Hi everybody! My wife is terribly busy with work this week, so I will contribute some thoughts to the blog...I hope this post is somewhat devotional (and accessible) and provides you with another template through which to consider the Annunciation of our Lord's birth...angels are everywhere in the account of the incarnation and for good reason! They hover around events where God is doing something new and important, then recede into the background until something else happens--I like to think of them as the EXCLAMATION POINTS of Scripture. Blessings to you all--DP
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In the Hebrew Scriptures, angels repeatedly interfere in people’s lives when an essential objective in God’s plan lies in the balance. For example, an intervening angel appears to Abraham moments before this man of faith prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah. In the book of Exodus, Moses spots an angel in the flaming bush and then hears the voice of YHWH calling to him from the centre of the previously inconspicuous shrub. Speculations abound concerning the identity of the angel in both accounts, but perhaps this is not the point the reader is to consider. Instead, the angel temporarily operates as a sort of intermediary between God and the two patriarchs, someone or something who redefines the contour between heaven and earth. If this is the case, then an angel’s responsibility is not always about bringing a message to earth out of the aether, but about reinforcing the always-present power of God to compensate for humanity’s eroded self-sufficiency. Angels are agents of revelation, evangelists whose words and actions are always consistent with Gabriel’s message to Mary in Luke 1:37, “…nothing is impossible with God.” Though they are present at Jesus' birth, temptation, resurrection and ascension, the utter absence of angels during the ministry of Jesus either suggests that the Nazarene was a fraud or that he was more than a prophet, and therefore able to handle all teething troubles without their assistance. This theory is supported by the account of Jesus’ betrayal in Matthew 26:53 when he refused to order a pre-emptive strike against his would-be captors.
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