Mary’s Song – the Magnificat

Every young mother thinks her child is special. There is no other child as beautiful or as clever as her child. For Mary, the mother of Jesus, her son was even more special. The angel Gabriel had told her that her son would be called “the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1.35) and that “the Lord God will give to him the throne oof his ancestor David” (Luke 1.32). Mary was given the privilege of being the mother of Jesus. It must have been with great pride that Mary watched Jesus grow up.

After Gabriel had spoken to her, Mary visited her elderly cousin, Elizabeth, who at the time was pregnant with her son John, who would be later called John the Baptist (or John the Baptizer). Elizabeth was filled with Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (1.43) – as the Good News Bible puts it, “Blessed is the child you will bear!”. Whereupon Mary burst into song, the song which is known as the Magnificat (it receives its name from the opening line of the hymn in the Latin Vulgate, Magnificat anima mea Dominum i.e. “My soul magnifies the Lord”(1.46). Here Mary’s song is a call to a revolution. This becomes clear in Fred Kaan’s hymn based upon Mary’s song:

Sing we a song of high revolt;
Make great the Lord, his name exalt:
Sing we the song that Mary sang
Of God at war with human wrong.
Sing we of him who deeply dares
And still with us our burden bears;
He, who with strength the proud disowns,
Brings down the mighty from their thrones.

By him the poor are lifted up:
He satisfies with bread and cup
The hungry folk of many lands;
The rich are left with empty hands.
He calls us to revolt and fight
With him for what is just and right
To sing and live Magnificat
In crowded street and council flat.

The Magnificat proclaims a religious revolution, that God has chosen a young unmarried mother to be the vehicle which begins his decisive revelation to the world. It proclaims a political revolution that the powerful will be defeated and the oppressed will be freed and given fulness of life. It proclaims an economic revolution, that the hungry will be fed and those who are rich now will feel what it is like to be poor.

We cannot spiritualize the Magnificat, so that it has no social or political sting at all. On the contrary: precisely because of the value that Jesus throughout his ministry gave to the poor and the marginalized, the world of politics and economics of necessity become of concern to Christians. But there is an even deeper reason illustrated by the story of Muretus, a poor scholar in the Middle Ages, who wandered from place to place. In one Italian town he fell ill and was taken to a hospital for the poor. As Muretus lay in his bed he heard the doctors discussing his case in Latin. One of them, not dreaming that Muretus could understand what they were saying, suggested that they might use this worthless wanderer for medical experiments. At this point Muretus looked up and said to them in Latin: “Call no man worthless for whom Christ died”. How right he was – in God’s sight nobody is worthless. In that sense the Magnificat was prophetic of the revolution Jesus did start. For no other religion has cared for others as has the Christian faith; no other religion has been as concerned for issues of justice and of peace as has the Christian faith.

Not surprisingly governments considered Mary’s song to be dangerously subversive. So, for instance, the Magnificat was prohibited from being sung in church. In the 1980s Guatemala’s government discovered Mary’s words about God’s preferential love for the poor to be too dangerous and revolutionary. Similarly in Argentina the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – whose children had all disappeared during the ‘Dirty War – place the Magnificat’s words on posters throughout the plaza, with the result that the military junta outlawed any public display of Mary’s song.

The revolution that Jesus started still needs to go on, for inequality and injustice still abound. So Vive la Revolution!