Tongues of angels: a reflection on the Annunciation

This week we celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation, remembering a pivotal moment not only in the life of a young Jewish woman in first-century Nazareth but in every life for all time.

Mary is just going about her business when the angel Gabriel appears to her. If coming face to face with an archangel wasn’t startling enough, he tells her she’s been chosen to give birth to the Son of God, the saviour of the world (Luke 1:26–38).

It’s one of those passages in Scripture when time seems to slow down, everything becoming still and expectant for the few agonising moments between the delivery of the angel’s message and Mary’s willing agreement.

Yes, she says. I will do this extraordinary and unprecedented thing—this thing I don’t really understand and can’t begin to imagine—because while I don’t understand how it’s possible, I believe that it is. I don’t know why I have been chosen, but I trust the one who has chosen me.

When we hear God’s call on our own lives, Mary’s ‘yes’ becomes the model for our own.

When we speak about the Annunciation, often our focus—quite rightly—is on Mary and her fiat, her wholehearted ‘yes’. And there is certainly much we can learn from her humble and courageous obedience. When we hear God’s call on our own lives, Mary’s ‘yes’ becomes the model for our own.

But the Annunciation also involves a message, a proposal, not just a response. With the whole course of salvation history resting on Mary’s reply, God didn’t trust the delivery of that crucial message to just anyone.

In a world where so much human communication has become counterproductive and even harmful—deepening polarisation and distrust rather than inspiring and strengthening community—it’s also worth considering what we might learn from Gabriel.

After all, it’s not just the journalists, authors, podcasters, editors and communications professionals among us who are called to be messengers and news-bearers. One of the prayers we pray at baptism reminds us that we belong to a people of prophets. Every single follower of Jesus is given the task and privilege of proclaiming the Good News of God’s saving love to a world that sorely needs to hear it.

The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, meaning ‘messenger’. The Archangel Gabriel was one of God’s most trusted messengers—God’s ‘Head of Comms’, if you like. While the annunciation could arguably be regarded as the pinnacle of his angelic career, he came to this moment with a strong track record, having already communicated God’s will very effectively to the likes of Daniel and Zechariah.

What are the things we should notice, then, about the way this master communicator speaks to Mary?

First we should note that Gabriel is sent by God. His message is God-sponsored and God-focused, and it’s delivered as part of God’s mission. Gabriel is not just peddling an opinion or pushing his own project; he always has God’s broader vision in mind, and his communication serves that vision, not his own.

We should always be asking ourselves: Who are our words serving?

It’s not that having an opinion is bad in itself. God gives us minds so that we can use them to test out ideas, share them with others and discover through trial and error what we believe. But when our opinions become so precious to us that we lose sight of the bigger picture, forgetting our real purpose and putting the ‘right to say what I think’ ahead of every other consideration, then our messages can become distorted. We should always be asking ourselves: Who are our words serving? Are they just serving our own agendas and egos? Or are they serving God and the people with whom we are communicating?

Gabriel sees Mary, recognising and acknowledging her dignity and worth. Calling her ‘highly favoured’, he reassures her of God’s love for her, and her important place in God’s plan. Many people in Mary’s world would have immediately looked past her, dismissing her as unimportant, a ‘no one’, but Gabriel sees in her what God sees: her strength, her humility, her tenderness and clear-eyed focus on doing God’s will.

Increasingly, the anonymity of digital communication means we literally cannot see the people we communicate with and—perhaps more significantly—they cannot see us, making us less accountable and more likely to speak impulsively and to indulge in the kind of hurtful and hyperbolic rhetoric we wouldn’t dream of using to someone’s face. The facelessness of online communication makes it easier to lose track of both our audience’s humanity and our own, to carelessly dismiss others as contemptible or ‘not one of us’, blinding ourselves to their God-given gifts and role in God’s plan.

Do not be afraid.

As we gradually withdraw from the sometimes challenging but often humbling and enlightening practice of real-world, human conversation, we can come to mistake the tribalism of our digital echo chambers for real community, becoming easy prey for those who seek to benefit—commercially, politically or otherwise—from our prejudices and insecurities.

‘Do not be afraid,’ Gabriel tells Mary at the outset—a common line, it seems, among angels and prophets. As we heard last week on the Solemnity of St Joseph, Mary’s betrothed received the same message from the angel who came to him in a dream, encouraging him to marry Mary regardless of what people might say (Matthew 1:18–21).

Before he gets to the challenging part, outlining God’s astounding plan for her, Gabriel reassures Mary, calming her natural fear of the unknown with words that help her focus on the trustworthiness of God. His approach is never to seek a response that is driven by anxiety or fear. He gives her space to voice her questions and concerns, and time to reflect and respond.

Of course, a little healthy fear can be a good thing, playing an essential role in protecting us from danger by triggering the fight, flight or freeze responses that enable us to cope with external threats. But when the threats are manufactured or amplified to keep us reading or consuming, our responses over time become distorted. Our natural fight response turns to chronic aggression, outrage and contempt. Our flight response feeds our addictions to unhelpful distractions. Our freeze response manifests as crippling indecision, cynicism and despair. Increasingly, the constant anxiety and stress generated by the 24/7 news cycle threatens to burn us out and leach into our own words and ways of communicating.

Gabriel gives Mary a vision of the amazing thing that God is doing and her important part in it—a vision that will sustain her through all that is to come.

Studies have shown—and media businesses know very well—that provoking emotions like fear and anger are an easy and effective way to get our attention, generate ‘clicks’ and drive up profits. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ as the saying goes. Research indicates, for instance, that posts that trigger emotions—especially anger at those who are outside our group—are the most likely to be shared. And according to another study, lies spread faster online than the truth.

In his recent message for the 59th World Day of Social Communications, Pope Francis speaks of the need to ‘disarm’ the way we communicate.

‘Too often today, communication generates not hope, but fear and despair, prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred,’ he says. ‘All too often it simplifies reality in order to provoke instinctive reactions; it uses words like a razor; it even uses false or artfully distorted information to send messages designed to agitate, provoke or hurt.’

Instead, he dreams of a ‘communication capable of focusing on beauty and hope even in the midst of apparently desperate situations, and generating commitment, empathy and concern for others.’

Gabriel shows us what this might look like. His words are astounding, but they are also true and trustworthy—they check out. When Mary sets off to see Elizabeth, she quickly discovers that what Gabriel told her about her cousin’s surprising pregnancy is true.

He doesn’t make false promises either—he doesn’t say it will be easy for Mary or that challenges and suffering don’t await her—but his words are beautiful and inspiring, moving Mary’s focus beyond her immediate circumstances, giving her life and mission a broader and gloriously hopeful context. He gives her a vision of the amazing thing that God is doing and her important part in it—a vision that will sustain her through all that is to come.

It is this vision, suffused with God’s infinite love and mercy, that inspires Mary’s wholehearted ‘yes’. In the end, it is not fear but love—love of God and love of others, even those we disagree with—that is central to all transformative communication. Pope Francis wants us to ‘put personal and collective responsibility towards others at the heart’ of our communication, steeping it ‘in gentleness and closeness, like the talk of companions on the road’. His message is aimed particularly at those who make a career out of communicating, but it’s good advice for all of us.

In his first letter to the Church in Corinth, St Paul famously observes that even if we speak in the ‘tongues of angels’—following Gabriel’s example to the letter, as it were—but do not communicate with genuine love for those who hear our words, then we are just adding to all the noise and distraction (1 Corinthians 13:1). And there’s enough of that in the world already.