Delivered by Amy Higgins on December 17, 2023

Scripture: Matthew 25: 1-13

And Mary said:

♫My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

And my spirit exults in God my Savior

For He has looked with mercy on my lowliness

And my name will be forever exalted

For the mighty God has done great things for me

And His mercy will reach from age to age

And holy, holy, holy is His name.♫

Magnificat by John Michael Talbot 1992

That is how we think of Mary’s Song, the Magnificat. It is called the Magnificat because it is a canticle, a song, of praise but, also because in it Mary magnifies, or glorifies, God. But we read the verses of the Magnificat as a peaceful prayer. As a song, it is soft and reverential. And this is how we think of Mary – the obedient servant who bears the Son of God. And we even depict her as a serenely dutiful woman looking adoringly at the baby Jesus either lying in the manger or seated on her knee. Our Mary is meek and mild, submissive. But was she really? Let’s not forget she was a teenager, after all.

We have even diminished her in changing her name. Her real name was not Mary, we just shortened it, changing it to the diminutive of her real name the way we sometimes do with children. The woman we know as Mary, mother of Jesus, was really Maryam of Nazareth. Maryam, or Mary, means beloved and she is beloved by God, chosen to bear His son, the Messiah. But Maryam also means rebellious and would she not have to be rebellious to become the unwed, teenaged mother of the Messiah? So what if we were to look at Mary less as an obedient servant girl and more as the strong willed teenager on the cusp of womanhood that she was?   

Mary is not just a young woman. She is poor. She is a peasant girl living in occupied territory, struggling to survive under the oppression of the Empire. God looks upon her lowliness, her poverty, her low position in society. The translation from the Greek for lowliness is misery, pain, persecution, oppression. And yet, God chooses not a woman who can give His son a comfortable life of considerable means and a bountiful table but, an impoverished woman who is hungry for justice yet nourished by hope and the joy that hope brings. This is her true song.

In the Magnificat, Mary speaks the most of any woman in the New Testament. Others proclaim the Good News, especially on Easter morning but we are mostly told what they said, we do not get to hear their own words. Mary’s canticle defies the traditional silencing of women’s voices. And throughout history, we have silenced and devalued Mary in how we read the Magnificat and portray Mary as the silent figure of the Nativity. There could be a few reasons for this. One is the Protestant reaction to the veneration or sanctification of Mary by the Roman Catholic Church. Another is just good old fashioned misogyny. Another is the powerful not wanting to give those beneath them any ideas. Some countries, especially those with oppressive governments, have banned the Magnificat from liturgies and public readings. There are even some denominations that only use the first part of the Magnificat about how God has favored Mary and they leave out the second part about how rulers will be brought low. Whatever the reason, we have devalued Mary’s rebellious passion and her part in changing the course of history.

Luke 1:46b-55 (MSG)

I’m bursting with God-news;
    I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
    I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
    the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
    on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
    scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
    pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
    the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
        remembering his mercy,
It’s exactly what he promised,
    beginning with Abraham and right up to now.

The full Magnificat has two parts – spirituality and social justice. As the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described Mary’s Magnificat, it is “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.” And he knew about being revolutionary. As an anti-Nazi dissident, Bonhoeffer was a vocal opponent of the Nazi practices of euthanasia and the genocide of Jews, speaking out to the point of death. In the second half of Mary’s song, she moves from exalting God for the favor He has bestowed upon her and proclaims the prophesy of what God will do through her – how He is using her to lift up the oppressed and tear down the systems that oppress them. She exalts Him for the change He is going to bring to the world.

If you are one of the “bluffing braggarts”, “tyrants”, or “callous rich” Mary’s prophesy is a threat; it is not the good news it is for those you oppress. Dominican priest, Gustavo Guttierez once wrote that we will miss the true meaning with any “attempts to tone down what Mary’s song tells us about the preferential love of God for the lowly and abused.” In magnifying God, Mary magnifies how much God cares about our political, economic, and social realities. By her poverty, her gender, and maybe even her age, Mary represents the voice of the lowly, even the silenced – showing us that all voices should be welcomed, all voices are worthy to praise God, and most of all that God hears each and every voice. But, this is not to say that God seeks to punish the mighty. Rather, Mary foretells the mighty will be humbled. Like the leveling Isaiah prophesied, it will bring equity and justice. And in Mary’s prophesy, through our equity in Christ, the poor and the affluent will dream together.

No matter who we are, all of us are wrapped inside the hopeful joy Mary proclaims. As the 16^th century German priest Martin Luther said, “She sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her.” God summons us into the struggle to build a just world. In Mary, He shows us how the ordinary becomes extraordinary. And her response – to be faithful through all uncertainty – is encouraging. Just as Mary is filled with joy and the Holy Spirit, we too are fortified to follow our own calling. None of us are called to give birth to the Messiah, but we are called, in our generation, to carry him into the world.

Yes, there is a quiet, peaceful joy of knowing what God has done for us. And it is this joy that we are loved despite our lowliness that should bring us the fierce, rebellious, even radical joy that even we can change the world. This is the joy of Mary – hungry and hopeful for a better world. It is our joy. And that is the Messiah we bring, each and every one of us, into the world.