I have often been suspicious of the English translation of the word "eu-angelos" as "Good News." Certainly it carries that meaning. But it seems often that there is an overtone of the word "Good Angel" to this phrase when it is spoken, or even that "Good Angel" seems sometimes to be the primary of the two meanings. The Angel of the Lord, that is Christ Jesus, becomes manifest and present by his Spirit in the apostolic teaching and preaching and service (liturgy). This seems scattered throughout Acts, certainly, and I doubt I'd have trouble finding it elsewhere in the Gospels, either. (The fact that the Anglo-Saxon's translated the word "eu-angelos" as "God's Spell" strongly suggests that the richness of meaning was still very much alive to the Catholic Christians who translated it for these Germanic tribes.)
In the apostolic preaching, the Power of God, Jesus Christ, is present by his Spirit. People are sorted. Those who are attracted to him cleave to him and are drawn to the message. Those who desire something else are forced to recognize what that something else is or to rail against the One who is incompatible with it, and they thus reject the One whose Name sets the bright earth within the void and moves the hearts of men towards the Good, that is, to God. This occurs in the apostolic preaching because it is an extension of the Person, work and word of the Word of the Father, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ sorts men according to their character. The truth about men is revealed in their response to him. Do they love righteousness or wickedness? It is not enough to observe external observances -- though these are good and right and when done with even a grain of purity in the heart, transformative. "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.” (St. John 3:19-21) This indwelling of the Word in the soul attracts those souls to the Word-made-flesh: "you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe." (John 5:38) The word of the scriptural text is impotent to instruct apart from this Word, who abides in the soul and draws a man yearningly to the Father. Thus the Lord says that "no one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day." (St. John 6:44). Those in whom the Word (who is more than words) abides are drawn to the Word-made-flesh.
Thus in the Gospels, we see passages where the Lord and Son says such things as "all that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out." (St. John 6:37) Those who are friends of the Father are gathered by the beauty and power of the Master, by his Face and Voice. The sheep know the Voice of the Shepherd. As we see in chapter 12 of the Gospel According to St. Mark the Lord comes to gather fruit from the vineyard he has planted -- to gather fruit that he has already provided the means of growing. The Son of the Vineyard Owner is not sent to the vineyard to start from scratch. The Word, the Son, is everywhere active, everywhere preparing men by the Spirit. Have we responded? "The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation." (St. John 5:28-29) As with the dead at the Resurrection, so too here and now with those in the flesh around the One who is the Resurrection. Are we dead or alive? "The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live." (St. John 5:25)
Those who are enemies of God, however, whether they consider themselves friends of the Law or not, are not simply stuck in that condition (I have written before of how the Jerusalem temple seems to have been made an idol, and the same might be said of the Law -- indeed, anything can become an idol when re-purposed by us for our uses and thus cut off from the light-bearing ends of God). Jesus exhorts believers who doubt that he is in the Father and the Father in him to nonetheless believe "because of the works" (John 14). There are similar exhortations to his opponents earlier in John, even if implicit in the rhetoric of his objections to their arguments or his declaration of their sin.
Looking at Acts, we see in 13:48 a verse that shows the same pattern,"as many as were ordained to eternal life believed." This is not about double predestination. This is about the making plain what is secret, about the judgments of God regarding a man's soul (which judgment reflects their condition) becoming explicit through their response to Christ in the apostles.
It is certainly the case that Pharaoh had a choice at first when Moses came to him as a god with the Lord's demands. Yet Pharaoh's heart froze in response to this demand -- in choosing against the Lord, his heart froze in such a state, it hardened at the demand of God just as clay hardens under the heat of the sun. Pharaoh should not have been clay, but wax. It is not as though he was autonomous before this moment, and lost his autonomy in his rebellion against the Father's Word. The Spirit everywhere prepares hearts just as the Lord prepared a special vineyard. His freedom, his autonomy, must have dwindled in so many ways over the years, so that the choice which froze his heart was merely the revelation of his deicide. We are not our own to define without limit or restraint. We should fear lest we too find ourselves frozen in opposition to the Lord's work about us and in our own hearts.
Yet if the heart is, as the Lord's parables in the Gospel According to St. Mark figure it, either barren, poorly soiled or thorny ground, how does one better prepare the ground of the heart to receive the divine and life-giving words of Christ? How can one prepare one's ear, soul -- how can we till the earth of the heart?
