The World Upended

The scriptures referred to are Luke 1:39-55.

One of the most beautiful Christmas songs of recent years is “Mary, Did You Know?” sung by the acapella group Pentatonix. In haunting close harmony the group sings, 

“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?

Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?

This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you?”

There are more verses. I highly recommend you look it up on You Tube and listen to it.

But the internet being what it is, someone has supplied another verse, that goes like this:

“Mary freaking knew that her baby boy would one day rule the nations.

Mary freaking knew that her baby boy was Lord of all creation.

Yes she knew! Read Luke 1, you fool, she sang about it then;

It helps if when you're reading you listen to the women!”

Personally I love the original song but the sassy additional verse has a lot of truth to it, as we see in today's gospel and canticle.

Luke's gospel is the only one that records that people moved by the Spirit burst into song. Does that happen in real life? Not in a Hollywood musical way but I once heard a sermon turn into a song. The pastor at an African American church was preaching in the call and response manner, with the congregation filling his dramatic pauses with “Amen!” “Preach it!” and “Hallelujah!” As the preacher became more rhythmic and poetic, the people picked up on that and tailored their responses to fit his rhythms. Then the choir started to sing their responses, and the organist began to play and the whole thing began to transmute into a spontaneous song. The preacher realized it was getting away from him and tried to halt it but the people kept singing and he finally said, “Let's just praise the Lord!” and they did so for several minutes till it faded away. And I was blown away. I thought, “Wow! That never happened in any church I belonged to.”

Little kids sing spontaneously till we make them feel embarrassed about it. In the same way we make fun of something we have all done at some point, which is sing along with the radio while driving alone. And yet don't we love it when a choir infiltrates a public space and does a flash mob rendering of the Ode to Joy or the Hallelujah Chorus? Which of us, at moments when we are alone and overwhelmed by strong emotions, has not found joy or solace in a favorite song?

What strong emotions would Mary have had that caused her to suddenly improvise the song we call the Magnificat?

First, we need to ask why Mary was visiting her relative. Elizabeth and her husband, the priest Zechariah, lived in Judea. The distance to there from Nazareth was roughly the same as from Key Largo to Key West but with mountains and valleys thrown in. It would take her at least 3 days walking. That's quite an undertaking for a young girl. Seeing as she was poor and pregnant, it doesn't make sense that she did it as a lark.

But her condition is an important clue. Luke tells us she was betrothed but not married to Joseph when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and told her she was to bear God's son. (Luke 1:26-27) From Matthew we know that Joseph did not take the news of Mary's pregnancy well. He was considering breaking the engagement, which was so binding it required a divorce. (Matthew 1:18-19) We don't know how long he was contemplating divorce but Luke tells us “Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.” Why did she go with haste? It wasn't like Elizabeth was about to go into labor. Her baby wasn't due for another 3 months. It must have been on Mary's end that haste was called for.

It wasn't that long ago that women pregnant out of wedlock were sent out of town to have their babies in secret. In an honor/shame society like the ancient Near East, Mary's pregnancy would be scandalous. Worse, she could be accused of adultery and stoned to death. Which is why Joseph wanted to divorce her quietly. So it makes sense she would be sent away on the excuse that she was helping her relative with her late-in-life birth.

Women then were raised for one purpose: to be a wife and mother. With Joseph making noises about divorcing her, Mary was looking at a life of disgrace and extreme poverty. Who would marry her? Who would help her raise her son? If she had to do it alone how would she support them both? All of these questions would have been eating at Mary during the long trudge to Judea. Her anxiety would have been off the charts. And what would she tell the priest and his wife? An angel told her she was bearing the Messiah? She would have sounded at best mad and at worst a terrible and blasphemous liar.

So when Elizabeth called her the “mother of my Lord” and mentioned how her own miraculous child leaped for joy in her womb, Mary must have been flooded with relief and gratitude. And later she would learn that an angel had appeared to mute Zechariah. These people believed her! She wasn't crazy and she wasn't alone. God was at work here.

And so the words just poured out of her! She cannot praise God enough. He has taken notice of this poor girl. The Greek word translated “lowliness” could also be rendered “humiliation.” And Mary's unwed pregnancy would be considered a humiliation in that culture. But God will turn that around and the girl sent out in dishonor will be honored by untold future generations.

God has a tendency to turn the values of this world upside down. And that is the theme of the song of Mary: God is turning the world we know topsy-turvy. The proud and the arrogant will be scattered. The powerful will be brought down from their thrones. The rich will be turned away empty of the spiritual blessings given to the humble.

