On hearing the Magnificat

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Micah 5:2-5a and Luke 1:39-56

We are now one step closer to Christmas. Tonight’s gospel text recounts the visit of Mary to her kinswoman Elizabeth, and includes Mary’s song, known as the Magnificat. You’ve heard it before, time and again at this time of the year, but sometimes the frequency of the telling can lead us to miss the deeper power of what Luke wants us to know.

It is “with haste,” Luke says, that Mary heads out to a “Judean town in the hill country,” which was no small journey from her home in Nazareth. She’s heard the strange promise of the angel Gabriel that she would bear a child even though she’d never consummated her relationship with Joseph, and while she has embraced that message—“let it be with me according to your word”—perhaps the immensity of it all has begun to feel more than a little scary. She heads straight out to be with this trusted, older kinswoman, and in Luke’s telling there is no suggestion that she has even paused to talk with Joseph about all of this. Maybe she’s frightened, maybe she’s worried that Joseph won’t believe her, and maybe she’s anxious about the town gossips. Or maybe she’s just second-guessing the whole experience, wondering if maybe she’s just dreamed it all up?

But Elizabeth is safe, and Mary knows she can trust her, so she heads to see her right away, maybe scratching her head the whole way along. When she arrives at the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth—and remember from last week’s reading that they too are expecting an all but impossible child in their old age—she greets Elizabeth. This is how Luke recounts that episode:

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?’

Why? Well, she’s frightened and alone, and needs the wise counsel of her elder to help her get her feet back on the ground, that’s why. Yet whatever doubts or second-guesses Mary might have harboured to this point seem to melt away, and she opens her mouth to sing what we commonly call the Magnificat:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

for he has looked with favour on the lowliness 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 God’s name.

The “great things” of which Mary sings certainly include this impossible pregnancy, which she seems in this moment to utterly and entirely embrace, but as her song moves forward the “great things” include what N.T. Wright characterizes as “the ancient dream of Israel,” namely that, “One day Israel’s God would do what he had said to Israel’s earliest ancestors; all nations would be blessed through Abraham’s family.” “But,” Bishop Wright adds, “for that to happen, the powers that kept the world in slavery had to be toppled.”

This, then, is where these lines from the Magnificat come from:

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

The Lord has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

That’s all present-tense, notice. God has done this, and has done that, and the powers that have kept things in a kind of slavery have been toppled. She is singing, in short, into the future, now at this moment utterly sure that it is all unfolding as the prophets like Isaiah and Micah said it would. Period.

It did unfold in the life and ministry of Jesus, of course, and his earliest followers did their best to keep walking the path that he’d set. Read the Book of Acts, read Paul’s epistles, and you’ll see how those early Christians sought to live into the ethos of Mary’s song. Sharing food. Giving space in their homes for one another. Making sure that there was room for all, including, perhaps most significantly, enslaved people.

But you do know that all of that was happening under the iron rule of the Roman Empire; an empire in which the ruler and his cohort lived with an appalling level of wealth, while so many others were oppressed and went hungry. That history keeps unfolding in different ways over the next two thousand years, sometimes more extreme and sometimes more fair, but never entirely in keeping with the song that Mary sung.

We have these social safety nets in this country, and a good deal of it was actually pioneered by people of faith, who were concerned that no one should go without. Yet those aren’t seamless nets, and some all too easily fall through. Meanwhile I recently read that in 2021 Jeff Bazos, the founder of Amazon, had an annual income of $64 billion, which translates to a daily income of roughly $175 million, or an hourly income of about $7.31 million. How is that even possible? What relationship to reality does that even have? None, really… except that people who work in the Amazon warehouses generally make minimum wage, doing a job that requires them to move almost impossibly fast just to meet their quotas. That’s a truly absurd imbalance.

And so I wonder about the dream that Mary’s song holds. That same wondering was held by those in charge of India during British occupation, when the Magnificat was suppressed for being dangerously subversive. The same was true later in the Twentieth Century in Guatemala, and then again in Argentina, when the so-called Mothers of the Disappeared placed Mary’s words on posters throughout the capital plaza, leading the military junta of Argentina to outlaw any public display of the Magnificat.

It would seem that it was safe to sing the Magnificat in the chapel of King’s College Cambridge, or to have clergy and others from across the world pick up the Book of Common Prayer and pray the Magnificat every single day at Evening Prayer, but just don’t let anyone take it too literally… It gets dangerous, you see, when taken seriously, whether in India, Guatemala, or Argentina… or perhaps at one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker houses in places like New York, or even in a small parish church in the East End of London or downtown Winnipeg, where someone is liable to hear her dream and begin to change their own life.

Of course, it is precisely that danger that we need to hear, and then be reminded of the extraordinary grace and even dangerous love that fuelled the life of Jesus. Tramping about the countryside of Galilee, he fed empty stomachs with bread and fish, filled lost folk with powerful parables, and bound up those whose bodies or hearts were broken. He lived Magnificat, you see, and that earliest church followed him as best they could.

And so should we. Now I live a pretty comfortable life. If there’s a book I’d like, I can generally just purchase it. If there’s an occasion for a special dinner out, I don’t really have to think about how to pay for it. If my laptop breaks down, I’m only worried by the inconvenience of having to wait for a repair. Which is why I can’t just read the Magnificat as the nice old canticle I say at Evening Prayer, but rather as an ongoing wake-up call to find ways to live into it now, just as so many others—from those early Christians to the desert fathers and mothers to St. Benedict and Francis of Assisi, right up through to Dietrich Bonheoffer, Dorothy Day, Kenneth Leech, and that person in the next pew who lives out of a space of radical abundance and generosity, even when finances can get stretched.

That’s the claim of Mary’s song, you see. To strive to find ways to live the gospel in its fullness, and to trust that in the fullness of time it will so be. Our souls, too, shall magnify the Lord, and our spirits, too, and to rejoice in God our Saviour!