Over the last few weeks I’ve been studying Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). I’ve never paid much attention to this text – it’s just one of those passages churches sappily pull out once a year to reinforce our American sentimentality about Christmas.
But I recognize quite quickly that this passage does not buttress our sentimentality toward a watered-down holiday. It subverts our very notions of power and prestige. It decimates our sense of security founded in wealth, consumerism, and military might. Read rightly, it makes us uncomfortable with God and uneasy with the idea that he is “on our side.”
Mary’s Song is based, among other things, on a Maccabean war song. The Maccabees were an subjugated group of nationalistic Jews trodden under Roman empirical hegemony. They felt their only way to contest Roman authority lied in striking out in violence. Essentially, they would have been equivalent to modern day terrorists.
Did you catch that? - Mary is singing the national anthem of terrorists. She is praising Yahweh to the tune of the Iraqi national anthem! She speaks of God being, not on the side of the Empire, but on the side of those whom the Empire has overlooked – the hungry, the poor. God sends the rich away empty and throws down rulers from their thrones, but he has seen the humble estate of his poor servant and has chosen to act!1
Now, about 1/3 of the commentaries I did research in attempted to spiritualize these things or make them entirely eschatological. But this seems to be far from what this peasant woman is singing about. She is not rejoicing because God will eventually, someday, sometime, probably throw down rulers in the future; she is rejoicing because in the coming of God-incarnate, all earthly conceptions of power and dominion are overturned. It may seem this is an impossibility, but if an earthquake can make the Mighty Mississippi flow backwards, surely God can invert all human notions of power!
God has come in the form of a poverty-stricken baby, in an overlooked part of the world, to an apparently sexually deviant woman, in order to demonstrate his preferential option for the poor. There is nothing to spiritualize about this – there is nothing purely eschatological. The coming of Jesus changes everything!
I will be forced to think on this during this Christmas season as I attempt to deny my consumerist appetites. The money American’s alone spent on “Black Thursday” was more than enough to give clean water supplies to all the people of the world! If we really wanted to celebrate the spirit of Christmas, we would do it, not through feeding the idol of materialism, but through showing our preferential option for the poor. In this world of “keeping up with the Jones’s,” it would indeed be an act of terrorism2 if Christians gave all we had to the poor instead of the bottomless pit of our materialistic wants.
- Though I found no scholarly support for this, the language seems to parallel the language of God remembering the sufferings of the Hebrew slaves in Exodus 1. [↩]
- can you imagine what would be said of Christians if they didn’t decide to participate in Christmas consumerism? One of the first criticisms would be a question of our nationalism – how can you not support your country’s economic progression? In a world that worships economics – that would be near equivalent to terrorism! [↩]
13 Comments
Tom,
My only problem with this interpretation is that you are assuming that Mary actually said these things. As we all know, the Bible is not totally reliable…That is why we need to buy multiple versions of it - especially around the holiday season :-).
Your post reminded me of the Nativity Story movie. You sort of get a glimpse of Mary’s Innocence — in the myst of the bigger issues going on with the Roman occupation and the Advent of the Messiah.
I enjoyed reading your post.
Edgar.
E.I.,
Even if she did not (which, in my opinion, is historically unanswerable), the the composer of Luke put those words in her mouth. The themes are still there, being said by a peasant woman in a work that the lineage of the apostolic church took to be authoritative and we are inheritors of that lineage. As such, I think the historical question is largely irreverent (but should be acknowledged).
HMI
I really enjoyed this post. Tom you are absolutely dead on in your understanding of this text, that is in the Maccabean history that Mary is drawing upon. I have been meditating upon Mark 1:14-15 in the Greek text. Jesus says that the kingdom of God–the gospel–has come. It is a perfect tense verb, which denotes a complete actions with abiding effects. The kingdom has arrived. I think that Mary and Jesus believed that the eschaton came with Jesus’ coming and ministry and glorification upon the cross. It isn’t a future event; it is a present reality. We Christians would do well to remember that. Good post. Keep it up.
Hi Honzo,
I hope you know I was kidding with the “not totally unreliable” bit… If not, I may need to take that Borat Humor Class.
Edgar.
E. I.,
Completely missed that part. I got the consumerism joke (which I loved), but did not incorporate the first line into the humor grouping. Whoops. I guess it is too late into the semester for me to be getting all the jokes that slip about!
HMI
Tom,
Here’s to anti-consumerism! I spent $0 on Black Friday and proud of it. I was afraid to travel within a mile of any store, which means I stayed home and put up the tree.
PS–Jesus was poverty-stricken? I haven’t heard that before. I think the family was fairly typical for the time. Are you considering poverty in absolute or relative terms? Curious how you came to that conclusion.
Dan
thanks for the questions, Dan.
I base my “poverty-stricken” statement on a few things from the gospels.
first, he was the son of a carpenter. Carpenters, unlike in our day, were quite poor in the first cent. comes from the gk. tekton, and indicated a person of the lower-class status. as he was the son of a carpenter (or a carpenter himself, depending on the gospel you read), jesus’s “father” belonged to the artisan class in Roman society - the peasant class - the dregs of society.
Furthermore, in Mary’s Magnificat, she alludes to God seeing the humble estate of his servant. The gk. there often refers to a barren woman, but as Mary is probably around 13 yrs old and unmarried, barreness is probably not what she is referencing. Rather, she seems to be referencing her poverty - frequently the New and Old testaments will interchange humble and poor.
But, yes, the majority of people were poor in Roman society.
Good question. hope that cleared things up a bit.
Hey Tom thanks.
Do you all think ‘terrorism’ is too offensive a term for this? would ‘political revolutionary’ be better?
i think so. to much negative connotation at this time. you could just leave it at: Mary’s Magnificant: A National Anthem…
I think that has an elegance and still get’s to your point; it shouldn’t offend anyone…
I love what you are saying here Tom and it rings true a little more than my consumerist mentality would like.
However, I feel like the terrorist language comes off at first light as a bit gimicky. It most certainly gets my attention, but makes my eyes roll - at first.
Once one gets into what your are saying, the terrorism angle fits because of the nature of the Maccabean song and so forth.
To sum up, I like the references within the post, but using terrorism in the title seems a bit hokey.
i like the terrorism language. it offends us precisely b/c we’ve bought into the Empire (pun intended).
of course, you MUST talk about Hanna’s song as well. mustn’t you?
also… I wouldn’t say the "Iraqi national anthem". even that is a political body. you’d want maybe an Al Qeda war song.
Agian, I like it in the body, but having it in the title looks like you are forcing the issue for shock value only (he is not, this time, the terrorism language fits perfectly). However, that is just editorial preference - some are more confrontational than I - blame my philosophy professors at Columbia College - they ruined me for forceful language!
I think that the INA is appropriate because it mirrors the Maccabean reference better than an entiry that has not obtained political control and then lost it.
And all this “emipre” critique makes me wonder about a total evaluation of the empire - a measuring of the bad and the good and what exactly how I should relate to it.