Mary’s Tough Love Saves Us All
Scripture Luke 1: 46-49, 52-53
And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is God’s name.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
If you came for the sweet Mary who decorates mantles, never makes eye contact and knees silently, looking down at a baby in her sky blue turtle neck….well that’s not really the mother we are gathering around tonight. Mary’s song is revolutionary. And it is hard to hear she didn’t just leave it at lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things, everyone likes that, but no she had to say send the rich away empty and let’s kick some powerful butts off their thrones or out of their board rooms or where ever they hang out. I sometimes imagine her looking around at our churches wondering when we will start sending the rich away empty, like she is giving us the look and crossing her arms to remind us, “I specifically asked you.” Mary’s song is why we are here, even if it’s hard to hear particularly, if you, like me, are pretty comfortable. The more power, the more might, the more wealth you have the more uncomfortable you will feel. This is probably why people sing it in Latin. Mary’s power ballad is the the foundation of Christmas, the oldest advent hymn and it clarifies that the work of Christmas is a whole lot more than decorating trees, baking sugar cookies or making donations to the Food Bank. Sorry, I know that’s a ruff reminder and on Christmas of all days, but it the truth.
Mary sing this revolutionary masterpiece in the midst of a tender moment of blessing from her beloved Auntie Elizabeth.
In 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 leapt 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 leapt for joy. 45And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’
Scholars love to explore this as a moment between Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist, like they have in-utero walkie-talkies and are strategic planning for a ministry that is 30 years down the road but most of these guys (and I do mean guys) didn’t grow up worried about pregnancy, being shamed about sex and perhaps didn’t realize that sometimes a young woman just needs her favorite Auntie, the one you can go to when you aren’t ready to talk to your parents, the one that loves you no matter what and that is exactly what Elizabeth offers. Mary retreats from home, pregnant in a world when she shouldn’t be and she does not go to the Auntie who will say, “Oh what a shame Mary, you had so much potential.” She goes to the one who will bless her when the whole world seeks to shame and even punish her for being pregnant. This is the way the world controls bodies, particularly women’s bodies (past and present) and Mary needs her family, so she goes with haste. Mary goes with haste and is received with a blessing, her elder kinswoman, Elizabeth proclaims a blessing and Mary sings a song in response naming her blessing. There is a lot of BLESSING in these verses but we should be clear it does not look like a social media influencer heading to the Christmas tree farm in matching…I mean coordinated family outfits that are not to match-y match-y and posting well compost photos with #blessed. Elizabeth does not have barn-wood, shabby-chic home decor with blessed in some sweet, friendly script. Elizabeth’s blessing comes from a hard space and names what will be a nearly impossible and totally risky journey for Mary and her baby Jesus as a blessing.
There are actually two different words at play here that are both translated to the same blessed or blessing in English. There is blessed as in markaros used in 1:45, 48 which names or acknowledges the gifts or existence of a blessing (The Brith of The Messiah by Raymond E. Brown p 333). Jesus uses this when he says blessed are the poor, the meek, the peacemakers and more folks the world does not see as blessed. They are blessed and this blessing resides inside them and Jesus, even if the world thinks blessings look like a palace and a pile of money says something different. Elizabeth speaks this type of blessing for herself in receiving Mary, its a gift already there just acknowledged and named. And Mary sings this as she names that all generations will call her blessed. The other word for blessing comes in the form of eulogēmenos this is how Elizabeth names Mary, blessed among women and Jesus as blessed fruit of her womb. Contemporaries would have offered this blessing language toward the divine, naming blessings for God in their prayers at temples and singing them in songs. Mary is connected to the Divine and Elizabeth’s song names this celebrates this and honors a blessing by and through God at work in Mary’s life. Mary the impoverished, peasant in an occupied country with no palace or power is blessed, Mary, whose best hope is to be dismissed quietly and think about what she has done to dishonor her family, that Mary is blessed.
That’s the radical part of this song. Mary is blessed and Mary knows it. She sings my soul magnifies the Lord. I help you see God. And when she points us to God, God is active and not just lifting the lowly or filling the hungry but sending the rich away empty and pulling the might from their thrown. Mary’s song is a revolution. She does not sing about charity that feeds the poor but keeps them lining up or service projects and good deeds on the weekends her song calls for a world where you don’t need this kind of charity because there is justice and the world is made new in God’s love. And you may say God loves everyone, even the rich and some of the rich are very generous. Can’t we just stick with that and say Mary Christmas. God loves, but perhaps as any parent God loves each as needed for their welding. She has some expectations that you are going to love others, you want to hoard wealth, Big Mama God is going to say, “no thank you sweetheart.” You want to fill your table and starve your siblings, your neighbors, “nope." Gustavo Gutierrez suggests Mary’s song teaches us to center the liberation of the poor and if we do we are all saved (A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez p 120).
Perhaps its hard to hear, maybe Christian kings had good reason to want to spiritualize the lowly and the hungry but you can’t tone it down or soften the edges. Some scholars imagine the hymns of Elizabeth and Mary as something composed by the author of the Gospel of Luke, like Luke is Lin-Manuel Miranda and just wanted that part of the narrative to really pop. I like imagining this and certainly the songs echo the Hebrew hymns and blessing as well as the speeches on the lips of early Christians in the book of Acts. Of course, folks may easily notice that the songs could be pulled from the narrative and the whole story would be fine and that maybe they are a little awkward.
