Bible Commentaries

Acts 12:15

The Blessing of Death.

I. What was the meaning of these strange words—"It is his angel"? It was the opinion of many of the Fathers, and notably of St. Chrysostom, that the saying is a witness to the belief of the early Church in the existence of guardian angels, as if each Christian were under the care of a spiritual being, like the genius of whom the poet Horace writes:

"Natale comes qui temperat astrum"—

a being who was, as it were, a sort of higher self, who guided his life, who was associated with him in every joy and every sorrow, and who, on supreme occasions, but none knew how or when or why, would assume the likeness of his personality. But there is another view, which is the more perhaps to be considered as it is the view of Waterland, expressed in the fifth sermon of his second volume, viz., that when the surviving disciples said of St. Peter, "It is his angel," they thought that he was dead, and that it was his spirit, or, as we should say, his apparition, which Rhoda had seen and seemed to recognise at the gate. And, if so, one is led in the light of this verse to dwell for a moment upon the laws of communion between the living and the dead; for, perhaps to all of us, there is no more touching subject than this as life grows older, and they whom we loved the most on earth are ever drifting from us to the shadowy land. "It is not only when men are next to us that they are nearest—Nicht nur zusammen wenn sie beisammen sind, as Goethe nobly says in Egmont, but the distant too and the departed are alive for us." Has God one blessing only—the blessing of life? or is there healing in the wings of the angel of death? Shall we shrink from death as the Greeks in Herder's simile, like children covering their eyes with their hands, to hide its horror? or may we welcome it as an angel of the All-merciful, although it robs us of our best and best-beloved, and say in the spirit of St. Francis, "My sister Death"?

II. There are some purposes which cannot be wrought out by life, but must needs be accomplished by death. It is not the faiths for which men are ready to argue, although they forge never so cunning a chain of arguments; it is the faiths for which they die that conquer the world. God buries His workmen, but carries on His work. Nay, He makes their very death a strength and solace to the generations which are the heirs of their high purpose.

J. E. C. Welldon, The Spiritual Life, p. 193.