Michael Pleaded With God Not to Make Him Tell Abraham

The Assignment

The assignment seemed simple. God needed someone to go to Abraham and tell him that his time on earth was ending and he should prepare himself. Abraham was old, righteous, loved by God and by everyone who had encountered him. His life had been full. The death that was coming was the natural conclusion of a long story, not a punishment, not a tragedy, simply the last chapter. Send an angel, deliver the news, the matter was concluded.

God chose Michael. He was the greatest of the heavenly messengers, the archangel who stood closest to the divine throne, the one who had been Abraham's guardian and companion through the long decades of the patriarch's life. He had carried Abraham on a cloud and shown him the earth from above and escorted him through the gates of judgment. He knew Abraham better than any other angel. That was presumably why God chose him.

Michael descended. He saw Abraham. And then he ascended directly back to heaven and pleaded with God: "I have not seen upon the earth a man like him."

The Case He Made

The Legends of the Jews records the substance of Michael's plea in detail. He was not simply expressing reluctance or squeamishness. He was making an argument. Abraham's compassion, hospitality, and unwavering devotion had reached a level that Michael had not encountered in any other human being in all the years he had been the guardian of humanity's greatest figures. Telling this man that he was going to die was not a simple delivery. It was going to devastate him.

God listened to the argument. God also did not change the fundamental fact: Abraham's time was ending. What God offered instead was a workaround. "Go to Abraham," God said. "Agree with whatever he says. Eat at his table. Be a guest in his house. Meanwhile I will plant the knowledge of his coming death in Isaac's dream, and Isaac will receive the news and pass it to his father, and the delivery will happen through the family rather than through the angel who cannot bear to make it."

Michael had one more concern. "All the angels of the ministering host," he told God, "would be grieved to learn that Abraham was dying." Not just Michael but all of them. Abraham was not merely a righteous human being. He was the human being who had transformed the relationship between the earthly and the heavenly in a way that made him beloved across both orders of existence.

The Tour He Gave

Michael descended again, this time following God's instructions. He came in a chariot of the cherubim, those powerful angelic beings, and scooped up Abraham and carried him up on a cloud accompanied by sixty angels, and he showed Abraham the earth from above. The Legends of the Jews describes Abraham looking down at the world he had spent a hundred years walking through, seeing it all at once from a height that changed its scale entirely. He saw the good and the bad and the downright ugly. He saw a man committing adultery and demanded that fire come down from heaven to consume them, and it did, because God had told Michael to fulfill Abraham's requests during this tour.

Then Michael brought the chariot around to the gates of judgment. Two gates. One wide and inviting. One narrow and difficult. Abraham saw souls being processed at the two gates, saw the path that led to reward and the path that led to destruction, and he was overcome. He wept for the sinners going through the wide gate. He asked Michael: "who are these?" He wanted to pray for them. He wanted to intervene. He was a hundred years old, preparing to die, watching the souls at the gates of eternity, and his first response was compassion for the ones going the wrong way.

What Michael Could Not Say

Through all of this, the actual message had not been delivered. Abraham did not yet know, from Michael's mouth, that this tour was a preparation, that the cloud ride and the tour of judgment were the last great experience of his earthly life before the news came. Michael had agreed with everything Abraham said. He had eaten at his table. He had been the perfect guest. And he had not said the thing he had come to say.

God's plan worked. Isaac dreamed. He woke and told his father what he had seen in the dream, and the meaning was clear enough, and Abraham understood that the time had come. He prepared himself. He gathered what he needed for the transition. He had not heard it from Michael's lips, but he had heard it, and he received it with the same quality of acceptance that had defined his response to everything God had asked of him over the course of a century. He wept and then he prepared and then he was ready.

Michael had been right that it was not simple. God had found a way around the simplicity.