Year C Advent IV Luke: 1:39-45

“My heart exults in the Lord … My strength is exalted in my God …”

Sound familiar?

Today we hear the Magnificat, that great song of Mary that the author of Luke and Acts has blessed us with.

But this quote isn’t from the Magnificat. It’s not even from the Gospels. It’s from the Book of Samuel in our Old Testament. It’s sung by another pregnant woman, Hannah the mother of Samuel, the great priest and prophet.

Hannah was unable to conceive and bear children because we are told, “The Lord had closed her womb.” In time, however, she does conceive and when she dedicates her son – her only son – to the temple, to become a priest she sings a song. Luke uses this song as a model for Mary’s song.

In Luke’s Gospel, as in none of the other three, and only because Luke collected and preserved them for us, we have something wonderful - songs, hymns from the early church. No other Gospel writer thought about putting down the beautiful lyrics to those songs sung by early congregations of the faithful, but Luke recorded them for us. The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is one of them.

In both Hannah’s song and Mary’s the mighty are laid low, and the lowly are raised up. God is active and acting in the world. And so these women sing, “My heart exults in the Lord!” “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

That’s an interesting phrase: My soul magnifies the Lord. MY soul magnifies the Lord. This is sometimes translated as “my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,” which means sort of the same thing. But there’s something more profound in saying “my soul magnifies the Lord.”

And the Magnificat has yet another translation that opens up an even deeper level, a more profound paradox.

It reads, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and then a little later it says, “For He that is mighty hath magnified me.” I magnify the Lord, but the Lord also magnifies me. It’s a double magnification and it’s maybe a little “through the looking-glass.”

But that’s where we are in Advent. Advent prepares us for Christmas, which takes us through the looking glass. There, everything looks familiar but everything is utterly and profoundly different. Because God has become incarnate, has become flesh, one of us, and that changes everything.

My soul doth magnify the Lord. . .

For Mary this could have been a very sad time had Joseph not been visited by an angel and then stepped up to marry Mary and legitimize her Son in the eyes of the Jewish community. It could have been so many sad things, but, instead, on the day of this song, all is happiness.

What do we know about Mary? In Protestant congregations, she is not much emphasized, but we do know that the Roman Catholics revere her as Ever Virgin and as God’s Mother. Episcopalians and Lutherans argue against the “ever virgin” dogma, but hold Mary in very high regard.

All of Christendom acknowledges Mary as God’s mother. Whether, depending on her love for us and loving and trusting her, we pray to her for her help and intercession, which is the practice in congregations with a Catholic tradition, or simply love her and acknowledge her as God’s mother, which is the more Protestant approach, Mary is a person of glorious mystery and an example of unselfish and unconditional love.

My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For He hath regarded: the lowliness of His handmaiden.

Despite all the honours heaped upon Mary by the Church, and all the doctrine and dogma that surround her, in life she had no delusions of grandeur. She was an humble person, and humility is something with which we modern folks have a lot of difficulty. For us humility has wrongly come to represent cringing and crawling and not standing up for one’s self, but this is not what humility means.

“For He that is mighty hath magnified me.”

Mary was humble because she was all for God. She placed herself totally in God’s hands and trusted God completely. She surrendered to God! This is what each of us is called to do, but we resist it because we have our own plans, our own lives, our own way of thinking. We resist because, unlike Mary, we are not full of grace. Rather we are full of ourselves. God attempts to intercede in our lives, and more often than not, we’re too filled with our own noise to hear Him, too busy to respond. Think what would have happened to us all, if Mary hadn’t had the time for God, hadn’t made room for Jesus.

And his mercy is on them that fear him throughout all generations.

Mary is for us the spotless mirror of God’s love, and the example of what it means to fear God. We hear the term “fear of God” and don’t understand that to fear God means to respect God. Our chief concern each morning ought to be to praise God with the joy and happiness Mary exudes in her song, and to ask her Son, Jesus, to guide our day. We ought to fear going through any day without paying close attention to the Holy Spirit infusing our thoughts, our actions, our lives with light and love.

He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.

We are the people called, like Mary, to be “yes” before the world, but sadly, “the proud and the mighty” is a description that better fits most of us. We are in such a rush today to get on with our lives, to push forward on the path we have planned, to accomplish the tasks we have set for each day, that what we fail to recognize is that such a way of life really is “all about us” and not about God.

It is Advent! This is the last Sunday, before His coming, for us to reflect on our preparedness for Jesus, not just at His appearing on Christmas morning, but at His appearing every day in our lives. From our morning prayers of dedication to Him until we close our eyes at night and commend ourselves to His care, we are called to, with joy, await His appearing. And appear He does, in our lives, in one way or another, each and every day.

Mary went in haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and there she sang the song we heard today. Let us always be open to God and, no matter what He asks of us, to go in haste and with joy to do His will. He comes to us later this week, as a baby, helpless, to be held in Mary’s arms. Let us, with joy, be ready to receive Him, and above all things, to hold Him always in our hearts.

Let us pray:

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.