Mary Sings Our Song

³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Jack was coming out of church one day, and the preacher was standing at the door as he always did to shake people’s hands. The preacher grabbed Jack by the hand and pulled him aside.

The Pastor said to him, 'Look, Jack, you need to get on board with the church and join the Army of the Lord!’ Jack whispered a reply, 'I'm already in the Army of the Lord, Pastor.’ The pastor questioned, 'How come I don't see you except at Christmas and Easter?'

However, in our scriptures today Mary finally breaks her silence and reveals the secret of her pregnancy to the world. All too frequently, we read Mary’s song, called the Magnificat from the Latin, magnifico, magnify, that we have heard into day’s scriptures as just a beautiful Christmas song from a young girl enthused about her divine pregnancy. We don’t usually pause to listen to Mary’s song beyond our seasonal interests, nor do we put her song into the larger context of Luke’s Gospel. Mary’s song is actually an outline for the Gospel of Luke, which highlights Jesus’ life and ministry as a summation and culmination of God’s enduring presence and work in the institutions, rituals, and faith of the Jewish people.

Nevertheless, let us start at the beginning. The opening verses of Luke tell us a story about an old priest, Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth. Zechariah on his priestly rotation at the Great Herodian Temple in Jerusalem had been chosen by lots to burn incense on the altar with in the Holy Place. Given that people believed God played a determining role in the casting of lots, Zechariah had received a great honor. While performing his duties the angel Gabriel, one of the seven archangels of late Judaism usually given messenger duty, appears to Zechariah and tells him that his aged wife Elizabeth is to bear a child. In typical Old Testament fashion, aged, barren women conceiving and bearing a male child portended God entering into the human situation in a powerful and enlightening way. We see this in the birth of Isaac to Sara and Samuel to Hannah, etc. In fact, Mary’s song is highly reminiscences of the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10. In each case, the children of these births become powerful and special people in the course of God’s relationship to the faithful and to the world.

As the story goes, Zechariah did not believe the angel Gabriel and because he did not believe that all things are possible with God, he was left unable to speak and could not pronounce the blessings on the people that had gathered out side the Holy Place in the Temple. His speechlessness was taken as a sign among the people waiting for his blessing that Zechariah had seen a vision while in the Holy Place. Zechariah does not speak again until after the birth of his son, John the Baptist.

John the Baptist would be one of the last prophets of Israel in the old tradition. John, as an old styled prophet, confronts the lowly and the powerful and calls them to prepare their hearts for the coming of the terrible Day of the Lord by repenting of their sin and spiritual indifference and to be baptized as a sign or their repentance. Little did John know or understand the new thing God was about to do among God’s people.

Zechariah’s unbelief and its resulting speechlessness are contrasted to Mary’s and Elizabeth’s belief and their joyous and blessed proclamations that with God nothing is impossible. It is the faith of Jewish women such as Sara, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary that with God nothing is impossible which lies at the heart of the Christmas story and divine salvation across the eons.

In the Old Testament, older, barren women through divine intervention conceived and gave birth through normal human reproductive means. Now, however, a young woman will give birth through supernatural means because God is about to break the molds of understandings and expectations among God’s people.

Continuing with the story, when Mary and Elizabeth encounter each other, Elizabeth acknowledges that Mary carries the future savior of God’s people and blesses her. In this acknowledgement, we again see the reversal motif, the elder serving the younger—a common showstopper in Scriptures. The reversal of roles or the upsetting of the predictable order of things serves to throw human expectations off balance and gives God a chance to do new things contrary to human expectations. The old ways of God delivering God’s moral will through divinely, influenced human conceptions, and the births of dynamic prophets gives way to God becoming the divine child and prophet. In Mary’s child, as much as is humanly possible, the moral and spiritual attributes of God will be perfectly and concretely manifested in the person of Mary’s child and in his dealings with human beings.

In Mary’s song, she tells of what God will do for the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed of the world. Mary sings about God’s will for all people for all time. The lowly, the spiritually disenfranchised will be raised; the false piety and prideful knowledge of the religious and secular no-it-alls will be brought low; the spiritually, starving masses will be filled, and the rich and self-inflated will be sent away empty. This becomes so evident in Jesus’ dealings with the Sadducees and the Pharisees and his blessing, healing, lifting up, and spiritually feeding the poor and marginalized of his day. The poor, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised become spiritually wealthy and powerful because they hold no illusion of power and self-importance and thus receive without hearts and minds the message of the Christ. In the end, through Mary’s child the world will be turned upside down, as the kingdom of God comes on earth contrary to all human expectations.

