22 December 2024 Advent 4
Micah 5.2-5a; Song of Mary; Hebrews 10.5-10; Luke 1.39-45
Today we have a picture of two women who have overcome social disgrace; stared down the whispers; held their heads high and said, ‘it is all alright, just wait and see’.
Elizabeth was childless into her old age and that was a situation of great pain for her and a huge social disgrace. Mary is also ‘out of favour’ with the community, newly pregnant, unmarried, she faces not just social disgrace but more serious consequences for her situation. Is this why she runs so quickly to Elizabeth? Or is she just anxious to celebrate Elizabeth’s pregnancy ‘after all this time’. We don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. Both Elizabeth and Mary have ‘found favour’ with God and, even though they probably do not fully understand the fullness of that favour, they are ready to act on it.
The angel has just proclaimed to Mary that she will carry God’s Son, and even though Mary has questions and doubts about how ‘this can be’, she accepts it and agrees to it. After the angel leaves Luke tells us that Mary went ‘with haste’ to visit Elizabeth who, Mary has been told, is also pregnant, even though it was thought to be ‘too late’ for her. Now we don’t really know how much time elapses between Mary finding out she will become pregnant and her leaving for and arriving at Elizabeths. And that probably doesn’t matter either, but Mary is clearly already pregnant when she arrives because the child carried by Elizabeth ‘leaps’ when Mary arrives, and Elizabeth celebrates that Mary is pregnant because the child Mary carries is also a ‘special child’ from God.
Luke gives us lots of ‘songs’ in the early chapters of his gospel.
Mary sings as Elizabeth greets her. Zechariah sings at the birth of his son John, after his tongue is untied. The angels sing of peace and goodwill to the shepherds. Simeon sings his song of farewell when he sees the Christ child in whom God’s promise to Israel is kept. And the thing about songs is, they are often an act of resistance. When the slaves sang their spiritual songs, they were both praising God and protesting against their masters who had stopped them from worshipping their God. Civil rights leaders sang ‘We shall overcome’ even though most of them probably thought they had no chance of advancing their cause of justice. In 1989, in Leipzig, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the citizens of Leipzig would meet every Monday evening, by candlelight, and sing. In the space of two months, their numbers grew from a thousand to three hundred thousand, which was more than half the citizens of the city. They sang songs of hope and protest and justice, and their song shook the powers of the nation and changed the world. When asked later why the secret police didn’t crush the protest like they had so many times before, they said simply ‘we had no contingency plan for song’.
And maybe Mary and Elizabeth knew this as well. Two women, one too old to have a child, the other so young she was not yet married, yet both were called to bear children of promise through whom God would turn the world upside down. And they sang with confidence in the Lord’s promise to overturn the powers that be, to reverse the fortunes of the unjust world, and to lift up those who were oppressed.
The Magnificat, which Mary sings when Elizabeth greets her is well known, it is a song that is radical and hope-drenched and it is full of promise for the world’s poor, broken-hearted, and oppressed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said of the Magnificat: "It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings....This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind." In this song, Mary describes a reality where our sinful and unjust status quo is wonderfully reversed: the proud are scattered and the humble honoured; the hungry are fed and the rich are sent away; the powerful are brought down and the lowly lifted up.
The interesting this is, this song is so subversive in its cultural, socioeconomic and political implications that it has been banned many times in modern history. During the British rule of India, it was prohibited for churches to sing it. During the war in Argentina, when the mothers of children who had disappeared erected posters in the capital plaza with the words of the Magnificat, the military junta banned all public displays of the song. Too much hope, it was decided, was a dangerous thing. But too much hope is precisely what we are being called to proclaim and cultivate on this Fourth Sunday in Advent. Our Messiah is nearly here, we are told by Mary. And the promise of his lasting reign changes everything. Unjust systems, oppressive hierarchies, arrogant leadership structures will all by upended by God. So let us find our voices and share our song with the world.
And the question this asks each of us today is ‘what does my/your Magnificat sound like. How is God magnified through my/your unique perspective and vision. What words have I found/you found to express the radical, revolutionary hope of the Messiah I carry. The Messiah is coming. So make haste. Be blessed. Magnify the Lord.