Christmas Turns The Tables
Text: Luke 1:39-56
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
December 15, 2024 Third Sunday in Advent
After Mary received that visit from the angel Gabriel announcing that she will carry the Son of God in her womb, she goes to the hill country to her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth is also with child. The child will be John the Baptist.
The words in the passage we read just now has come to be known as the “Magnificat.” Many translations read Mary saying, “My soul magnifies the Lord…” Magnificat is from the Latin for “magnify.”
Mary magnifies and glorifies God by declaring the greatness of God. She glorifies the Lord by making him big, praising him, putting the spotlight on him.
This passage is very prominent in the Roman Catholics tradition. Catholics have a great deal of emphasis on Mary. When Nancy and I were in the Holy Land there were a number of Roman Catholic priests in our group. We enjoyed our time together immensely. One day one of them asked me about the place of Mary in the Protestant tradition. I told him that we don’t worship her or pray to her as many Roman Catholics do. I said that we do respect her place in the biblical story and that I have preached several sermons with Mary as a focal point. He said he had never preached a sermon about Mary. I was surprised.
When we lived in Idaho, I used to go up to a little Hermitage in the foothills for some retreat and prayer. The Hermitage was run by two Benedictine nuns who lived there and provided me with hospitality. Every night before retiring from the day, they met in the chapel to pray, and they would pray or sing this song of Mary. It is a staple in the Catholic liturgies and services.
This song or prayer or poem of Mary might be the world’s most dangerous prayer. When the British ruled India, the Magnificat was prohibited from being sung in church. In the 1980’s the government in Guatemala banned it from being said in public because of the words about bringing down the wealthy and powerful and lifting up the downtrodden and poor. The leaders considered it too revolutionary. The poor in Guatemala were being stirred by this part of the Bible.
In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose children all disappeared during what was called the Dirty War, placed these words of Mary on posters throughout the capital plaza. The military junta of Argentina outlawed any public display of Mary’s song. Gentle Mary’s words banned by authorities.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor, understood how revolutionary Mary’s words are. Before he was executed by the Nazis he spoke about these words in a sermon during in Advent in 1933. He said:
“The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. 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.”
Why is Mary almost always portrayed as a calm, demure “beauty queen, always perfectly manicured”, at ease? Why isn’t she portrayed as a woman capable of walking the hill country of Judea and giving birth in a cave? A woman with grit and maybe some edge.
We probably need to reclaim the Mary of the Bible. Who was Mary? What type of a girl is singing and praying these most dangerous words?
Mary was part of a people known as “the poor ones” who lived in the areas of Galilee, Samaria and Judah. In Hebrew the term for poor ones is the anawim. They were a particular people in the society of 1st century Palestine.
Why were they called the poor ones? They were physically poor and dependent upon God for their daily needs. They were the lowly, poor, sometimes sick, and downtrodden. Some were widows and orphans. The poor ones lived in the slums. Everyday was about survival. Food, clothing, health were day by day things.
But that dependence for basic necessities of life also made them dependent upon the Lord for everything. The poor ones were different from the proud, the rich, and the self-sufficient who felt no need for God. They recognized their dependence on God and their utter confidence in him.
The poor ones also believed that they were a unique people. They believed that they were the remnant of Israel. The idea of a remnant in the Bible refers to those who are “left over” after some great catastrophe or those who have escaped a disaster but continue to live as a people.
Read the books of the prophets in the Bible and you will find reference to the remnant of Israel. This was a group of people that remained faithful to God after Israel was taken over and Jerusalem was destroyed.
There was a time when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was attacked, destroyed, and the people taken over by Assyria because of Israel’s unfaithfulness. Not all of the people were taken away and destroyed. A remnant remained. This remnant of people believed they were still there because they had trusted in God alone. They believed that they were a sign of hope that God still had a people.
Later, when the Southern Kingdom fell to Babylon and Jerusalem was destroyed and left empty the Lord spoke through Jeremiah, saying:
“I myself with gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing.
The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up to David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.”
Did you see that? Out of this remnant would come a King and Savior. Not everyone had been taken away from the area of Palestine to Babylon. Some were left behind namely, those who the Babylonians didn’t even think worth taking. How low is that? Not even worth taking to be slaves by your conquerors. They weren’t many, but there was a population. These were the poor ones.
They were kind of the refuse, the lowest, of Jerusalem and surrounding areas. It was these “poor ones” who considered themselves the remnant that the Bible spoke of.
They believed they were the ones to continue the faith and legacy of Israel as God’s people. They knew the remnant was a people faithful to God so they lived a certain way of life, a way of life that was full of faith and devotion to the God of Israel. They sang the songs of faith, recited and learned the stories of God from the scriptures, worshipped, prayed, and lived believing that God would come to them and redeem them someday.
