My Soul Magnifies the Lord - Lectionary (RCL) Reflection for Advent 4C (Luke 1)

Luke 1:39-56 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

³⁹ In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰ where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴² and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³ And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴ For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” 

⁴⁶ And Mary said, 

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

⁴⁷     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

⁴⁸ for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

    Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

    and holy is his name.

⁵⁰ His mercy is for those who fear him

    from generation to generation.

⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm;

    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

    and lifted up the lowly;

⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,

    and sent the rich away empty.

⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel,

    in remembrance of his mercy,

⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” 

⁵⁶ And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

 

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                Who is this Mary whom Luke mentions at the beginning of his Gospel? What is her role in the story of our salvation? In Luke's telling of the story of Jesus, why did God choose her to be the mother of the Lord? Some of that information is given in the preceding verses, where the angel visits Mary and announces that she will bear a child, even though she has not been with a man. No worries said the Angel, the Holy Spirit will take care of that. And indeed, Mary is now with child.

           Luke offers us one of two takes on the question of Jesus’ origins. For the most part, the New Testament writers show no interest in Jesus’ conception or birth. In most of the New Testament, Mary doesn’t figure prominently in the story. Yet, Mary has figured prominently in the traditions of the church. But as time passed, she began to play a bigger role in the story, with the emphasis being on her virginity at the time of the conception of Jesus, and from then on.

         When we get to the fourth century CE, we see that the Nicene Creed declares of Jesus that “for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” The confession that Mary was at the time of conception a virgin, and perhaps continued in that state forever afterward, has long been a point of contention within and without the Christian community. It has become a matter of contention in the modern age as questions are raised about the miraculous. Some believers continue to hold fast to the ancient confession, perhaps because they embrace the miraculous or because they believe that this is an essential tenet of the faith. On the other hand, there are many others who reject the concept, relegating it to the realm of myth, insisting that it needs to be set aside by reasonable moderns. There are still others who simply continue affirming the confession, not because it is in line with modern beliefs, but because it reflects the important role of Mary in the economy of God.  As John P. Meier put it: “one’s acceptance or rejection of the doctrine will be largely influenced by one’s own philosophical and theological presuppositions, as well as the weight one gives Church teachings” [A Marginal Jew, 1:222]. 

                As we gather on the fourth Sunday of Advent, we stand on the border between the season of anticipation and the season of fulfillment. The Gospel reading for this Sunday focuses on the visit of Mary to her relative Elizabeth. The text itself has nothing to do with the question of the nature of Mary’s conception, except that she feels greatly blessed that God would choose her to be a partner in the work of salvation. Elizabeth’s pregnancy is, according to Luke, almost as miraculous as that of Mary. Like Sarah and Hannah before her, she was past the age of child-bearing. And yet she is carrying a child, who will in time come to be known as John the Baptist. Thus, even as John will engage in a ministry of preparation, the same is true of Elizabeth. She responds to Mary, inspired, according to Luke by the Holy Spirit. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb."

After Elizabeth gives her witness to the importance of Mary’s child, and the blessing she derives from the encounter, we hear Mary break out in song. It's the song we’ve come to know as the Magnificat. In this powerful psalm, Mary declares both her trust in God’s decision to honor her with this calling and her own sense of God’s vision for the future. As with many of the texts we read during Advent, this song has an eschatological/apocalyptic tone. God is going to do something rather powerful in the world, and she gets to play a significant role in this effort.

What will this work of God look like? According to Mary, something revolutionary is about to happen. God will turn the world upside down. The rich and the powerful will be brought low, and those living on the margins will be raised up. This isn’t a vision that fits very well with a Christian worldview that values success and power. It’s not the kind of vision that Constantine would embrace, or many Christians living in America today. The growth of Christian nationalism that has embraced Trumpism doesn't connect well with Mary's song. Nonetheless, this is the vision espoused by Luke and by Mary. For this reason, Elizabeth declares Mary to be blessed by God. Mary’s vision is challenging. Even those who celebrate it likely will find themselves at least a bit uncomfortable with its message. At least we should be since Mary speaks of a world turned upside down. As powerful and as important as this message is, I want to spend the rest of the reflection focusing on the person of Mary, and her role in our belief systems.

