Enter the Songs ~ Mary’s Song: A Song of Promise

Mary, a young girl from Nazareth was called by God to give birth to a child – Jesus, the holy one of God. She is a prophet – someone called by God to share God’s vision – speaking and acting on God’s behalf.

Imagine… we are in the dry golden landscape of ancient Palestine. There are hills in the distance, and some dark green trees. There is a young woman. She is fourteen or fifteen years old, with long, black hair tied back by a scarf. A donkey is walking in a circle – its harness tied to a stake in the ground. It is pulling a threshing board to separate the grain from the chaff. The grain and chaff are being combed into a circular path under the donkey’s feet. Mary stands in the hot sun, under the blue sky, clapping her hands and calling to the donkey to keep walking. Her skin is brown like her people, and browner from the sun. As she reaches down to pull away the chaff, someone appears – a stranger.

Mary is startled, but the stranger quickly greets her in such a way that she is not afraid. At that moment she is more puzzled at their appearance and their words. The stranger – this messenger – tells Mary that God is with her – tells her that she is going to conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. Mary recognizes this as God’s word to her, and her only question is: how can this be?

The messenger tells her that with God, all things are possible. And Mary consents though she knows the danger she faces. The messenger leaves as suddenly as they have come, and Mary hastily departs on a journey from Galilee to Judea.

Mary heads for the hills, to stay with her cousin, Elizabeth, who understands at once what has happened and Mary is able to tell her what God has given her to do. Mary’s words are recorded in scripture as a joyful song:

"My soul proclaims your greatness, O God, and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior. For you have looked with favour upon your lowly servant, and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed.[1]

This song – the longest speech placed on the lips of any woman in the whole New Testament – is a freedom song. She looks into God’s time and sees salvation already accomplished.

Mary’s Song calls us to disrupt the hold violence has on our world. She sings of a future where all children are safe. She sings of a future where people have homes and food and jobs. Her words are in solidarity with us. She sees to the far horizon and sings of the coming reign of God. We will be fed – and we will feed others. We will be blessed – and we will bless others. We will receive justice – and we will be part of ensuring justice for others. All things are possible with God.

Mary sings of a future worth struggling for. She sings prophetically – she sings about something that hasn’t yet happened. She sings of a hopeful vision for the future because she can see farther than the rest of us – she keeps us from giving in and giving up. She sings to keep our hearts full of hope. We need to hear that song over and over again.

Mary was bold to sing about God. Her song contains shockingly radical words. How is God calling us to sing new lyrics to Mary’s Song? How are hope, peace, joy, and love being birthed in you and me this Christmas? How is the Holy Spirit moving within us such that in the coming year your soul may ever more fully magnify God?

The Christmas story has too frequently come to have a sense of preciousness – of sentimentality. When this over-romanticizing of the story happens, we can miss the radicalism of the claim that God is found – not as the royal child of a queen – but as the son of an unmarried peasant. As an unwed teenager in a religiously conservative small town, how stunning is it that Mary finds the courage to sing.

Originally, what we know today as Mary’s Song was likely an independently existing canticle inspired by many different verses from Hebrew Scripture. Indeed, there are multiple scriptural echoes in every line of this text – usually referred to as the Magnificat. Luke likely uses this song because it provides such a powerful thematic prelude for his gospel.

The infancy narratives in Luke’s gospel are suffused and punctuated with singing. He wants to awaken us to the wonders of Christ’s coming. He fills the story with the sound of singers chanting their songs of joy and wonder at the new day dawning before their very eyes. The songs Luke has us listen to are not tame or calm. Luke’s Advent songs are more like the ringing of an alarm shattering early morning silence.

