We’ve all seen Christmas trees with the angel set upon the peak, right in the middle, and she – it’s always a she – has flowing robes and a gentle face, as she extends her slender arms to bless. I don’t know when and where the popular tradition of seeing angels as sweetly feminine or gentle first arose. “He’s an angel,” we might say of a baby asleep in his crib, in his mysterious beauty and innocence.
When I was a boy, I often looked up to the ceiling of our church, which was covered over with paintings I didn’t understand, and nobody explained them to me, but I did know that the angel with the strong and muscled forearm, grasping the hilt of a sword, was Michael – whose name I took at Confirmation; and I was aware that he was thrusting the devil back into hell, although that wicked personage was only suggested by the scope of the scene, being just beyond the bounds of the painting. If I looked to another of the works, I saw four angels flying about the Lamb, and because they were above where the old altar with its many candles stood, the smoke had, over many years, made them a bit sooty, giving their faces five o’clock shadow. They were the only angels I ever saw who needed a shave.
The writer to the Hebrews says that we should take care to be hospitable, because you never know when you might be entertaining angels. He was thinking of the three young men whom Abraham welcomed with a feast, who announced – that is what the Greek word angelos means, someone who announces, and what he announces is the angelion – that his aged wife Sarah would bear him a son. He was also thinking of the young men whom Lot smuggled into his house so they wouldn’t be abused by the men of Sodom. They were messengers too, but their message came not in words but in fire.
Meeting an angel, Scripture show us, is a glorious and fearful thing, filled with wonder and holy dread, and that’s why John, in the Apocalypse, falls to his knees before the angel, that is, the one who announces, who had shown him the great events to come, the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. But the angel told him to get up. “I am your fellow servant,” he said.
Now, the Hebrew word for the angel has to do not with the message, but with the sender. And here’s where a coincidence of language turns out to be really appropriate and suggestive. The king, the melek, sends his messenger, his mal’akh (from an ancient verb l’akh, to send), so it sounds as if the messenger partakes of the power and authority of the king who has sent him. That surely is the case with Gabriel, whose name means mighty man of God, whose messages to the prophet Daniel speak of destruction and desolation, but also of the coming of the Messiah. Then Gabriel comes to Zachariah, whose name means the Lord remembers, and to Mary, to declare the birth of the forerunner John, and the birth of the Christ himself. And both Zachariah and Mary are struck initially with fear, and they don’t understand how these things can come about. But it is Mary who says, in an obedience that does not insist upon understanding everything, the obedience that submits to mystery and glory, “Let it be done unto me according to your word.”
So shall we find the little child in the manger, and the angels who tell the lowly shepherds that there is nothing to fear after all. I don’t imagine that those angels needed a shave, or were swinging swords!
Angel