Today concludes this sermon series reflecting on Christ’s taking of a Body, that is His “incarnation”: a word that means “becoming bodily.” This past week, this Thursday Scripture Study class completed its study of the First Book of Moses, commonly called Genesis. It was an exhilarating study for many reasons, and the study of this single book of Scripture took us fifteen months. Yes, we proceeded through the text slowly, but even as we finished this past week, there was a desire for it to have taken longer. The reason the study lasted so long is that we were reading Genesis the way Christ taught us to. That teaching is found in Luke 24.27, that the Church is to read Scripture to find Christ, because everything in Scripture is about Him, given to us so that we know Him more and more.

This means Christ insists that we read Scripture (the Old Testament) spiritually, that is, according to the Holy Spirit, for as Jesus said in John 15.26: “the Holy Spirit will testify of Me” and in John 14.26: “The Holy Spirit will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” and in John 16.13: “The Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth … and will glorify Me.” Reading Scripture the way Christ taught us demands patience, reflection, and openness of heart. Whereas read the news to be informed; we read Scripture to be transformed by the Holy Spirit Who helps us to see what, on the surface, does not seem to be there: Christ in Scripture (the Old Testament).

One of the patterns of Genesis we noticed is that the text speaks of a figure which is called “the Angel of the Lord.” On the surface it seems to be an Angel such as Gabriel who speaks with the Blessed Mother in Luke’s Gospel. But a deeper reading suggests the Angel of the Lord is something else. In Scripture, the word “angel” simply means messenger. “Angel of the Lord” means “Messenger of God” or “He Who brings the message of the Father.” So in Genesis 16.7, the Angel of the Lord finds Hagar by a spring of water in the wilderness. Hagar is the maid of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Hagar bemoans being rejected by Sarah, and the Angel of the Lord responds by saying “I will multiply your descendants exceedingly, so that they shall not be counted for multitude. Hagar calls Him the “God Who Sees Me.” Hagar speaks of God, and this Angel of the Lord Himself speaks of powers that only God possesses (“I will greatly multiply your offspring”) and indeed these are words similar to those spoken to Abraham by God a chapter earlier.

The Angel of the Lord appears again in Genesis 18. The three men, so we are told, who visit Abraham and Sarah at Mamre. Yet the text quickly shifts to referring to two of the men as Angels and one as the Lord, and to the Lord is attributed words that indicate the same divine powers that only Christ possesses–making Abraham a great nation, destroying Sodom, and more. This Angel of the Lord is described as walking and eating. He stands near to Abraham and Abraham stands near to Him.

In Genesis 22, the Angel of the Lord again calls to Abraham from heaven, to keep Abraham from slaying his son Isaac. The text reads: “The Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time and said ‘By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven” and so forth. An Angel swearing to himself would be meaningless, an Angel swearing upon God carries heavenly meaning. The Angel of the Lord says “By Myself I have sworn.” This hints at Christ quite clearly.

In Genesis 31, the Angel of the Lord says to Jacob “I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made a vow to Me.” Notice “a vow to Me.” And there are many more appearances of the Angel of the Lord outside of Genesis: in the Book of Joshua to Joshua, in Judges to Gideon, to young Samuel in 1 Kings, and others. Isaiah (in the Greek Septuagint) speaks of the “Angel of Great Counsel” (Is 9:6). Perhaps the climactic appearance of the Angel of the Lord is in Exodus 3.2-6, Moses at the Burning Bush. The text says, “The Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush” and short while later, “When the Lord saw that Moses turned aside to see, God called to him out of the Bush . . . and he said, “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” The Angel of the Lord says “I am the God of your fathers.”

What this all points to is that the Angel of the Lord revealed in Scripture is Christ. As one Church Father wrote in the fifth century: “The whole passage at the Burning Bush shows that it was God Who appeared to Moses. But Moses called Him an “angel” [that is, “messenger”] in order to let us know that it was not God the Father Whom Moses saw, but the only-begotten Son.” More specifically, it points to Christ having a body and showing Himself to Hagar, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, to Moses: that (in the words of a contemporary theologian) Christ “stood, walked, interacted with humans face to face, had conversations with them, touched them with His hand, and even ate with them.”

These comprise a different kind of bodily appearance than that of Christ’s taking flesh from Blessed Mary for thirty-three years. Yet what is remarkable is that the bodily appearances described in Scripture, while very different from those in the Gospel in human flesh, are quite similar to those appearances of Christ in His Resurrection, during the forty days of Easter up to and including His Ascension. As Christ did in Scripture cryptically, Christ did with the disciples in His Resurrection, also cryptically and mysteriously: In His Resurrected and Glorious Body, He stood, walked, interacted with humans face to face, had conversations with them, touched them with His hand, and even ate with them.

And the Resurrected Body looked different than the physical body than He had during His thirty-three years in flesh, and thus His presence was a mysterious presence that only the Holy Spirit made known and revealed to the disciples, such as in the breaking of bread in Emmaus, by the name “Mary” spoken to Mary Magdalene, and so on. Thus the Resurrection of Christ is, to paraphrase that contemporary theologian, the final fulfillment of a long series of bodily appearances in Scripture, and His fleshly life through His crucifixion. As the disciples of the New Testament were filled with the Holy Spirit, they came to understand Jesus as the Anointed One, as the Messiah, as the Christ, Who was seen and spoken with throughout Israel’s history, and Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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