(Featured image credit to Greyson Joralemon, from Unsplash)
We are innately aware that there is an existential pattern that shapes the trajectory of our lives. We live in the continuum of beginnings, endings, arrivals, and departures. We leave our mother’s womb as infants, and then we march through the irrepressible stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age and death. Birth to life, beginning and ending, arrival and departure – this cycle is an existential component of who we are. And so it is in the Christian liturgical life. The celebration of our faith is marked by cycles and seasons as well. Our Christian church year cycles through several centers of Sacred Time. It begins in the season of Advent, Christmas, then Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and concluding at Pentecost.
And so it is, that we now stand in the midst of the final week of the season of Advent.
Advent is the spiritual and liturgical discipline that our churches enter into to celebrate God’s coming into history in the person of Jesus. So in the four Sundays of December prior to Christmas Day, Christians submit to a ritual re-enactment of the crescendo of joyful and hopeful anticipation leading up to the birth of Jesus. It is to renew the Christian’s spiritual journey with the core message of the gospel, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” God’s self-emptying, the humbling of the divine self in the grand mystery of the Incarnation, is the bedrock of our faith.
This central theme of our faith, God in divine humility choosing to “be like us” out of suffering love, is best expressed in the Song of Mary in Luke 1: 46-55, known in Christian literature as the Magnificat, so named from the first words of the Latin translation of Mary’s Song, Magnificat anima mea Dominum, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” It is a prophetic hymn of praise to God. In it Mary exults, that in the midst of the perilous and violent time in which she lived, God’s promise of companionship and salvation comes upon her lowly station in life. And so Advent is not only about waiting (which could be a passive act), but about expecting (which is animating anticipation of certitude over what already has been accomplished). So God’s loving redemptive will for the world comes to us through a child, born of a lowly handmaiden, whose birth is first announced not to royalty dwelling in gilded palaces, but to lowly shepherds “abiding in the fields.”
The gospel of Luke clearly narrates the birth narratives of Jesus taking place within the historical context of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar. Augustus also confirmed Herod the Great as ruler of Palestine (Chapters 1 & 2), who ruled that region when Jesus was born. Augustus believed himself to be god. He introduced massive institutional reforms during his reign, built extensive networks of roads across the empire that opened commerce to its fullest, and established a powerful military. He was known to have ushered a period of peace and prosperity in Rome called the Pax Romana. Through this hegemony, he transformed Rome from a republic to an empire.
Yet, as with hegemonic orders, it was an age of political repression, a time of censorship and disinformation to control public opinion. Non-Roman citizens were considered a minority and were marginalized and persecuted. Crucifixions became the avatar of the empire’s cruelty and ruthlessness. Political rivals and dissenters were silenced, and the stifling of free expression created a culture of fear across the land. During the reign of Tiberius, the Jewish community in Rome was expelled due to his concern over their growing number of converts in Rome, and whose practices he perceived to be threats to Roman society. And so behind the facade of peace and prosperity, it was a deeply troubled time for those who were not close, or subservient, to the power of the empire. Oppression, corruption, and injustice reigned. The downtrodden and the oppressed often wondered if God were absent. It was a time when Herod, ordered the killing of all boys under two years old in Bethlehem, after the Magi told him that a child destined to become king of the Jews had been born in the city. Jesus’ birth took place in the midst of deeply troubled times.
We, too, live in troubled times. America just went through a profoundly divisive election that has driven a penetrating partisan wedge in the culture and trapped the nation in the moral casuistry of “whataboutism.” This presidential election campaign was unprecedented in its demagoguery, ideological animus, hatefulness, xenophobia, misogyny, and counterfeit claims that overran the culture like a tsunami. And the presidential candidate that espoused such a campaign prevailed in the election, as a majority of the electorate embraced such a candidate. In this momentous culture shift, American Christianity was not spared, as the allure of power made the voice of its dominant expression, in the American cultural discursive environment, indistinguishable from the din of secular, cultural warfare. It brazenly allied itself with worldly partisan power. Some of its adherents called their candidate “anointed”, “savior”, “messiah”, or the “chosen one.” Many believe that in some places the breach in American society has become irreparable.