It is interesting to note that in none of the angelic messages concerning Elizabeth’s or Mary’s child do we hear words about the Messianic or nationalistic restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Instead, we learn that in Mary’s child God is bringing the Kingdom of God to all people.

Thus, we may say that Mary is singing our song of Emmanuel—God with us now and forever more.

Many have asked the question of Christmas that if it was God’s intention to confront the human condition with God’s divine presence and moral will why didn’t God do it in some unambiguous and overwhelming manifestation of divine glory and power. [1]

People who ask such questions are looking for cheap answers to deep and profound questions regarding our relationship to God. Not unlike like the man who was shopping for a Christmas present for his wife. He consulted with the sales clerk in a large department store about possible gifts. The sales clerk suggested maybe a bottle of nice perfume. The man agreed this would be a great gift for his wife. The clerk showed the man a bottle of perfume and he sniffed it. He asked her how much the perfume costs. The clerk replied with much pride, “$100.00.” “Oh, no!” came the man’s reply, “nothing that expensive.” The sales clerk next showed the man a bottle for $50.00. Again, the man refused saying that $50.00 was too expensive. He grimaced and asked the clerk, “Can you show me something really cheap?” Where upon the clerk snatched up a hand mirror and shoved in the man’s face. It is amazing that in our most important relationship of love—our relationship with God--we humans seem to want cheap answers.

For some reason known only to God as the Creator and Sustainer, God chose to share with humankind the divine power of self-determination. We have come to understand this as humankind being made in the image of God. A freely, self-determining creature must by the definition of the word free have the absolute right to choose the good or bad, as stated in Genesis chapter 3. We are also free to choose to participate in a consciousness of God and to enter into a relationship of love and trust with our consciousness of God or not.

Because of the radical otherness of the nature of God, God’s will, and divine presence must always be mediated and muted least God’s presence overwhelm and intimidate us, especially in our choices regarding compliance with God’s moral will. However, God does not let the divisions between the divine nature and human nature stop God from loving and desiring relationship with us. Nor, does God let the chasm between God and humanity impedes God’s responding to our need and desire for relationship with God. God extends the divine self to us even if it means that God must invest and restrict some essential and critical aspect of the divine self to the limits of human nature for all eternity.

Given that we humans tend more often than not to follow our prideful understandings and knowledge, God in Jesus Christ had to break through human understandings of power and might and expectations in such a way so as to preserve humankind’s freedom in relationship to God while revealing God’s ultimate moral and spiritual will for humankind at the most propitious time in human history.

I like the way Blaise Pascal (1623-62), the French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist explains it:

It was not then right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men; but is was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely seek Him. He has willed to make Himself quite recognizable by those; and thus, willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart, he so regulates the knowledge of Himself that he has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.[2]

This is to say that God did not present the divine self to humanity in all of God’s over-powering glory. In created space and time, we humans exist in relative independence wherein God reveals God self in ways that allow us the freedom to recognize or fail to recognize God’s presence based upon our desires for a relationship with our Creator and Sustainer or not. God’s actions in human time and space always leave room for the uncompelled response of faith. Human faith is a correlate to human freedom. Human faith in God is an act of freedom that allows us to understand or assimilate something new in terms of our previous experiences or interpret ordinary events as God’s presence in a special way. [3]

Therefore, as Pascal indicates, the human soul or mind that sincerely desires a relationship to God and in faith reaches out for that relationship is met with the power of faith to see God’s hand, God’s will and ways, at work in the most ordinary as well as in the extra ordinary. This is the gift of the eyes of faith. The stories of Abraham and Sara, Elkanah and Hannah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary and Joseph, are not only stories about God’s ability to do the impossible but stories wherein the faithful see and believe that God reaches out to humankind in time and space to endow us with God’s moral and spiritual ways—the ways that facilitate the highest possibilities in the divine-human relationship.

Mary, sing our song; sing our song of God’s love; sing the song of God’s will and ways. Mary sing of God’s presence in the human condition. Mary sing out loud and clear that nothing is impossible with God for the faithful. Mary tell us again this year that we should not leave our holy places speechless about the great and marvelous thing God has done for us through the life and message of Jesus of Nazareth. Claim Mary’s song and let us go out from our holy place and proclaim and pronounce God’s blessings on the world for Jesus, God’s Christ, is born.

[1] Hick, John H. Philosophy of Religion, 2^nd Ed. Foundations of Philosophy Series, editors, Elizabeth and Monroe Beardsley (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1973), p. 60.

[2] Pensées, tr. W.F. Trotter (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., and New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., No. 430, p. 118.

[3] Hick, John H. Philosophy of Religion, 2^nd Ed. Foundations of Philosophy Series, editors, Elizabeth and Monroe Beardsley (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1973), p. 61.