Episode Summary

This episode helps to explain why angels are never too late. It takes up the universal religious belief that God communicates with us by sending real people who are the unwitting bearers of spiritually significant messages for our lives and it rejects the idea that angels are good dead people with wings and halos.

Episode Notes

The title of this episode comes from a story told by the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. When he was young, Heschel was in the synagogue with his father on the Jewish New Year and was listening to the biblical story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis chapter 22 where we read that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac as a sign of faith. At the last possible moment before the sacrifice an angel from Heaven calls out to stop Abraham because he has passed this gruesome and incomprehensible test. Heschel recalls that he was crying when he heard the story. His father asked him why he was crying and Heschel told him, “I am worried that the angel will be too late.” His father said, “Don’t worry my son. Angels are never too late. That is the way with angels, but people! People can sometimes be too late. That is the way with people." 

This episode helps to explain why angels are never too late. It takes up the universal religious belief that God communicates with us by sending real people who are the unwitting bearers of spiritually significant messages for our lives. It rejects the idea that angels are good dead people with wings and halos. Human beings can be used in the service of God’s mercy to convey messages to us that have the power to change our lives. 

This episode also reviews the religious teachings that in addition to human beings being used by God to help lead us into better lives, there are also angelic spiritual beings who were never human beings but who serve God as a kind of heavenly bureaucracy like Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael. And then there are also angels that are not of the first rank and are not human beings but who are a more direct manifestation of God like the angel that stayed Abraham’s knife in the biblical story. 

The belief in angels helps us to bridge the gap between an unknowable and invisible and immaterial and transcendent God and our lives here on planet earth.