Advent Sermon Series on Mary, Part 2

Please see the comment at the beginning of Part 1 of this series above.

Ave Maria, Part 2: The Magnificat

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 7, 2008

Scripture:
Luke 1:46-55

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week, in the first sermon of this three part Advent sermon series on Mary of Nazareth, I suggested that we see Mary, the mother of Jesus, not as the meek, mild, obedient woman Christian tradition has turned her into but as a strong, morally autonomous, independent woman who does her own thinking, her own questioning, her own discerning, and her own deciding. It’s a very different way of thinking about her than the Christian tradition has transmitted to us; but then the Christian tradition, as valuable as it is in many respects, has gotten so many things wrong one hardly knows where to start to enumerate them all. It’s distortion of who Mary was is just another example of those errors. Today I want to add another dimension to that revisionist portrait of Mary as liberated woman that I began to paint last week. This new dimension comes from the passage from Luke that we just heard. That passage is known as the Magnificat, because its first word in Latin is Magnificat. The new dimension I want to add is the dimension of Mary as prophet.

The Magnificat begins with lines that can be seen as reinforcing the image of Mary as lowly, humble, and obedient: “My soul magnifies the Lord, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” The traditional interpretation of Mary sees these words as emphasizing Mary’s “lowliness,” a status in which Christian patriarchy has always wanted to keep her. Those lines are there, of course, but it seems to me that we can see the Magnificat as a hymn to Mary’s lowliness only if we ignore everything that comes after them. Mary’s next lines are: “Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me.” These lines fit with the interpretation of the Annunciation that I suggested last week, that in saying yes to God Mary was reaching for the brass ring, claiming her chance for glory, her chance really to be somebody. It just may be that God’s doing great things for her was exactly what Mary was counting on. In any event these lines, like the Annunciation itself, are ambiguous. They don’t necessarily indicate a Mary meek and mild.

Then we come to the part of the Magnificat that really shows a Mary different from the traditional view of her, that shows her as a prophet. She says: “God has shown strength with his arm; God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Now, to understand how these lines make Mary a prophet we have to understand what a Biblical prophet actually is. The common understanding is that a prophet is someone who foresees the future. A much better understanding of the Biblical prophets is that they are people who proclaim God’s truth. In particular, they are people like the great writing prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah who proclaim God’s demand for justice, who say that what God wants from us is not empty worship but lives devoted to justice for the poor and the vulnerable among us.

That’s the kind of prophet Mary is, although the way Luke puts it may not make that fact as clear as it might be. The words he puts in Mary’s mouth are in the past tense. The verses I just quoted consist of three parallel statements each of which begins by saying “God has.” The past tense of the verbs makes it sound like Mary is talking about things God did in the past. Yet it is pretty clear to us that the things Mary mentions God has not done in the past. The proud still have pride in their hearts. The powerful still sit on their thrones, even of those thrones look more like government offices and corporate board rooms than royal palaces. The lowly are still lowly. The rich are still full and the hungry are still hungry. So how are we to understand Mary’s words?

As prophecy, that’s how. Mary here isn’t talking about things God has literally done in the past but about God’s will, God’s desire, God’s dream for the earth. It is a dream of overturned hierarchical structures and justice for the least, the last, and the lost. When we understand Mary’s words this way, we see her as a prophet in the ancient tradition of Amos, Hosea, and Micah. And of her son Jesus, whose proclamation of the Kingdom of God her words foreshadow.

So, is Mary humble? Yes. She attributes all that is happening to her to God not to herself. Is Mary meek and mild? Hardly. She is giving new voice to the prophetic thundering of Amos, with his “let justice roll down like waters;” of Micah, with his “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice;” and of her son Jesus, with his “insofar as you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me.” The tradition doesn’t call her a prophet. It should. In the Magnificat the humble young woman of low estate rises up and joins her voice, loud and strong, to the great prophetic tradition of Israel. With the ancient prophets, and with Jesus Christ himself, she call us to lives of justice and of peace, to work for the coming of the Kingdom and the realization of God’s dream on earth. Praise be to God! Amen.