After Mary, Zechariah will take the stage to praise God’s fidelity to Israel through the birth of John the Baptist, the angels will offer their canticle of peace and good will at the birth of Jesus, and Simeon will sing of God’s mercy being extended to the entire world. Why so much verse? Because Luke understands – as did the Psalmists of Israel – that songs are powerful. Laments express our grief and fear so as to honour deep and difficult emotions – simultaneously stripping them of their power to incapacitate us. Songs of praise and thanksgiving unite us with the One to whom we lift our voices. Canticles of courage and promise not only name our hopes but also contribute to bringing them into being.

Luke aims to have us listen to these singers and their songs, not just to marvel at what God did “once upon a time at the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem’s manger,” but to have us sense the energy of heaven that God has unleashed among us. Luke does not want us to be mere spectators of the story – he wants us to live it – to embody and participate in creating it. The songs Luke records are meant to awaken us – to fill our hearts with great rejoicing – to delight us with what God is still busy doing even today.

Mary’s Song is an overture to the Gospel of Luke as a whole. It celebrates the redeeming nature of God that addresses each one of us personally. Her lyrics speak of God addressing injustice by turning our expectations upside down – or right side up – setting the tone for Jesus’ radical and controversial ministry that is to come:

You have shown strength with your arm; you have scattered the proud in their conceit; you have deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places. You have filled the hungry with good things, while you have sent the rich away empty.[2]

I think it matters that Luke recounts this portion of his gospel story in verse. By transcending the confines of prose narrative, the poetry of Mary’s Song pierces the veil of the ordinary and opens a window by which to perceive in a new way the extraordinary and unexpected goodness of God. Mary promises that the Holy One of Israel may also encounter us amid the ordinary, mundane, and even difficult activities of daily life.

Although Luke has on several occasions in these opening chapters located God’s activity among the historically powerful, they are noticeably absent in this scene – replaced by two pregnant cousins. Similarly, the politically or prophetically significant cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth are not the locale for this action, but rather the hill country of Judea. Already – at least in this scene – the proud have been scattered and the lowly uplifted – all this occasioned by two women greeting each other in love and wonder.

We have an opportunity this Sunday not only to talk about Mary’s Song – and to sing it – but also to enter into the promises to which it gives voice. Mary sings of God’s mercy – promising that God lifts up the lonely, the downtrodden, and the oppressed – not just of her day – but of our own as well. So, as we take up her song, we call upon God to remember those who mourn or are lonely – those experiencing food insecurity and financial instability – those who suffer racism and gender inequality – those living in places of strife and war – those who struggle with mental illness or carry lovingly the burden of another’s care – and so many more.

According to Luke, when Mary sang, she didn’t just name those promises but also entered into them. Mary recognizes as she sings that she has already been drawn into relationship with the God of Israel – the one who has been siding with the oppressed since the days of Egypt and who has been making and keeping promises since the time of Abraham. It is not that everything Mary sings about has been accomplished, but rather that Mary is now included in God’s history of redemption.

So it is with us. When we sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” we are drawn into the story of Israel’s redemption – and not only long for, but participate in – God’s promise to bring light and cheer – to dispel death and darkness. Similarly, when we sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” we can feel the hopes and fears of all the years met in the vulnerable babe of Bethlehem. Singing “Joy to the World” can create in us the very joy we long for.

Songs are powerful. When we gather together and sing to God, the hope and consolation of Israel and the world, we – like Mary – are swept into God’s divine activity to save and redeem that world. A few voices drawn together in song may seem a small thing in the face of all the wars and worries of the age, but surely no smaller than those two voices joined in the Judean hill country twenty centuries ago. Mary’s God delights in taking what is small and insignificant in the eyes of the world to do extraordinary and unexpected things. So it has been – is – and ever shall be “according to the promise God made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

Singing doesn’t just help us to name things – it draws us into the actual experience and reality we voice. God has promised to change the world – and in singing these promises we enter into that work. So, we sing Mary’s Song: My soul gives glory to my God #123

[1] Luke 1: 46b-48, The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc; © by Priests for Equality

[2] Ibid. Luke 1: 51-53