Mary’s Song of Praise:
The Magnificat

And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”
Luke 1:46-55

In his book Biblical Critical Theory, Christopher Watkins recounts how on February 3, 1989, Diana, Princess of Wales, toured a ward of Harlem Hospital and was photographed hugging a little boy with AIDS.

If any of you are fans of the Netflix series The Crown, you may have watched this scene recreated in the show and, like me, found it rather normal or unremarkable. It represented another day of another royal making normal hospital rounds.

But when Diana did this in 1989, it was anything but normal. It was revolutionary. This is because she was breaking social taboo, spending time with and touching AIDS victims at a moment in history when “prejudice and misinformation about the disease still abounded.”¹

So why did I find her hug so normal? It was because, as Watkin says, “in my ignorance, I had not realized that things had been so bad for AIDS sufferers. Hugging someone with AIDS did not appear bold or subversive to me because I was ignorant that there had ever been at time when such hugs were so taboo. And the reason I did not realize, at least in part, is that Lady Di’s campaigning worked so spectacularly well….I found her gesture unremarkable precisely because its impact has been so utterly remarkable.”²

Mary’s Magnificat is like that.

Whether we realize it or not, this is a subversive and revolutionary text. But we miss much of its subversive nature because the very things this passage overturned have now become normal in our society.

Our culture was built on these Judeo-Christian values first spoken by Hannah in her song (see 1 Samuel 2:1-10), a childless woman from the hill country of Jerusalem, and then by Mary, a commoner from the hill country of Galilee.

But these words were picked up and echoed by Mary’s Son throughout His teaching for the rest of His life. We hear them echoed in the first public sermon He gave in Nazareth (Luke 4:16-19) and in the Beatitudes of His famous Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-12). His mother’s knowledge of the Word and her trust and belief in a Holy God who fulfills His promises and upends things with His Word shaped her Son. And they have the power to shape us as well if we will have fresh eyes to see and ears to listen.

So what exactly does Mary’s Magnificat upend, reverse, and shape in society and in us?

Reversing the Glamorous for the Ordinary
The first thing the Magnificat upends is our belief that God only works on behalf of or cares about the lives of famous, glamorous, or extraordinary people.

“In the ancient world, there was a strict division between tragedy and comedy and between the types of characters that could be depicted in each genre. Tragedy echoed the full resonant depth of human experience and drew its heroes exclusively from among the members of the ruling classes, whereas comedy could depict the lives of common people but treated their concerns as trifling and very often dismissed them as objects of humor and mockery. What the gospel accounts introduce into Western literature is a revolutionary novelty: the deep emotional world of tragedy inhabited by the common characters of comedy.”³

In the words of Rita Felski, “The soul of a bank clerk or a shop girl becomes a battleground on which momentous and incalculable forces play themselves out.”

We see this clearly with the apostle Peter, a common fisherman from Galilee. The whole range of human emotion is displayed in the account of his betrayal of Christ, his gut-wrenching cries and heart-felt tears once he realizes what he has done, and then his beautiful restoration by the Savior he loves. We also see it here with Mary in the Annunciation and Magnificat. She expresses wonder and fear at the angel’s greeting, and then sings with joy that the Mighty One has done things great for her – a simple, ordinary, peasant girl from Galilee – and all generations will call her blessed.

Throughout the New Testament, the rich and powerful are far from being the heroes. People like Nicodemus, Herod, Pontius Pilate, and the rich young ruler appear in the texts only to the extent that their lives cross paths with or are concerned with common people, which is exactly the opposite of almost all other historical accounts written during the same time period.⁴

What is even more extraordinary is we see in Luke 1 that Jesus Christ does not just identity with common people from a position of grandeur, wealth, or privilege, He indwells the womb of a common person and becomes a commoner Himself.

One of my favorite quotes to read during the Advent season comes from Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation. He says, “If Christ had arrived with trumpets and lain in a cradle of gold, his birth would have been a splendid affair. But it would not have been a comfort to me. He was rather to lie in the lap of a poor maiden and be thought of little significance in the eyes of the world. Now I can come to him. Now he reveals himself to the miserable in order not to give any impression that he arrives with great power, splendor, wisdom, and aristocratic manners.”⁵

This is nothing less than profound, for Christ’s identification with all that is common infuses all of our moments with God’s purpose, provision, and providential care as well. His hand is not just on those who are well-off or well-resourced; His care and concern is not just for those who have extraordinary talents or exciting adventures. His love, delight, pleasure, and will is to be worked out in ordinary moments of life with ordinary people.

