THE MAGNIFICAT IS PAST TENSE?!?
(Preached on Sunday, December 11, 2005)
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
-Luke 1:52-53
Did these words startle you? These words reflect no meek and mild, simpering teenager. This is a manifesto for a new world order that God is bringing about through Jesus the Christ. It is a hymn about the golden age that the prophet Isaiah envisioned and longed for. The age of new opportunity for all the forgotten, neglected, exploited, abused people of earth.
“You, God, have shown the strength of your arm
You have scattered the proud hearts
and all their vain pretensions.
You have put down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of the lowest status.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
but the rich you have sent away empty!”
These truly are shocking words.
Painful words for those who wield power or who live affluent lives while either perpetuating, or permitting, grave injustices to happen to vulnerable people.
Advent ushers in a revolution.
Emmanuel brings disruption.
Advent presents us with a paradox. For there are three human greatnesses or self-sufficiences: pride, power, and riches.
Are not a position of honor and prestige, the power to control one’s circumstances, and access to resources for a comfortable life the very things to which people aspire?
Are these not the things that liberate?
The mass media has given us the message of what we must do and possess to look good, feel good, and be happy.
Yet here are these words of an ancient Jewish village peasant woman, a teenager, rejoicing at the great things God has done — great things which have turned the normal social order on its head — scattering the proud, removing the powerful from their seats of power, and feeding the hungry but sending the rich away empty.
That is not the way the world works.
Nor is it very comforting to anyone living in the USA. For whether we consider ourselves well-off or needy, we all aspire for these three things.
(And I’m not pointing any fingers here, after all, if I were, there would be three pointing back at me. I like my life just as much as you do; I like my house with three bedrooms that sit empty and more room than any two people need; I enjoy my 26 inch television, dvd player and cable television; I enjoy attending the theater, the occasional professional sporting engagement or rock concert, taking my wife to see the King Tut exhibit, traveling to Chicago for Thanksgiving, playing golf, and more. And I know that in this nation I do not even approach the category rich. But on the world scale, and when truly listening to the Magnificat, I grow anxious. For I truly have more than I need and I worry about which category I will be found when judged by biblical standards.) No, I am not pointing fingers and I struggle with this passage, and much of the Bible as much as any North American does.
So where is the hope for us and what keeps this from being “bad” news instead of good? Perhaps we can find hope in the reading of these words and the view of Mary among the poor and dispossessed of the world. In many ways, even more than Jesus, Mary is the gospel character the poor have identified with most strongly. And why not, for poor and common woman though she may be, the powerful, living, holy God is doing great things to her. Not to her only but to all the poor — bringing the mighty down from their thrones, exalting the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, sending the unrepentant rich away empty — all of this in fulfillment of the ancient promise. In her very being this is happening, for she embodies the nonentities on whom God is lavishing rescue.
No story more clearly illustrates this truth than that of the Virgen de Guadalupe. In the early 1500s the Franciscan missionaries arrive in the New World bringing with them the Catholic faith.
The indigenous peoples hear the words spoken by the missionaries, a message of a god of love in the midst of death and suffering.
The message, however, does not make sense.
Before their eyes, the conquistadores have plundered their land, destroyed their sacred temples, and left them decimated.
They have lost their land, their identity, and their culture; they cease to exist as a people. From the ashes of their temples and sacred books, however, a new race is born. Through the union of the indigenous peoples and the Spanish conquistadores, the mestizo is born. The mestizo, however, continue to suffer rejection, marginalization, and impoverishment at the hands of the now dominant Spanish culture.
Then, in 1531, on a small hill called Tepeyacac, near Mexico City, a mestizo named Juan Diego hears a voice speak to him in his native Mexican language:
“Listen to me, my child, the most abandoned. Know and be assured in your heart, that I am the ever Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the true God through whom there is life; of the Creator through whom everything exists; ... I am a merciful mother, yours and of all those that live in this land, those that love me, those that speak to me, that seek me and that confide in me. Am I not here, who am your Mother? Are you not beneath my all-encompassing shadow? Am I not your health? What else should you need?”
More important even than what she said was her appearance: for she was dark skinned, her face a beautiful mixture of indigenous and European features and she was dressed in native garb.
In this encounter with the Virgin of Guadalupe, dignity is restored to those who had lost hope and the barrier of prejudice between Spaniard and Indian was breached.
This story illustrates the truth that God does not reject the rich and powerful; the poor are not inherently better.
As the Virgin reminded Juan Diego she is mother of all.
God loves all people.
The reversal of fortunes of the greedy rich and the hungry poor is therapeutic. The rich need to be awakened to the structures of injustice in society that hold the poor in a cycle of poverty. For all of us are called into God’s family, a family of true justice and true equality.
A social structure in which the rich continue to get richer as the poor get poorer is headed for disaster.
And yet, for 2,000 years that seems to have been reality.
Which brings us to the other shocking aspect of this hymn.
Did you notice the tense of the verbs?
The Magnificat is spoken not in future tense, not in present tense, but in past tense. Mary is not looking forward to what God will do, or is doing, but rejoices in what God HAS done!
She is not talking nonsense but expressing the truth of the incarnation, of Emmanuel, God with us, God in the flesh, that is growing inside her and being born into the world.
For what it means that God is willing to take on human flesh is that God has embraced all that it means to be human — all the suffering, sorrow, inconsistencies, and divisions — embraced them, embraced us, and drawn us close to the very heart of God.
In Jesus God has united all humanity and brought us home.
In Jesus, God had overcome all the barriers between God and us, and between each one of us, so that nothing separates us from the love of God or from one another.
So Mary is rejoicing in what God has already accomplished — that all the barriers and divisions are overcome, all the injustices corrected, and God’s family has been called into being. It is a matter of us living that reality now.
In World War II there was a German prison camp where, unbeknownst to the guards, the American prisoners built a makeshift radio.
When news came over the radio that the German high command had surrendered, bringing an end to the war, the German guards had not yet found out. As word spread among the prisoners, celebration broke out all over camp.
For three days the prisoners were hardly recognizable.
They sang, waved at guards, laughed at the German shepherd dogs, and share jokes over meals.
On the fourth day, they awoke to find that all the Germans had fled, leaving the gates unlocked.
The time of waiting had come to an end.
For three days, the environment and the conditions of their lives did not change, but their attitude toward it had, because they knew that the reality of their lives had changed. It was just a matter of that reality transforming the conditions of their daily lives.
The reality of our lives has changed. The way of life, God’s way, is the way of justice for all, kindness and mercy.
We are called to imagine such a reality.
That is the first step to realizing it.
The second step is to embrace that reality and choose to stand with Mary and the poor and seek the power of God’s Spirit to guide us in living lives of service to others and doing all we can to share what we have been given and to use our power and prestige for the good of all God’s people, not just ourselves.
Then we too will be able to say: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”