And beyond the shores of the United States, the world continues to convulse in the violence of ancient hatreds and wars – from the Middle East, Myanmar, Africa, and Asia. In the age of the Internet and social media, we have been made painfully aware of the evil that still pervades the world. Despots and potentates no longer remain hidden. They are made visible for all to see, as quickly as one clicks a TV remote or a link on the newsfeed of social media accounts on mobile phones or computers. Human history is replete of the footsteps of despots and potentates, who rose and fell with their misbegotten regimes, leaving behind untold misery and the suffering of the innocent. They still do in our lifetimes. Violence in all its forms is present in the world – hate, idolatry, greed and avarice, corruption, the oppression of the weak and the powerless. However, it is in the midst of this that God speaks.
In Mary’s song, we hear the bold announcement that God’s coming makes possible the impossible. God’s presence permits – and even requires – incredible reversals. These “reversals” are the signature of God’s presence in the midst of a people. The proud are humbled; the power of the powerful is exposed of its pretensions. By contrast, in God’s reign the poor and the lowly are exalted. More than predictions of what is to come, the Magnificat instead praises God for the concrete goodness of God’s nature and faithfulness that God’s people have already experienced. It sings of God’s redeeming work not as a future event, but as promise that already has been fulfilled. This is the sure hope of our faith. The overthrow of the principalities and powers of the world has not come about through a peasant rebellion of the weak, but through the coming of God in the frailty of a child. In the Magnificat, God’s desire is not neutral. God’s desire is unequivocally for the poor, the weak, the lowly, and the oppressed. God’s desire is to reconcile the broken, to heal the wounds of nations.
Mary’s song is a blueprint of how God acts. Confessing God as “Savior” means that our salvation comes from no other power. Not technology, not an economic system, not a political party or well thought-out, long-range strategic plans. God may use these but in the end the basis of our hope and trust is clear: God is our savior. The joy of Mary and Elizabeth is the joy of all who look forward with wonder and thankfulness to the birth of Jesus – Emmanuel, “God with us.” What God has done for Mary anticipates and models what God will do for the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed of the world. God’s act is stated in the text as past tense, not future tense verbs, because the past tense is a way of declaring certainty and fulfillment. Mary is so sure that God will do what is promised, that the song is really a proclamation of an accomplished fact.
God’s loving reign is already here, in our midst. Violence and all its forms ultimately destroys itself, but God chooses to enter the world in agape love. The very nature of God’s love and presence always finds expression in the righting of what is wrong, in repairing what is broken in all of creation, in reconciling what has been cast adrift from human community. Justice is the face of love, and compassion its power. Holy work is hard work; and at times it leaves scars on the faithful, like stigmata resembling the wounds of the crucified Jesus. But it is to this ongoing task that God’s people is called. Love suffers because it cares; it grieves because it loves.
This is the great expectation of the certitude that we are celebrating this Advent season – that God’s love in Jesus is the hope of the world.
To embrace this newness is to confess with Mary in joy, faith, and submission that “the Mighty One has done great things for me.” It is to acknowledge that the powers of this world are not the powers that matter most, and that God is the great leveler of all human structures of power that oppress and control; that God’s love is more powerful than all the forces of division in life. It is God who brings down the exalted and elevates the lowly. We are called to do nothing less than to act in the world in terms of God’s promise. We are called to audaciously hope in the face of trials and tribulations. Our hope is not an empty fantasy; but rather it is hope that is rooted in the past evidence of God’s faithfulness.
Christian theology, particularly the Protestant variety, has romanticized the Magnificat for the most part into an individualistic, introspective, meditative literature. But, far from it, the Song of Mary is a song of audacious defiance, and a paean of resistance, to the forces of worldly power and nihilistic dominion. With this fierce declaration of Mary’s song, the definition of power in the world is turned upside down. In this season of waiting and anticipation, may we sing with Mary in the midst of the shifting sands of life’s challenges, assured that God’s love is present even in the midst of these troubled times.
Elmo Familiaran 