NOTES for Gn 18:1-33
Abraham's encounter with the angels has always raised many questions, and the answers have produced many different kinds of commentary, not only literary commentary. We need only recall Andrei Rublev's Trinity, which is also a kind of commentary on the account of this encounter, although an iconographic rather than a literary one. It should be noted that the Bible speaks of encounters with angels fairly often, although such an encounter can by no means be called an ordinary event.
For all the extraordinary nature of the events described in the account, one thing is clear: this or something like it could happen only in a world not damaged by the Fall. This is not even because such a world is without sin, but because it is one, not fragmented into separate little worlds that are estranged from one another and separated from God. The most remarkable thing about the story of the angelic visit is that its account is completely free of mysticism. There is no mention of ecstasies, illuminations, or any special spiritual or ascetic practices. There is none because all these things are needed in order to glimpse one world from another.
But God did not create the world in such a way that one would have to peer from one of its parts into another as if through a keyhole. He created the world as a single, whole reality, and on the very first day of creation this world was permeated with light, the light of God's presence. All divisions came later; they all resulted from the activity in the world of wills opposed to God. Their activity divides the world and destroys its fullness, and it is then, in a world torn into pieces, that one has to seek ways of looking from one part into another.
An encounter like the one described in the Book of Genesis was possible only where and when, even if only locally and for a short time, the integrity of creation had been restored. The world became one again, and in this united world human beings and angels once again walked the same roads. The world once more became God's Kingdom, if only at one point and for a very short time, but it became the Kingdom nevertheless. Someday it will again become the Kingdom, the whole world. This will happen when the time of the Messiah comes.