While Roman Catholics venerate Mary, Protestants have historically struggled to integrate her into our faith experience. Even those Protestants who hold on to the belief in the virginal conception, usually struggle with this question. In part, this may have to do with resistance to Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. For some Protestants, anything that looks Catholic needs to be rejected (though this is thankfully increasingly rare). The good news is that in recent years we’ve seen a growing appreciation for Mary within Protestantism. One reason might be that she is a leading female figure within the biblical story.  Another reason is found in this very text. Many Protestants with a progressive social vision celebrate Mary’s song.                   

            

         Since there is this greater appreciation of Mary’s role in the biblical story, I thought I might highlight her importance to the Christian faith tradition. It is at the Advent/Christmas season that we engage with Mary.  She is, after all, the mother of Jesus (however this conception and birth took place). So how do we integrate her into our faith journey? Leaving aside the question of Mary’s virginity, which is not at issue in this passage, who is Mary to us as modern Christians? What does it mean for Mary to be chosen by God to participate in God’s work of salvation?

                How do we get from the humble servant of Luke to Mary the Theotokos?  By the fourth and fifth centuries, as the debates about Jesus’ humanity and divinity were heating up, the question of Mary’s role became increasingly important. For some (the winners of the debate) she was the Theotokos, the “God-bearer.” Those who argued for this title wanted to emphasize the divinity of the child whom Mary had carried in her womb. This position was challenged by Nestorius, who claimed that Mary couldn’t be the mother of God, for God has no mother. Nestorius was concerned that in protecting Jesus’ divinity, the theologians of the church were diminishing Christ’s humanity. In the end, the matter was “settled” by the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Nestorius lost, though Nestorian Christianity found a home in the churches of the East. But is there something of value to be found in these debates? Is there something of importance to be found in the confession of Mary as the Theotokos, even if Nestorius raised questions about its value? Note that Nestorius wasn't denying the virginal conception, only the title to be given to Mary. In his mind, she was mother to the human Jesus, into whom the divine Logos was incarnate. In many ways, Nestorius has found a new appreciation in recent decades, but should we let go of the idea of Mary being Theotokos? 

           The focus here on Mary's role in the story serves to remind us of Jesus' role in the larger story. Thus, Karl Barth writes in his Credo, which is his reflection on the Creed:

 The formula “Conceived by the Holy Ghost” makes at least this general statement: that the human existence of Jesus Christ in its creatureliness as distinguished from all other creatures, has its origin immediately in God, and is therefore immediately God’s own existence. And the formula “Born of the Virgin Mary” makes at least this general statement: that God’s own existence in Jesus Christ, without prejudice to the fact that here also God is the Creator, has also a human-creaturely origin and is therefore also human-creaturely existence. What, then, the two formulæ together aim at is not to bring God and man into positions of very great, perhaps infinite nearness, but to say that in the conception and birth of Jesus Christ, God and man became one, in order for all time and unto eternity to be one in Him Who was so conceived and born. So that it is as a twofold fact that these two things can be said and must be said of Jesus Christ: He was and is God and man; but always both of them, not one without the other, and both (each in its own way!) with equal seriousness and emphasis: neither the one nor the other under reserve, neither the one nor the other in a merely figurative, provisional, metaphorical sense. Jesus Christ is this: not only man, further, not only an exceptional man, further, not only so exceptional a man that we must venture to ascribe to him similarity to or even equality with God, no, but as true man so also by origin and in Himself true God.  [Barth, Karl. Credo (p. 67). ANTHEM PUBLISHING. Kindle Edition., pp. 66-67]. 

Here is what Disciples of Christ theologian Joe Jones has to say on this matter: “If we pull back from this sobering assertion, then we endanger our capacity to follow through on the logic of the eternal Son becoming incarnate by the womb of a woman” [A Grammar of Christian Faith, 2:409]. Jones goes on to state that the “miracle” has nothing to do with whether Mary is a virgin: “The real miracle is that God becomes human flesh through being born of a Jewish woman” [Grammar, 2:410]. The important matter is Mary’s election by God. She is the one, for whatever reason, whom God chose to bless. That is her own confession. Jones writes: "It should now be fully clear that creaturely bodiliness is not alien to God but is assumed by God and lovingly embraced by God, not just in possibility but in concrete act” [p. 410]. As the prologue to John makes clear: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of God's only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14). Mary doesn't appear often in the biblical story, and no mention of Jesus' conception and birth is found in the Gospel of John, and yet, without her answer to the call of God, there would be no incarnation. 

Image attribution: Redon, Odilon, 1840-1916. The Visitation, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58653 [retrieved December 13, 2021]. Original source: https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020036766.