Mary’s Song

One day about two thousand years ago in a small town in the region of Galilee, an angel appeared to a girl. The angel said, “Greetings, favored one! The lord is with you.”

You all know the story.

And as the hymn puts it, “gentle Mary meekly bowed her head. To me be as it pleaseth God,’ she said.”

Gentle Mary, meek and mild. Meek and mild.

I suspect that’s how most of us tend to imagine her. Quiet, calm, passive. A girl who does as she’s told. You can see it in the centuries of art that show Mary with her head bowed and her arms folded across her chest.

It’s an image reinforced by Christmas pageants, year after year. A pretty girl in a blue dress gazes silently at a manger, while adorable angels with rumpled wings sing around her.

It’s a lovely scene. It’s sweet. It makes for a wonderful photo. There’s no threat there, no challenge. But how accurate is the placid image of countless pageants and paintings?

Here’s the thing. Angels in the Bible aren’t cute. They’re scary. The second words out of the Angel Gabriel’s mouth are these: “do not be afraid.” Presumably, there was a reason he said those words. And Mary? Meek and mild? Well, maybe.

Certainly she was young. Our pageants get that right. Maybe as young as 13 years old. In that time and place, much older and she would have already been married. But was she meek and mild?

A thirteen year old girl said yes to God. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” She must have known that her pregnancy would be a scandal. But still she said yes. Was the girl who took on that burden meek and mild?

In today’s Gospel, Mary sets out to visit her relative Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. A visit to a cousin or an aunt doesn’t sound all that extraordinary. But based on what we’re told about where the two women lived, it wasn’t exactly a jaunt around the corner. It was probably a journey of about 80 miles. That’s at least four days on foot, through difficult and dangerous country. No cell phones, no 911 system for emergencies, no convenience stores.

How many 13-year-olds do you know who could make that trip? If you can think of one who could and would, is she meek and mild?

And of course, when Mary meets Elizabeth, she sings a song. The Magnificat. Look at the words carefully sometime. It’s a song to a God who scatters the proud, a God who casts down the mighty, a God who fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty. Does the singer of that song sound meek and mild?

The truth is that we’ve domesticated Mary. We’ve made her unthreatening. A pretty girl in blue. I suspect that we’ve done that because we don’t want to listen too closely to her song, and to her challenge.

“He has shown the strength of his arm, *

he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *

and the rich he has sent away empty.”

What do we do with that? Because let’s be honest. There’s no getting away from the fact that as compared to the truly poor of the world, most of us are rich.

And it’s not just that we’re rich. As compared to the truly powerless, most of us are among the powerful. We can speak our minds without fear, we can seek justice when we’re treated badly. Millions upon millions of people lack that power.

So what does Mary’s song have to say to us? Is she condemning us even as she rejoices at Jesus’s coming birth? Should we throw up our hands and say that this God of Mary, this God who casts down the mighty and who sends away the rich has no good news for ears such as ours to hear?

Well, maybe. The scriptures certainly teach that God is to be found among the poor and the outcast, among those on the margins of society. If you want to find Christ, looking to the poor – not to the rich – is a pretty good rule.

We ought to be challenged by Mary’s song. At the very least, we should hear her words as a call to use our wealth and our power to help those who have less than we do. And we should remember that the things that make us comfortable probably aren’t very good for our spiritual health.

But here’s the other thing. We’re rich, yes. And we’re powerful. But not all the time.

All the money and power in the world can’t bring a loved one back from the dead. All the money and power in the world can’t undo the things you wish you’d never done or unsay the things you wish you’d never said. Wealth can’t cure every illness, solve every problem.

Mary sings a song of a God who upends our expectations, a God who makes use of the most unexpected people.

And she speaks a truth. A maddening, paradoxical, wonderful truth that if we hope to meet God, we need to look to the broken places of our lives, to our own places of poverty and powerlessness.

It is when we are humble that we can lean on God’s strength. It is when we are weak that God will lift us up. It is when we are poor that God will fill us with good things.

The truth that Mary sings is that all that comes from God is grace. We can’t buy it. We can’t compel it. We can only accept it. And when we find it, we can cry with Mary, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

And if we can find the courage to claim Mary’s “yes” as our own, we might just learn that the God who works through the most unexpected people can work even through people like us.