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"I am Gabriel the one who stands before God: and I have been sent to speak to you, and to evangelize to you these things." Gabriel, the head messenger (as Archangel means), we celebrate today as we take leave of the great Feast of the Annunciation and resume our walk towards Golgotha.  He is the greatest messenger of all the archangels, for he bore glad tidings of two great births, the Forerunner and the Savior.  His mission is stated simply in his opening words to Zacharias: "I have been sent...to evangelize to you."  For this is what Gabriel truly does: he comes to announce the Good News, the Gospel.  He comes to evangelize (εὐαγγελίσασθαί).  Such a description fits even more with his message to she who would become the Theotokos: "Then in the month the sixth was sent the angel Gabriel by God to a town of Galilee, of the name Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man, of the name Joseph, out of the house of David: and the name of the virgin was...

The original icon  The original icon without its riza (the metal covering revealing only the faces) The Axion Estin (Αξιον εστιν), "It is truly meet," is an icon of the Theotokos (Eleusa-style) located in the the Protaton, a church in the Karyes settlement of the famous Mount Athos in Greece, home to many ancient monastic communities.  The event which the icon takes it name from occurred in 980, so the icon was written sometime before then. The name of the icon comes from the opening words of a Marian hymn in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.  Up until this famous event, the hymn only included the latter half, starting at "More honourable than the Cherubim," which was written in the late 700s by St. Cosmas the Hymnographer, foster-brother of St. John Damascene.  This section of the hymn reads thus: More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim. Without corruption thou gavest birth to God the Wo...