What Does an Angel

Look Like?

Six Meditations on Christmas

Joshua Brown

This devotional book takes a fresh look at the familiar Advent readings. Chapter titles include:

Prepare Ye the Way
What Does an Angel Look Like?
Led By a Little Child
The Gift of Christmas
Joseph, the Dreamer
Questions

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One year, as I got ready for Christmas, I found myself asking an unusual question. Maybe a foolish one. I started asking, "You know, what does an angel really look like?"

I'm sure that if I asked you, you would have one of two answers. Either you'd say:

1) "Well, I don't know. I've never seen one," or else you'd say,

2) "Well, everybody knows that! Angels wear long white robes and have wings and a halo."

The Bible doesn't really say what angels look like. You'd think that they might have given at least some details. But it doesn't say.

When artists try to represent angels, the standard picture is of a human-like figure with a robe and wings. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe the idea is to show that we're close to or related to the angels. In Psalm 8:5, it says that we human beings were created "a little lower than the angels." Maybe that's why artists make angels look human.

Maybe giving angels wings is meant to suggest the idea that angels are more free than we are – that they are freer of the kind of human restraints and limitations that we have. Angels probably don't worry about how to make their living, or where their next meal is coming from. They certainly seem to be able to zip around from one place to the other pretty easily.

One of the other things that artists usually do when they make pictures of angels, is they portray them as filled with light. There always seems to be a special glow or radiance whenever an angel turns up. That idea, of course, comes from the idea that God is filled with light, or that God is light, and that the closer we get to God, the brighter and clearer everything becomes.

Of course, other people will say that angels are really invisible. That's because their real job is to let God shine through them. So we don't see them, most of the time.

Angels are supposed to be very beautiful, and angels are also somewhat terrifying. At least, that's the way it always seems in the Bible. There is something which is both attractive and scary about angels. Maybe they're so completely different and amazing that ordinary people are scared of them. That almost seems like a paradox, to have something be both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

But of course, there are more ways of understanding or picturing an angel, than as someone in a white robe with wings and a harp.

C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian writers of the 20th century, wrote a series of books in which he pictured angels as bodiless, weightless and invisible – but totally alive! The angels Lewis wrote about aren't so much invisible, they just move at a different speed than we do. The things we do are at such a different speed that angels can barely notice us; the things that angels are involved with are done at such a different speed that we can barely imagine them.

Lewis' vision of the universe is very different from the one we tend to have. We think of outer space as being empty and cold. It's infinite, terrifying and threatening. Lewis shows space, from the angels' point of view, as being filled with light, as giving infinite freedom, and being filled with movement and music. The stars and planets are all a part of a great dance and a great song which goes on forever.

Another Christian writer, Madeleine L'Engle, suggests an entirely different vision of angels. The angels in Madeleine L'Engle's books are more like something you'd find in the Old Testament in the books of Daniel or Ezekiel.

Madeleine L'Engle's vision of what an angel looks like is something made up almost entirely of wings and eyes. The wings, of course, suggest movement, the ability to go anywhere and be anywhere, and the wings of her angels are constantly in motion. The many eyes, of course, suggest vision, and the ability to see into anything in the universe.

There's a marvelous part in Madeleine L'Engle's book, A Wind in the Door, where she talks about being caught up into the heart of one of these angelic creatures. She says that it's a wild, passionate, timeless, ageless, kind of feeling in an angel's heart – it's filled with flame and life.

There's another section where she says that the angels are always singing, all the time, which is another common idea about angels. But she says that the angels only know one song, and that song is: "Glory, glory, glory . . .!"

Well, I didn't mean to get off onto such a long digression about angels. But there's a lot of confusion about what they are and what they're supposed to look like.

During the Middle Ages, people got into all sorts of absurd discussions about this. One group of scholars is supposed to have seriously debated on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

You know, I've heard people say that all my life, and I've never come across the original source of that story. It's got to exist somewhere. Everyone's heard of it, but I've never found anyone who could show me where that story came from.

Anyway. All this is kind of a prelude or introduction, because we're about to meet an angel. And I thought it might sharpen your curiosity if you started wondering what an angel would look like, or sound like, before we meet the angel in the story. As you read along, try to imagine yourself in the story, as if the angel were speaking to you, or as if you were the angel.

 

 

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