A Short meditation on the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55)
I love the Magnificat. It is one of my favorite parts of our daily prayer life. I especially love praying it during advent. It is such a rich resource for meditation and prayer in this season.
Mary's prayer teaches us how to pray. Like a good teacher, she models for us how to receive the blessing of God and turn it back around to bless the Almighty. As we pray the Magnificat today, her words become our words. Her prayer becomes our prayer. We are the lowly servants whose generations will be blessed. It is our souls that rejoice that the promise of God through previous generations has come to fruition in us, lowly servants of the most high God. When Mary says “the almighty has done great things for me,” we are acknowledging Mary’s claim that God has blessed her as an actual person in history and our tradition. But in another sense our spirit concurs along with Mary's in rejoicing in God our Savior. We are the continued generation of Abraham; not a generation of flesh and blood, but of spirit and faith. This is why we can praise God and say, “the Almighty has done great things for me.” As Paul describes in Romans, we have been grafted in, we have grown together with the promise made to previous generations. In the incarnation, we as humankind are elevated, which is a great thing not just for us but for the name of God the Almighty.
The prerequisite for receiving God's mercy is to fear the Lord above all else. Fear God more than political authorities, more than religious leaders, more than the idols we have constructed for ourselves in an attempt to make us feel secure in this life.
In God showing strength, our enemies will be scattered, and proud political officials and rulers will be cast down. Mary's claim is that God, in Christ, lifts up the lowly so that the seats of rulers will be brought down. God turns our understanding of power and political authority on its head. Prayer, not violence, is the tool of the powerful. In this way, the logic of the cross must force us to think outside of the box, outside of the finite institutions handed to us by this world.
Mary even gives us a great example right here in the prayer. "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty." Mary was not rich, yet she was chosen by God to be the bearer of God, the 'Theotokos.' An honor no one else in all of history would be able to claim. This honor was not given to the wealthy, or to a scholar of religion, a professor of ethics, a monk, or anyone else. Rather, a poor woman with no obvious social status would have this amazing honor. That Mary was poor has significance for Luke. As we have been learning this past year on Sunday mornings, Luke, in his Gospel as well as in Acts of the Apostles, gives special attention to the theme of the rich and the poor. In the time that all the scriptures were written (Old and New Testaments), it was generally thought by the religions of the Ancient Near East that if you were rich, the gods had blessed you. It meant that you were acting in a way that pleased the gods. This blessing was contingent on if you currently had favor with the gods based on behavior. This is the whole point of the book of Job when his friends are telling him, 'well you must have done something wrong to offend God or else all this bad stuff wouldn't be happening.' That the poor and the hungry will be filled with good things is turning this idea on its head. The poor are filled with the spirit. Against the milieu of the day, God blesses the poor, not just the rich. Luke's version of the beatitudes is a clear statement of the blessings had by 'the poor,' not just the 'poor in spirit' as is the case in Matthew's gospel. External circumstances are not a good indicator of God's blessing. God's help comes to all who believe, "because he has remembered his promise of mercy," a promise made to our matriarchs and patriarchs. Along with Mary, this is our promise also.
Mary puts on our lips the words that would turn authorities and ideologies on their heads so that we will leave behind our self-made idols and turn to the Lord. She also teaches us what it means to carry Jesus within us faithfully. She hears the good news of the coming of Christ, and lives into that reality in faith and praise.