It is not only the high priest who prays with those who truly pray, but also the angels, who “have joy in heaven on one sinner who repents, more than on ninety-nine just who need no repentance, and the souls of the saints who have passed away. This is clear from the case of Raphael offering a reasonable sacrifice to God for Tobias and Sarah. For the Scripture says that after they had prayed, “the prayers of them both were heard in the sight of the glory of the great Raphael, and he was sent to heal them both.” And Raphael, in revealing to them his mission to them both, enjoined on him as an angel by God, says, “When you prayed, you and your daughter-in-law Sarah, I offered the memory of your prayer before the Holy One”; and a little further on: “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who hear the prayers of the saints and enter before the glory of the Holy One.” And so, according to the word of Raphael, “prayer is good with fasting and alms and justice.” And in the case of Jeremiah, who appears in the Maccabees as “admirable for age and glory” so that “an extraordinary dignity and greatness” was about him, and who “stretched forth his right hand and gave to Judas a sword of gold”21—to him another holy man who had died bore witness saying, “This is he who prays much for the people and for all the holy city, Jeremiah the prophet of God.”
Sarah, the daughter of Raguel in the city of the Medes, who had been given to seven husbands, and the demon killed them as soon as they went in to her. This symbolically announces the multitude of nations, whose teachers only knew the life of this age, which revolves in seven days, and could say nothing about eternity. Therefore, all of them were seized by the devil, as they were slaves to idolatry, until our true spouse, the Lord, came, who joined her to himself through faith, after overcoming the enemy; just as Tobias took Sarah as his bride after the demon was bound, by the command and cooperation of the archangel, through whom the divinity of our Savior is fittingly signified, just as his humanity is signified by Tobias. Nor should one be surprised that we say that the one person of the Mediator between God and men is symbolized by two persons, namely the angel and the man, who has read in the expositions of the venerable Fathers that his one person suffering for the salvation of the world is prefigured in Isaac, who was offered by his father on the altar, and in the ram, which was sacrificed. He who was killed as a sheep in his humanity, remains impassible in his divinity with God the Father, just as Isaac returned home alive with his father. For if the ram aptly designates the humanity of Christ, the man signifies the divinity; why should not the man much more aptly signify the humanity, and the angel the divinity?
Therefore, the holy angel of the Lord, Raphael, who is interpreted as the medicine of God, was sent to free both Tobias from blindness and Sarah from the demon. The Lord was sent into the world, who said of himself, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick" (Luke IV); who also redeemed the Jewish people from the darkness of disbelief, and the gentiles from the bondage of idolatry. Of whom the prophet said: "And his name shall be called the Angel of Great Counsel" (Isa. IX).
[AD 253] Origen of Alexandria on Tobit 3:16