Preaching Paths 17 December 2023

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

NOTE:  We have decided to focus this week on the Magnificat (Luke 1:44b-55), suggested for Advent 3B as an alternate to the psalm of the day. The usual Gospel text for Advent 3B (John 1:6-8, 19-28) focuses, as did last week’s text (Mark 1:1-8), on John the Baptist. Online resources for John 1 abound. Mary’s song supports an Advent theme of God’s inauguration of a new order, one that dethrones the powerful and raises the lowly.

In Luke 1:44b-55, young Mary becomes proclaimer of the incarnate Word she carries within her. Her song weaves OT testimonies to divine deliverance with news of startling, divinely-initiated socio-economic reversals. The reversal motif of the Magnificat is sustained throughout Luke’s gospel.

When Elizabeth declares her pregnant, unmarried young cousin “blessed among women,” Mary’s voice is unleashed. Her song begins with her own experience. She, the unlikely and the lowly, has been caught up into God’s strange and wonderful redemptive design. The ancient divine promise of a deliverer to come is being kept in her body. Generations to come will echo Elizabeth’s greeting: “Blessed are you . . .” (1:42, 46b-49). Yet, Mary’s raising up is only the beginning of a cascade of far-reaching social reversals (vv. 51b-53) that signify an outpouring of divine mercy in Israel (vv 50, 54).

Strong verbs in the aorist (past) tense energize the staccato pace of vv 51-53: “has shown,” “has scattered,” “has brought down/lifted up,” “has filled,” “has sent away,” “has helped.” That which will come to pass is portrayed as fait accompli. This style of expression, the “prophetic perfect” tense, is common in Jewish apocalyptic, signaling eschatologically decisive events already under way.

Mary and Elizabeth see themselves as living proof that God’s redemptive overturning of taken-for-granted norms has begun. Their pregnancies are “unthinkable” according to prevailing norms. One is too old and long barren, the other young and unmarried. Yet Mary celebrates. For God will reverse the status of high and lowly, proud and meek, rich and poor, sated and starving.

For anyone counted by the world’s standards as socially insignificant, Mary’s announcement of God’s radical reordering of the world is good news. But for those of us who rest comfortably in nests of privileged whiteness, pedigree, or prosperity, Mary has predicted a day of reckoning. Sometimes,  when cracks and instabilities appear in the global economic, political, and military scaffolding on which our prosperity is balanced, we shudder. Yet maybe the quaking means that our salvation draws near. Luke tells us of precisely the saving reversals Mary has predicted. A bent-down woman is touched by Jesus and raised up to praise God, like Mary before her (13:10-17). Wealthy Zaccheus the tax collector is called down from his high, leafy perch to repent and be saved (19:1-10).

Perhaps God’s mercy-driven project of reversal requires that wherever power—social, economic,  religious or militaristic— is deployed to sustain binaries of domination and oppression, there must be a reckoning. Blessed be the day when all such brittle schemes fail us, stripping us of our fantasies of  invulnerability. Perhaps only then shall we find ourselves free-falling, like Mary, into the arms of divine mercy. Only then can we be raised up, freed, healed. Mary sings that it shall be the little-regarded and the vulnerable—not the powerful or the self-assured—who shall lead us out of our fragile delusions of safety and into God’s realm of wholeness, blessing, and lasting peace.