Magnificat | Advent 2024

Today I want to talk about Mary. She is my favorite character in the Christmas story, other that Jesus of course! This is the one time of year when we talk about her, even though she was present throughout Jesus’s ministry, at his death, after the resurrection and at pentecost. Mary is such an interesting character in the Bible, and the Church has been fascinated with her for centuries.

Surprisingly, there are not many Christmas songs that mention her, and when they do, it is a sanitized, bland version of the woman I have come to understand. Some of the most notable: What Child is This? What Child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping, the babe the son of Mary. That’s it? The only mention Mary gets is about her lap?

Or what about Silent Night? Now don’t get me wrong, I love singing this song on Christmas Eve, by candlelight. But when it comes to Mary we have: “Round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild.

Clearly these lyricists had never been around a newborn. Babies are precious to be sure, but they are also constantly feeding, never seem to sleep and go through so. Many. Diapers. Cute? Yes. Mild? Not a chance.

There are more modern songs like Mary Did You Know? I am going to talk about this later, but I think that Mary had a pretty good idea about what her Son was going to do. And then there is this one. Which I think gets us a little bit closer to Mary’s actual truth. Can anyone guess the song from this iconic intro?

Breath of Heaven by Amy Grant

“I have traveled many moonless nights, cold and weary with a babe inside. And I wonder what I’ve done. Holy Father you have come and chosen me now to carry your Son.”

Now we are getting somewhere. But before we get to the biblical account in Luke, lets go back through some church history to understand how we have traditionally viewed Mary.

Mary was a central figure in the first few centuries of the early church as they were figuring out the doctrine of incarnation. If the immaculate conception emphasizes the divinity of Jesus, then being born of a woman emphasizes the humanity of Jesus. They asked questions like, was there something extra special about Mary? Or was she simply a human vessel for God?

Roman Catholics continued to ask these questions, eventually imbuing Mary with a sort of divinity, such as the belief that Mary was conceived immaculately herself and she experienced a pain free childbirth, or imparting aspects of the Holy Spirit onto Mary, that she intercedes with God for us. With all respect to my Catholic friends, I don’t think it is necessary or helpful to minimize Mary’s humanity. Like that Amy Grant song, I think we get a better understanding of the Incarnation when we realize Mary was vulnerable and maybe a little scared. Her humanity affirms our own.

In response to the veneration of Mary, the Protestants swung to the opposite side of the pendulum. So much so that growing up, I didn’t hear a whole lot about Mary other than she was the poster child for femininity and motherhood. She accepts the angel’s pronouncement with perfect submission (aka no doubt, fear or hesitation), then we jump straight to the classic nativity scene of Mary on the donkey, and Mary at the manger, Mary holding a bundled up baby. Evangelicals treat Mary, and frankly most women in the Bible, as pictures of virtue for women to emulate, but whose character and story has little value for men.

And they have skipped a very important part of her story. After Mary is visited by the angel, she goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth who is also miraculously pregnant. Although Mary was informed by the angel that Elizabeth is pregnant, Elizabeth probably had no way of knowing that her cousin was also carrying a child. When Mary arrives, Elizabeth’s baby jumps and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. She calls out.

“You are a woman God has blessed. You have believed that the Lord would keep his promises to you!” Mary was a woman God has blessed. Not just because of her motherhood, but because she believed what God had said and was faithful.

I just want to note that later in Luke, Jesus also affirms this. When he was teaching, a woman cried out to him,

“Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.”

Because culturally, in the ancient world, the most significant thing about Mary was that she had an important Son. But Jesus responds,

“Instead, blessed are those who hear God’s word and obey it.”

I don’t think Jesus said this to slight Mary. He was affirming the reason why she is blessed is because she heard God’s word for her life and demonstrated her belief through faithful obedience. He was taking the opportunity to change the cultural narrative from a women is only blessed through her ability to bear children, to women and men are blessed because of their belief and faithfulness.

So after Elizabeth calls Mary blessed, Mary responds with a prayer that has become known as the Magnificat. This is the longest speech spoken by a woman in the new testament. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the Magnificat “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.” We may not have many songs about Mary, but This is Mary’s song:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, 

    and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.
    Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
    and holy is his name;

indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him
    from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
    he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
    and lifted up the lowly; 

he has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty.

He has come to the aid of his child Israel,
    in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

These are the words of a young and vulnerable woman. I imagine her singing them with defiance, and hope and uncertainty about the future. Its clear that while she may not have known the details of how her Son would change the world, she certainly knew the themes. Mary was a Jewish woman steeped in Scripture. She knew the prophecies of the coming Messiah. And she believed when the Angel told her she was carrying the Son of God. She knew that those prophecies were going to be fulfilled by her Son.

In her final book, Wholehearted Faith, Rachel Held Evans added to Mary’s song for our day and time, saying that in some ways it feel more appropriate to shout instead of sing. She writes,

“In the Michelin-starred restaurants and on the floors of the stock exchanges…

‘He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty!’

In the corridors of the West Wing and the Capitol…

‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly!’

In the streets of Charlottesville and Hong Kong, Moscow and Mandalay…

‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts!’

Among women who have survived assault, harassment and rape, only to be publicly maligned by their powerful abusers…

‘He has looked with favor the lowliness of his servant! Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed!’

Among the poor, the refugees, the victims of gun violence, and the faithful ministers of the Gospel who are speaking with courage against false religions of nationalism and white supremacy…

‘His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation!’”

Jesus has indeed come to set the world to rights. And Mary, a brown skinned woman who would become a refugee, a member of a religious minority in an occupied land, names the reality of the coming Incarnation—God is with us. And if God is with us, who can stand against us?

I think Mary and her song are Good News for us, and for our neighbors, both locally and around the world. And loving my neighbors, and believing the good news for them, is a pretty good way to love God.

It is so easy to get caught up in the relentlessness of the holiday season. Parties, family gatherings, choir concerts, school events, baking, shopping, etc. Before we know it it is new years day and the season has passed. Its also easy to hear these foundational stories of our faith, baby Jesus, Joseph and Mary, the angels, the shepherds, the Wise Men, and not feel their immediacy in our everyday lives. We can read the Magnificat and think, this is way beyond me, “outside my scope of practice” as we would say in healthcare.

And practically speaking, loving our neighbors and joining God in these great reversals is not going to look like us becoming pregnant and giving birth to the Son of God. There are a lot of people in this world who are going to do great things for God. But as for me? I just want to love a simple life of faithfulness. I want to to experience God with US. Maybe you do too. So we take dinner to our newly widowed neighbor. We march and protest against injustice in our city. We sit with our friend as they mourn the loss of a loved one. We help our neighbors give their kids a happy Christmas morning.

As a church, we can do some things together too. In January we are going to have a family meeting and talk about ways we can love our neighbors well. What matters is our willingness to be faithful to what we CAN do. I’m excited.

We are the ones living out the work of Incarnation, showing what it looks like when God is present with us.