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Luke 1:26-27: What is an Angel?

What is an angel? This is a good question that does come up in the scriptures; one such time is when Gabriel visits Mary to announce that she is going to have a son. The Greek for ‘angel’ (ággelos) simply means ‘messenger’: ággelos is used 176 times in the New Testament and only the context determines whether it is a human or celestial messenger. We know from elsewhere in the scriptures that there are times when people –like Gideon (Judges 6); Manoah and his wife, Samson’s mother (Judges 13); possibly like Jacob at Jabbok (Gen. 32), and even Abraham (Gen. 13) did not realize they were entertaining heavenly messengers. They didn’t know they were dealing with angels. It is possible that Mary did not recognise Gabriel as a heavenly messenger when he first arrived. After all she was greatly troubled when he appeared (Lk 1:29).

Mind you she could have been troubled because she did recognise Gabriel as an angel. In our day and age we often think of angels as nice spirit-beings (usually in the form of a woman with wings and a halo over her head) and just about incapable of deviating from the perfect will of God. This is not how people saw angels in Mary’s time. Angels were seen as free moral agents who would just as likely do you harm, as do you good. The Apostle Paul, a later contemporary of Mary, writes about angels a few times in his letters. None of these accounts is necessarily flattering (Rom 8:38-39; Gal 3:19-20; Col 2:18-19). At best he portrays angels as free creatures who can either uphold or oppose the work of God. There is also a story of Tobit with which Mary was likely familiar. This is about an angel who shows up on a bride’s wedding night and kills her husband. Angels were certainly not always seen as nice. Today most of us are familiar with the idea of the ‘fallen angel’.

Now Mary received the good news that she was about to have a child from Gabriel, the same angel who told her cousin Elisabeth’s husband that she was going to have a child. Elisabeth’s husband did not believe Gabriel and was struck mute for a time.

Angels are interesting. Angels are real. Angels are active in our world today. Angels were not always immediately recognised in the Bible and they are not always readily recognized today. I know that I have had positive encounters with them on at least two occasions but those are stories for a different time.

What is important today is not so much that angels can be spirit-beings but that they are always messengers from God and we are all called to be messengers of God’s Good News of Salvation.

The question for us today: are you ready to give and/or receive the Good Message of Salvation from the Lord?
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