They lived on promises such as this one in Isaiah, “Shout for joy, O heavens, rejoice, O earth; burst into song, O mountains! For the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones.” They lived with the expectation that God would come and comfort them.
These are the people Mary may well have come from. Nazareth was prime country for “the poor ones”. In Luke 2 we read of Anna and Simeon, devout worshippers in Jerusalem who could have been part of this group, too. We are told that they were devout and looking for the consolation and redemption of Israel. Zechariah and Elizabeth – that old, barren childless couple who so wanted a child– might well have also been part of these people.
These people were everything the rich, powerful, and influential were not. This remnant people in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas, were keeping the flame, believing that their life of devotion to God showed their favor with him, believing that God would send his Anointed One to have compassion on his afflicted/poor ones.
These devout and impoverished people became the core of the earliest church in Jerusalem. We read in Acts how the earliest Christians made sure they provided for the needy and had special concern for the poor. Paul writes in his letters about helping the poor.
Collections were taken from various church to provide for the needs of those in other churches. The believers in Jerusalem apparently were particularly in need. James was the leader of the Jerusalem believers and we know in his letter that he rails against the rich and upholds the poor.
Much of the first community of believers in Jesus were slaves. A historical note: when the Roman historian Pliny sought information on Christians he went to two female slaves to get it. That shows the status of Christians and what type of people made up the church in those days.
Mary’s world was one of hardship and oppression. Living under Roman occupation, Jewish people longed to be free from the political and social burden they faced. Women, particularly young, unmarried ones like Mary, had almost no recognition in society. Against this backdrop, Mary’s song was a bold proclamation in a world where power was concentrated in the hands of a few.
The good news meant that those ultimately blessed were not the mighty and the rich who made their lives miserable. Not their dishonest landlords, not the oppressive Roman government or those who imposed brutal taxation on them.
They lived under the conviction that the Lord was going to change all of this someday through his Messiah. They would have a new king.
A good portion of those first believers in Christ were Jews. But for those who didn’t believe, one of the objections against Christianity was that God would never have his Messiah come into the world without due honor and glory. Never would the Messiah be born of a woman who admitted that she was no more of a handmaid, a female slave.
But this is the woman through whom God chooses to come into the world. Why didn’t God come through a politically or socially power family? Why didn’t he come with great fanfare and celebration? Why didn’t he come as a rich, influential mover and shaker?
God didn’t get his purposes done by doing a Christmas Carol type of thing with Herod, changing him and all the world became well.
And Mary glorifies God by affirming,
…that the Lord has looked with favor on her lowliness,
…the proud have been scattered, the powerful brought down, but the lowly have been lifted up,
…the hungry have been filled with good things while the rich have been sent away empty.
God bypassed all who were important, comfortable and well-off, and chose her.
The good news in Mary’s song is that if you are lowly, if you are hungry, if you find yourself being bullied and taken advantage of by people who are stronger than you, if you find yourself on the bottom, or scarred by the pride of the powerful, you can rejoice in God because he is on your side.
If you think you are too small, insignificant, or unimportant for God to notice you, see Mary.
How this can mean anything to most of us who have so much? Poor certainly refers to socio-economic status but a person can be emotionally poor, grieving and hurting, mentally poor, physically poor, suffering from a debilitating disease, spiritually poor, hungry for meaning and purpose. We can have all the money in the world but if we are lonely, grieving, laying in a hospital bed with cancer, we have a certain poverty in life.
The thing is the less we are full of ourselves and the more we see our dependence on God, the more we will experience the Lord.
The Christian writer Philip Yancey wrote, “God’s kingdom turns the tables upside down. The poor, the hungry, the mourners, and the oppressed truly are blessed. Not because of their miserable states, of course – Jesus spent much of his life trying to remedy those miseries. Rather, they are blessed because of an innate advantage they hold over those more comfortable and self-sufficient. People who are rich, successful, and beautiful may well go through life relying on their natural gifts. People who lack such natural advantages, (and are) hence underqualified for success in the kingdom of this world, just might turn to God in their time of need.”
From looking at some Christians today you would think that the life of Jesus is about gaining power and control, beating up on others, and being influential. The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world with no privilege or power, but in humility and human weakness.
Jesus would say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Now, who does that sound like God is keeping his eye on?
Mary’s song, her Magnificat, is her praise to God. She glorifies God for favoring those like her. She knew her need for God and knew that God saw her and those like her. Amidst our wealth, abundance of resources, and “well-to-do-ness” we often have a hard time admitting how desperate we really are. But when we do know our need, Christ can be born in us.
Prayer: God Most High, your only Son came and took on the weakness of human flesh to give us power to become your children. And you chose an unnoticed, unimportant, girl to give him birth. But she knew you. You have always lifted up those who are low. Help us to see this world through your eyes and live in it with your heart. Amen.