Reversing Wealth for Poverty
But we have to be careful. There is no inherent virtue in being poor or ordinary, just as there is no inherent blessing in being talented or rich. Jesus no more saves the poor because they are poor than he condemns the rich because they are rich. He came “not as a banker to those poor of means but a doctor to those sick with sin (Mark 2:17),” rich and poor alike.⁶

Repentance is the genuine mark of the Kingdom of God, not material wealth or physical poverty. We all must trade whatever wealth we have of time, talent, or treasure for poverty of spirit. We must all come to terms with the fact that we are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” before a holy God and buy from gold refined by fire, clothes to cover our shame, and eye salve so that we might see (Revelation 3:17-18). A purchase like this requires nothing less than humility of heart and poverty of spirit.

Mary shows us this beautifully. When the angel appears to her, and announces the conception of Christ, Mary has much to lose. She stands to lose her reputation as a virgin, her betrothal to Joseph, the trust of her community, and her vision of a normal family life. But her response to the angel is extraordinary: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). She is willing to trade the loss of temporary comfort for eternal gain, exemplifying the words written by Jim Elliot, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

The Magnificat reminds us that we cannot use our earthly status symbols of wealth, power, beauty, and influence to gain the favor of a good and holy God. “[T]he Most High cares for the most humiliated”⁷ and is drawn to areas of weakness and those who know true riches are found in faithful dependence of Him.

Reversing Strength for Weakness
Finally, the Magnificat reverses the idea that the true power comes through military strength.

One of the most famous and well-known works of literature in the ancient world was The Aeneid written by Virgil between 29 and 19 B.C., approximately 100 years before the gospel of Luke. The Aeneid is a poem that tells the legend of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy to found the city of Rome. The opening lines are as follows:

“I sing of arms and of a man [Aeneas]: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coats of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the High Ones, for
the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger;
and many sufferings were his in war –
until he brought a city into being
and carried in his gods to Latium [the place where Rome was founded];
from this have come the Latin race, the lords
of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome” (emphasis mine).8⁸

Think of these words and then contrast them against the backdrop of Luke 1:26-56. The conception and incarnation of Christ is not a story of a man at war with the gods. Nor is it the story of a man carrying his own gods to a place of refuge and founding his own city. The account Luke writes is of a God being carried in the womb of a woman, becoming weak enough to save the world.

This was not just a scandal in the ancient world; this is a scandal in our own post-modern world as well.

We want to build our own destinies in our own strength and carry our own gods with us, entreating them do our bidding. But this is not the story of the Christ who came or who is coming again. Everything Jesus does in the gospels reverses strength for weakness, pride for humility, death for life, power for submission, vengeance for forgiveness, and military might for sacrificial love. In Christ, a Sovereign becomes a servant (Mark 10:45), and in His Name, we are to follow suit.

What Mary’s Song offers us is not just a pretty song to sing but an entire new set of values to live by. We are people of the Great Reversal – where weak is strong, poor is rich, humble is mighty, and gentle is great.

As you continue to prepare for Christmas during the Advent season, don’t forget to embrace the ordinary aspects of your life, cultivate a poverty of spirit, and celebrate the areas of weakness in your life that cause you to depend on God. These are the places God has come to upend, reverse, and indwell. He does not come to those who want to use Him for what He can give, but He comes to those who receive Him for who He is – one of us, yet nothing like us, made like us, yet uncreated from the beginning, weak and utterly defenseless, yet strong in spirit and full of might.

He doesn’t come to those with the greatest accomplishments; He comes to those with the humblest of hearts.

How silently, how silently,
the wondrous gift is giv’n!
So God imparts to human hearts
the blessings of His heav’n
No ear may hear His coming,
but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive Him still,
the dear Christ enters in.
O Little Town of Bethlehem, Phillips Brooks

1. Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p. 371. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid., p. 374. ↩︎
4. See Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p. 375. ↩︎
5. Jonathon Gibson, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, p. 87. ↩︎
6. Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p. 382. ↩︎
7. Derek Kidner, Psalms 73-150, p. 437. ↩︎
8. The Aenid of Virgil, A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum, Book I, Lines 1-12, p. 1. ↩︎