Sermon: Magnificat

   May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts

   be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Every evening in this Cathedral, 365 days a year, we sing or say Mary's Magnificat, set as the Gospel for today. The great musical settings immediately come to my mind. So I'm pleased that this year we can consider it in the context of the Eucharist. 

Magnificat comes in the story that we call the Visitation - the visit of St Mary to her relative Elizabeth.   The meeting of these two women is poignant: one is old, one is young, both are pregnant.  The older is carrying the forerunner, John the Baptist; the younger is carrying the Messiah.  Luke's account is fascinating. He records that on Mary's arrival at Elizabeth's home, at the moment she greeted Elizabeth, the foetal John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth's womb -  the first witness of the Baptist to the Christ, the lesser acclaiming the greater. Luke then portrays Elizabeth as a prophet. At that moment, filled with the Holy Spirit, which itself was exceptional, and crying out loudly in joy and exultation, Elizabeth is given by divine inspiration knowledge that could come from no human agency, that Mary is to be the mother of the Lord. And so Elizabeth bows in Mary's presence, crying out:

     Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.  And why has

     this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

Elizabeth interprets the leaping of her child as a leap for joy; she is the first to declare Mary ‘blessed'; and she commends Mary for her belief,

    Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to

   her by the Lord' -

in contrast to her husband Zechariah's refusal to believe the annunciation of the Baptist. The narrative is intensely joyful, and I invite you to note that, for it colours Mary's Magnificat to follow.

And Luke makes Magnificat Mary's response to this joyful meeting of pregnant women, both of whom are caught up in the God's extraordinary initiative to fulfill his promises.

And as I read the text, it seems to me that Magnificat is a joyful, strident, active hymn of praise.  And I want to say that because often when we think of the Virgin Mary, we can think of her as rather passive, restrained, benign, demure, like a million plaster statues that ‘adorn' western churches.  But there is nothing passive or benign about Mary's song. Whether Magnificat derives from Mary's own testimony, or was a creation of Luke, or emanated from the disciples of John the Baptist, or was a creation of the early Jewish-Christian Church, it is steeped in the Old Testament.  It has similarities with the prayer and song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2, but it also alludes to the stories of Leah in Genesis 29 and 30, the book of Habakkuk and more than one Psalm.  In other words, it weaves together a whole body of Old Testament material into a hymn form, and as such expresses, in my view, an early Christian summary of the hope of salvation, a hope realized in the coming of Christ. In Luke's Gospel, Magnificat sets a manifesto, and the Gospel narrative goes on to show how the manifesto is fulfilled.

We can conveniently divide Magnificat into three sections. The first is Mary's cry of praise for God's favour towards her personally and then to all people:

My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my saviour,

for he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.

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

for the Mighty One has done great things for me; holy is his name.

His mercy is on those who fear him

in every generation.

It's a beautiful expression of worship and praise to God -  worship of the One who is mighty, whose name is holy, and who shows himself as Saviour.  It reveals Mary's acceptance of her own unique vocation, her joy and wonder at the fact that God has chosen her, blessed her. This is no false modesty, but a genuine joy and wonder that she, representing the poor, the lowly, the voiceless, the quiet of the land, should be thus chosen.  Mary then expands that thought to God's favour to all. The mighty One, the holy One, is also the merciful One.  The divine hope is that human beings, the creation of a God whose nature longs to create and then to love what he has created, will respond themselves in love, and with an open heart will fear him. In other words, that they will show loving awe towards him.  And when that happens, imperfect though we are, God responds in mercy; the mercy that shows him as Saviour.

Second, Magnificat sets out the upside down values of God:

He has shown strength with his arm,

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

he has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich empty away.

There was a kind of perverted orthodoxy in certain strands of the Old Testament that human success and power had something to do with being righteous before God, and that human humiliation, poverty and economic distress had something to do with a state of unrighteousness through sin.   The gospel, and St Luke's Gospel in particular, counterblasts any such understanding.  Indeed, God shows himself to be against those who trust in power and riches and status, as if that could make a claim upon God.  The mission of Jesus was directed to those who thought they were outside of salvation, or those who thought they didn't count, so we see Luke's concern for the tax collector, the sinner, the Samaritan, the leper, the women, the children.  The greatest in the kingdom of heaven are the lowliest, the first is the last; it is precisely the poor, the disenfranchised, who can receive the Gospel as good news because they have nothing to boast of apart from their need of God.   A lowly, unimportant woman from Nazareth as mother of Messiah? Surely not.  Surely yes, in the wisdom of God.

And then third, God's faithfulness to his promises:
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made our ancestors,

to Abraham and his descendants for ever.

Again Magnificat returns to the theme of mercy, and that the revelation that the fact that  Messiah was now coming was the culmination of God's promise to Abraham that in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed.  Of course, Magnificat strikes us as utterly Jewish in its outlook; we need the rest of Luke's Gospel to pick up the strong theme, again hinted at in some Old Testament prophecies, that Messiah would be Saviour not only of Israel but of the world.

Magnificat is essentially about Mary's ‘yes' to God. But if she stands as the first saint of the new covenant, if she is the second Eve, the new Mother of humanity, then her ‘yes' can stand for our ‘yes'. We echo her words precisely because God has looked on us with mercy, that he has done great things for us.  And if Mary's ‘yes' led to the salvation of the world, what might our ‘yes' lead to if we make it today with true and sincere hearts?  

And if Mary represents those without wordly power and significance, perhaps God can use even us in our seeming insignificance to be agents of his eternal plan. 

And if her song is full of joy, then perhaps we can be encouraged to recapture our joy in what God in Christ has done and is doing for us and the world.

And if Magnificat proclaims the upside-down values of the kingdom of God, and we dare to sing it, then perhaps we too are encouraged, provoked, obligated, to seek to reflect them not only in the way in which we view ourselves, but in the way in which we order our lives and respond to others - in particular, to those who might think that this religion we embrace not only has nothing to say to them, but nothing to do with them.

And if we echo this song, we'll never forget that just as Mary praised God for the working out of his saving activity, so our practical attempts at discipleship can only be sustained through praise and worship, as here in worship, in God's presence, we become re-focused and allow God, and not all the poor tinsley stuff out there with all its false glories, to become our centre.

So I trust we'll go on, 365 days a year singing with Mary Magnificat, as we seek like her to carry Christ and so to reveal him to the world as Saviour and Lord.