Another school of thought, and perhaps we can enjoy both, suggests both Mary and Elizabeth’s songs are the songs of the “poor ones” or Anawim (Brown, p351). Folks in this community practiced faith that involved sharing radially, they longed for reform and liberation from Rome. Mary’s song sounds like songs of First Century Palestinian revolutionaries. Songs with a rhythm that gave courage in impossible odds, some even facing crucifixion like Jesus. These songs riff on the history of the Jewish people, the rhythm of battle songs from the Maccabees, they bring Hannah’s ancient hymn to Mary’s context, and Elizabeth blessing of Mary is reiterates Deborah’s blessing of Joel and the community blessed Judith.
These songs are rooted in tradition and visions of what might be. They gave the poor ones courage in the face of every reason to fear. Now some folks would like to image this as spiritual poverty and perhaps you may find peace in an expanded understating of lowly needing living and hunger that is more than physical but their and their poverty was material. Spiritualizing their poverty only serves the mighty. The community that followed Jesus’ way, perhaps lead by his brother James practiced a faith that changed their everyday and called them to share in community. And we know this was material poverty and not spiritualized piety because in Paul’s earliest writings he asks for money. Like a good pastor, Paul asks people for money to help the poor ones in Jerusalem. The poor ones are the center of this movement and others in the biggest metropolitan centers of power from Rome to Corinth learn their faith by by practicing solidarity and generosity with the poor and oppressed.
Mary’s song was revolutionary in its day and every odd was stacked against the ones who sang it with her or lived it with her or practiced this faith as she did. It was a song that invited risk and not just then but after 2000 years of Christian Practice a song the mighty still fear. Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached Mary’s hymn in Advent 1933. “The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings.…This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”
When The cloud of anti-semitism was turning into violence and genocide he preached Mary’s song. And when he was saying God pulls the mighty from their thrones he was looking right at the people he hoped would say no to Hitler. The Nazis murdered Bonhoeffer.
Bishop Oscar Romero preached Mary’s song naming the poor in his community as the ones that must be lifted and filled with good things in El Salvador. The rich and mighty killed him during mass in 1980. There are whispers of censorship and silencing of the Magnificat’s echo in worship. The British banned its singing in India as they sought revolution and liberation from their colonizers (D.L. Mayfield, Washington Post, Mary’s Magnificat in the Bible is Revolutionary, Dec 20, 1980). In Guatemala the poor connected over the prayer and the mighty said no more to its use in the liturgy (Elizabeth A. Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, p269) In Argentina, as the mothers gathered to bear witness to their disappeared children, embroidering their names on diapers or nappies they wore on their heads and posters appeared in the plaza with Mary’s prayer; “Lift up the lowly and tare the mighty from their thrones. Fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty.” There too, the posters were taken down and the mighty tried once more to silence the words of Mary. The censorship of the rich to continue holding power over the poor.
I say this as a whisper or a rumor because proper academics will question citing these events as there is little outside evidence like a newspaper article. Theologians like Mark Allan Powell warn against it even as Sisters like Kathleen Norris and Elizabeth Johnson share the stories. I am just not sure there will be a good paper trail on banning church liturgy and I am guessing that journalists, perhaps risking their lives, might have other stories to tell first if they get to tell stories at all. And I have met comfortable, privileged theology professors and I have met radical nuns on the front lines of injustice and oppression….and I’m going to go with the nuns every time. So I offer this to you in its messy imperfection because more than anything it holds up a mirror to many of us as citizens of a powerful country with various degrees of privilege.
It’s Christmas and she sings what she sang to Elizabeth and probably even Jesus; she is clear and brave and for some of us modern Christians a little terrifying. Because we have more in common with the mighty than we do with Mary, most of the time. And her song reminds us that Christmas is a practice more than a holiday and its a hard one because we live in a world where the mighty are comfortable and we pretty unwilling make significant change. Time magazine named a wealthy billionaire in a vanity space race as the person of the year. And perhaps having felt the sting of backlash he announced his tax bill of 11 billion dollars. Shall we thank him? Or should we ask how much money do you have and at what cost is it not only to our country but also to our world.
But Mary keeps singing.
Mass shootings abound around us in schools and theaters and concerts and workplaces and while surveys say we want reform, we can’t seem to make them happen, not even after kindergarteners were gunned down in their once safe classroom. We face a Goliath of gun cooperations and the NRA and Mary asks us when will we pull the mighty from the throne.
We have marginally survived nearly 20 months of pandemic and have not changed our health care for the greater good, not even a little. We have healthcare by go fund me and church pancake feeds because we choose slow change and bow to insurance executives as they make our health a commodity and use the healers in our community. And Mary sings when will we lift up the lowly. Angry voices are ranting about Critical Race Theory, arguing for the removal of teaching actually history, raging for censorship anything that critiques white supremacy and sending Rosa Parks out of the Library, but Mary sings low and slow anyway. Our city is building a state of the art juvenile justice center and our Governor wants to build a new prison without investing in schools and arts and programs and student loans and wages that might actually make all the difference in the world.
May we have the courage.
Further reading:
Truly our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of the Saints by Elizabeth Johnson.
A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez
The Birth of the Messiah: A commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke by Raymond E. Brown
Websites for further reading:
https://enemylove.com/subversive-magnificat-mary-expected-messiah-to-be-like
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2018/12/20/marys-magnificat-bible-is-revolutionary-so-evangelicals-silence-it/