Angels in the New Testament

In the New Testament the angels attend every stage of salvation: Gabriel announces the Forerunner and the Lord; a host praises God over Bethlehem; angels minister to Christ in the wilderness and in Gethsemane; an angel rolls back the stone and proclaims the Resurrection; angels stand at the Ascension and act throughout the Acts of the Apostles; and the Apocalypse shows the angelic worship of heaven. This file walks the New Testament’s angels, and marks the note struck at the Incarnation — that the bodiless powers now serve the God who has become man.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Angel of the Annunciation and the Nativity

The New Testament opens its account of salvation with an angel. Gabriel is sent to Zacharias in the temple to announce the birth of John the Forerunner (Luke 1:11–20), and then, “in the sixth month,” to Nazareth, to the Virgin Mary, with the greeting that begins the Gospel: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee” (Luke 1:26–38). The Annunciation is the hinge of the New Testament’s angelology: the greatest message ever borne by a creature — the conception of God in the flesh — is entrusted to an archangel, and the whole later honor of Gabriel flows from this office (see Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; on the feast, The Twelve Great Feasts). An angel also reassures Joseph in a dream (Matthew 1:20–24) and later warns him to flee to Egypt and to return (Matthew 2:13, 19–20).

Over the fields of Bethlehem, the angelic ministry breaks into song. “The angel of the Lord came upon” the shepherds, and “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:9–14). This is the angelic doxology at its most famous — the “Gloria in excelsis” that the Church took up into her own worship (see The Angelic Liturgy) — and it sets the tone of New Testament angelology: the bodiless powers rejoice and worship at the coming of God in the flesh, into a salvation that (Peter says) even “the angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:12).

Angels Ministering to Christ

The angels attend the Lord through His earthly life. After the temptation in the wilderness, “the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him” (Matthew 4:11; Mark 1:13). In Gethsemane, in His agony, “there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him” (Luke 22:43). Yet the Gospels also mark the reserve proper to the Incarnation: the Son does not summon the angelic armies to His defense, though He could — “thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53) — choosing the Cross over the legions. The angels serve the incarnate Lord, but the work of salvation is His alone; they minister, they do not accomplish it.

The Angel at the Empty Tomb

At the Resurrection the angel returns as herald. “There was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow” (Matthew 28:2–3); the angel says to the women, “He is not here: for he is risen, as he said” (Matthew 28:5–7). The other Gospels vary the detail — a young man in a white robe within the tomb (Mark 16:5), “two men… in shining garments” (Luke 24:4), “two angels in white” whom Mary Magdalene sees (John 20:12) — but the office is one: the angels are the first proclaimers of the empty tomb, the heralds of the Resurrection to the myrrh-bearing women. The angelic proclamation of Pascha is echoed in the Paschal hymnography (the “angel cried to her that is full of grace” of the Paschal canon).

At the Ascension, likewise, “two men… in white apparel” stand by the apostles and speak the promise of the Second Coming: “this same Jesus… shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:10–11). The angels frame the Resurrection and the Ascension as they framed the Nativity — as heralds of the acts of God.

Angels in the Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles is, among other things, a book of angelic interventions in the life of the young Church. An angel opens the prison doors and brings out the apostles (Acts 5:19); an angel directs Philip toward the Ethiopian (Acts 8:26); “an angel of God” comes to the centurion Cornelius, opening the door of the Gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 10:3–7); an angel frees Peter from Herod’s prison, at which the gathered Church, unable to believe it, supposes it must be “his angel” (Acts 12:7–15) — a text later read in the discussion of guardian angels (see The Guardian Angel). An angel of God stands by Paul in the storm to promise his deliverance (Acts 27:23–24). Throughout, the angels are the unseen agents of the Church’s mission, opening prisons, directing evangelists, and encouraging the apostles — the “ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation” (Hebrews 1:14), the definition the New Testament gives of what an angel is for.

The Angelic Worship of the Apocalypse

The Revelation of St. John is the New Testament’s fullest vision of heaven, and heaven, in it, is angelic worship. Around the throne are the “four living creatures” — the beasts of Ezekiel’s chariot, full of eyes, six-winged — who “rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty” (Revelation 4:6–8), and the “voice of many angels round about the throne… the number of them ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands,” crying “Worthy is the Lamb” (Revelation 5:11–12). The “seven angels which stood before God” sound the seven trumpets (Revelation 8:2, 6); an angel offers the prayers of the saints with incense at the golden altar (Revelation 8:3–4) — an image that binds the angelic ministry to the Church’s liturgy of incense and intercession. And Michael and his angels war against the dragon and cast him down (Revelation 12:7–9), the New Testament’s clearest window onto the angelic conflict (see The Fall of the Angels).

The Apocalypse also draws, twice and sharply, the line the whole tradition guards. When John, overwhelmed, falls to worship at the feet of the interpreting angel, the angel refuses: “See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets… worship God” (Revelation 22:8–9; cf. 19:10). The highest angel of the vision deflects worship from itself to God — the New Testament’s own charter for honoring the angels without adoring them (see The Boundary of Veneration). The angel’s own word sets the rule: the bodiless powers are fellow-servants, and worship belongs to God alone.

The New Note: Angels and the Incarnate God

Across the New Testament a new note sounds that the Old Testament could not. The angels now serve a God who has become man; they worship at a manger and an empty tomb; they behold in the Church “the manifold wisdom of God” made known through the economy of the flesh (Ephesians 3:10); and the Fathers marveled that human nature, in Christ and in the saints, is raised in a sense above the angels, since the Word took not the nature of angels but “the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). The bodiless powers, older than the world and mightier than men, bow before the God-Man and rejoice at the salvation of the human race — the mystery into which they “desire to look” (1 Peter 1:12; Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, 1957, on the angels and the economy of the Incarnation). This is the New Testament’s distinctive angelology: the angels as the joyful, worshipping servants of the God who has drawn near in the flesh.

References

Scripture: Luke 1:11–38; 2:9–14; 22:43; Matthew 1:20–24; 2:13, 19–20; 4:11; 26:53; 28:2–7; Mark 1:13; 16:5; John 20:12; Acts 1:10–11; 5:19; 8:26; 10:3–7; 12:7–15; 27:23–24; Hebrews 1:14; 2:16; Ephesians 3:10; 1 Peter 1:12; Revelation 4:6–8; 5:11–12; 8:2–6; 12:7–9; 19:10; 22:8–9.
Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The angels and the economy of the Incarnation; the doxology; the guarding ministry.)