Angels are very much in the air at the moment!  They appear with great frequency on the Christmas cards which are just starting to drop through our letter box, courtesy of the postman’s heroic efforts.  They grace the tops of Christmas trees, and they form a favourite theme in Christmas decorations.  Churches have organised hugely popular angel displays in recent years, and angels form the basis of a number of much-loved carols.  As I write this, I am drinking tea from a mug which has angels decorated all the way round the outside – angels playing harps and trumpets, angels kneeling, angels flying through the stars and clouds, and the inscription reads: “Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight over all the earth”.

The picture of white-clothed, fair-haired, musically-talented, airborne spiritual beings has been a favourite image for artists to paint down the centuries, based on certain descriptions in the Bible.  We are told in the Old Testament book of Isaiah Chapter 6 and in numerous passages in Revelation about angels who have some of these traditional attributes.  But the Greek word ‘angelos’ which is used in the Bible simply means a messenger.  There are a number of events in the Bible where humans mistake an angel for another person precisely because the messenger (or angel) appears as a normal person.  In Genesis Chapter 32, Jacob wrestles with a man until daybreak, and only afterwards realises that he has been wrestling with an angel of God.

Here’s a relatively modern story about an angel to ponder which I treasure being told by my father.  Bishop Edward King (a saintly man who was Bishop of Lincoln at the start of the 20^th century) used to visit prisoners in Lincoln Jail on Christmas Day. One year, he met a prisoner awaiting capital punishment who told him that he had wished to meet the Bishop for some time.  “Why is that?” enquired the Bishop.  The man then recalled to Edward King one night early in his ministry when he had received a message calling him out to visit a dying woman in his parish. So Edward King put on his coat and went through the woods to the house where the woman lived. On his arrival, the clergyman and the husband who answered the door were both equally astonished: the wife was perfectly well and they had not summoned the clergyman! So Edward King returned home, perplexed by the original message.

The prisoner now told the bishop what had really happened. It was he, the prisoner, who had sent the message because he had intended to attack Edward King as he passed through the woods.  “However”, the prisoner said, “What I hadn’t bargained for, was your being accompanied by somebody else as well!”  So the attack never took place.  Yet as far as Edward King knew, he had only himself for company.  On reflection, this seemed to be a guardian angel, who so far as anyone could see him at all, appeared to be a perfectly normal human.  Yet Edward King himself was totally unaware of being accompanied.

So perhaps we can conclude from some of these examples that angels do not always appear in “traditional” dress, but God sends his messengers to us in a variety of ways, using spiritual and human agents.  And sometimes God even uses one of us as his messenger to others.  You or I may already have been an angel in ways which we never realised and may never discover.  Who knows?

Sarah Bourne, Chaplain for the Arts – 9^th December 2020                sarahbourne@banburystmary.org.uk