Canter Bridge

The shadow of angels flits furtively across the Bible’s pages. Only rarely do these mysterious messengers tarry long enough to be named. More often, they remain invisible or—if glimpsed—simply do their work and go back to where they came from.

Wherever that is.

The few studied reflections on angels in the Bible’s pages suggest that they are the Lord’s agents, standing at the ready to do his work without ever taking any of the credit.

The Old Testament, several steps closer to its mythic origins and several degrees more candid about things unseen, suggests that the angels—some of them at any rate—are what non-Israelites would consider to be gods. That is, they are powers lesser than YHWH himself and beholden to his will but no less formidable to human dimensions for all of that. They rush to do YHWH’s bidding.

More importantly, the Old Testament anticipates the New in insinuating that the best way we humans can honor them is to look away and get on with praising YHWH.

Thus do the Bible’s angelic messengers assume the odd pose that comes naturally only on a monotheistic stage of being important and powerful yet not worthy of humankind’s adoration. The more attention is given them, the more human beings’ understandable awe stumbles towards idolatry.

How rare, then, that angels should at first seem to appear not once but three times in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Acts.

In the first, the imprisoned Peter is awakened and escorted out of his judicial confinement by an angel who seems to exhibit all the urgency and impatience of a human messenger while carrying out a clandestine task for which a nasty end is too likely. Peter imagines himself in a dream, not quite comfortable with the crossover of angels from his nocturnal imaginings to his real-time reality. Only the brisk air of the outside world wakes him up to the reality that this angel—soon disappeared from the story line as angels inevitably are—has actually got him out of jail.

The poor apostle, perhaps only slightly more invigorated by his liberation than stiff from the close confines of Roman imprisonment, stumbles by night towards a familiar doorway. There he is left by the astonished maid who races inside to report his appearance, only to be greeted by disbelief. Peter’s friends, it seems, find it easier to imagine ‘his angel’ showing up on a night like this than the man himself.

We are left to wonder whether this is the rhetorical stuff of calling an uneducated housekeeper off her imaginings or evidence of belief in something like a ‘guardian angel’. The more important detail is that the angel’s mission led to the deaths of several prison guards. Herod had them executed for their impotence in the face of angelic intrusion. They probably never knew what hit them.

Finally, Herod allows himself the dubious accolade of having spoken ‘with the voice of a god rather than that of a man.’ The high regard he shows for himself activates an angel—not as before ‘the angel of the Lord’ but this time ‘an angel of the Lord’—to strike him down. He is not cut in half by an invisible angelic sword, but rather eaten by worms.

Angels, it seems, also do worms.

Even the Lucan text—so comfortable with human agency, human feeling, and human fragility—acknowledges the furtive appearance of YHWH’s angelic agents. Then, true to form, it looks away and gets on with telling the story.

Not for a moment does it stop to ask itself, ‘Where have they gone? And how can we get them to come back?’