more familiar with the momentous events of its fifteen mysteries.

These fifteen scenes are already firmly implanted, I'm sure, in our minds, and continue to inspire us with their diverse emotions and resolutions.  These are the great events in the story of our Redemption.  They tell us how God redeemed us from sin and hellfire, and at the same time lay out the roadmap for us to find our way to heaven and save our souls.  But as October is also the month of the Holy Angels, it is a good opportunity to remind ourselves also of the important role the angels played (and continue to play) in that story of Redemption, a story that began, of course, long before the first joyful mystery when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Blessed Virgin in Nazareth.

In fact, the story began with God's creation of the angels.  God, of course, is a pure spirit.  He created the angels in his own image and likeness as pure spirits also.  They have none of the limitations of our material body, and are in this sense superior to man.  So when God revealed to the angels in heaven that he was going to create man, also in his own image, but with a body, and thus inferior to the Angels, that must have sounded just fine to those angels. But there was a sting in the tail of this announcement.  And the sting was that Man would be placed at the head of this new creation as its ruler.  This upset some of the angels, but there was worse to come... 

There was to be a “Woman.”  A woman, who would be his supreme creation, undefiled and immaculate, a woman who would be the Virgin Mother of God, who would crush the head of Lucifer, and who would reign forever in heaven as Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Angels.  Lucifer could not abide this revelation, and led the rebellious angels in an uprising against God.  And it was another angel, St. Michael, who was given the task of expelling Lucifer from heaven.  After this great battle in heaven, in which a third of the angels were cast into hell, their leader, Lucifer, filled with hatred and thoughts of revenge, set out to destroy God's greatest creature man by tempting Adam and Eve.  He tempted them to rebel against God, just as he had led the angelic rebellion, and was the cause of their expulsion from their earthly paradise, just as he had been expelled from heaven.  In so doing, he was, ironically, the unwitting cause of God's supreme triumph.  That triumph was our Blessed Mother and her role in our Redemption, giving birth to the Saviour and crushing Satan's head beneath her feet.  No wonder, then, why Satan has such hatred for Our Blessed Lady.  And no wonder why the other good angels love and revere her so devoutly.

Satan must surely have rejoiced on the day of his great victory in the Garden of Eden.  But his vengeful joy was very brief.  How could Satan smugly sit back and enjoy his triumph when he heard the following promise, from his Creator, of mankind's salvation and his own defeat?  “I will put enmity between thee and the woman," said God, "and between thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”  This “woman” of course was the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose statue we so often see with her feet firmly crushing the head of the serpent.  It was a prophecy directly from God himself that his Mother would be the instrument for destroying the work of the Devil.  And so Satan, filled with hatred for this Woman who was to be clothed with the sun, returned to his lair, and continued to tempt and beguile man, waiting for the moment when he could find another way of thwarting God’s plan to reopen the gates of heaven for mankind, in short, how he could destroy this "Woman's" seed.

Many thousands of years passed, the whole of the Old Testament period in fact.  During that time, God sent many prophets, who would continue to remind the children of Israel that a Messiah would eventually free them from their chains of sin, and reopen heaven for them.  Finally, one day, God sent an angel to an elderly couple, of the seed of Abraham, descendants of King David.  Their names were Joachim and Anne and they were praying very hard for a child in their old age.  According to the story, St. Anne sat praying beneath a laurel bush, and the Redemption story begins a new chapter.  An angel appears, the first of many angels in our story of Redemption.  The angel announced the following to St. Anne: "Anne, the Lord hath heard thy prayer, and thou shalt conceive and bring forth, and thy seed shall be spoken of in all the world". And Anne replied, "As the Lord my God liveth, if I beget either male or female I will bring her as a gift to the Lord my God; and she shall minister to Him in holy things all the days of her life."  Shortly thereafter, there took place that great event which was to be known as the Immaculate Conception, when alone among all the descendants of Adam and Eve, a child was conceived without the stain of their original sin, and in due time was born Mary, who was to be the mother of God.

There is no doubt that this silent and hidden Immaculate Conception was an event of the most enormous importance in the history of this world.  It is the end of the Preface to the Story of Redemption, a preface that started with the temptation of a woman and now ends with the exaltation of a woman. It is the end of the Preface to the Rosary, a preface that began with the rebellion of an angel, and now ends, as do all the greatest and most significant events of this redemption story, with the message of an angel.  This was the "end of the beginning." God chose one of his loyal angels to announce to the parents of the future Mother of God, that he had heard their prayers, and that their offspring would be no ordinary child, but “spoken of in all the world”.

Next week, God willing, we will turn our attention from the preface of our Redemption story to its accomplishment in the events of the Holy Rosary itself, and the role played by the sacred Angelic host as intermediaries between God and man, between God and his Blessed Mother, between God and his only-begotten Son—Son of God and Son of Man.  We will begin with the first Joyful Mystery, where our redemption was finally announced unto mankind, where it was made known by the message of an angel:  “The Angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary.”  We will see how each of our 150 Hail Marys of the Rosary begins with the words of this angel as he greets our Lady: “Hail Mary, full of grace.” 

Until next Sunday, then, “May the Angels above and the Angels below, protect and keep us wherever we go.”