We might even consider this song prophesy. Pontius Pilate, who had her son Jesus crucified, was recalled from his position as procurator of Judea in 36 AD and died in obscurity and disgrace. Caiaphas, the high priest who made the political calculation that it was better for Jesus to die than to possibly trigger the wrath of Rome, was also deposed that very same year. Tiberias, the emperor when Jesus was executed, is reported to have been killed by his successor Caligula in 37 AD. Herod Antipas, who had John the Baptist beheaded and did nothing to save Jesus when Pilate sent him to be interviewed by Herod, was exiled in 39 AD and possibly killed by Caligula as well. These powerful men were all brought down less than a decade after Jesus was crucified.

On the other hand, Mary sings that those who fear God, who have a healthy respect for him, will receive mercy. The lowly will be lifted up and the hungry filled with good things. These themes echo the song of Hannah when God enabled her to become the mother of the prophet Samuel. (I Samuel 2:1-10) God is reversing the order of a world that typically rewards those who have plenty and penalizes those who have little, that believes that might makes right and that the weak must serve the strong. We like to think our civilization is a meritocracy but Mary and Hannah show us what it would look like if people really got what they deserved. It doesn't look like the one we see on the news, does it?

You know who really noticed the disparity between the kingdom of God Mary sings of and their society? The Nazis. They realized that Christianity was not compatible with their ideals. So in addition to discarding the Old Testament, because it was all about the Jews, they rewrote the New Testament. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus blesses the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers. He tells his followers to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies, to not indulge in anger or hate. (Matthew 5-7) All that had to be taken out. The Nazi Jesus was not meek. He was an Aryan warrior who hated Jews. For him there was no peacemaking, no showing mercy, and definitely no loving enemies. Weirdly, you can say that while they were dishonest about what Jesus said, the Nazis were not hypocritical about their own values. And so they tried to remake Jesus in their own image. People still think if you don't want to change yourself, try changing God.

Many so-called Christians in the free world don't alter the words of Jesus; they just ignore them or explain them away. Jesus didn't really mean what he said about the rich being like a camel squeezing through the eye of a sewing needle, or that how we treat the poor, the sick, the imprisoned or the immigrant is how we treat Jesus, or about the woes he pronounced on those well off. (Luke 6:24-26) He didn't really mean that a rich man would be punished for neglecting a poor sick man at his gate. (Luke 16:19-31) He really didn't mean that those who come first in this world will come last in the next. (Luke 13:30) He really didn't mean that we should invite the poor and those who are disabled and those who can't repay us to our dinner parties in the assurance we will be repaid at the resurrection. (Luke 14:13-14) If he did, then our nation isn't really Christian.

If you think the world's priorities on who gets what they need and who gets justice is basically correct, then you will have problems with Jesus. But if you think we are only stewards of God's gifts and thus are expected to share them equitably, then you understand why Jesus commands us to live differently than the world does.

In the parable of the sheep and the goats Jesus said that the kingdom of God was prepared for the righteous, ie, those who treated the disadvantaged as they would Jesus. (Matthew 25:31-46) And the Greek word for “righteous,” as well as the Hebrew word, means “just” or “equitable.” They are related to the words in each language for “justice.” We tend to think of “righteous” as meaning merely “holy” but it means more than that. It means someone who treats others fairly.

And treating people equitably isn't the same as treating them equally. If, as a nurse, I put a bandage on the finger of not just the person who cut his finger but also on the finger of everyone who comes to me for any ailment, like a broken leg or a sucking chest wound, technically I have given everyone equal treatment: ie, a bandaid on their finger. But I have not treated them equitably; that is, fairly, according to their actual need. Justice requires judgment, deciding the matter on the basis of the actual factors involved, not arbitrarily or with a one-size-fits-all solution.

That's why we make accommodation for the disabled. Not everyone can climb stairs or can hear or can see. That doesn't mean they should be denied the rights that able people have no problem exercising. To ignore people's different needs would not be fair.

And, yes, accommodating the disabled and the disadvantaged can be inconvenient. It can be expensive to help and care for them. Which is why they were the first group that Hitler had murdered. They started with physically and mentally disabled children, starving them or giving them lethal drugs. The Nazis considered them “unworthy of life” and “useless eaters.” This is the ruthless pragmatism of psychopaths.

Nobody is useless in God's eyes. We are all created in his image and he doesn't care if accommodating those who are disadvantaged is inconvenient. As it says in Leviticus, “You must not curse a deaf person or put a stumbling block in front of a blind person. You must fear your God. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:14) We must supply what the needy lack. (Deuteronomy 15:11) We are to be just and fair to all, no exceptions.

At the time of her song, Mary is a poor pregnant unwed mother-to-be. Even after the angel came to Joseph and told him to marry her, you just know the tongues of villagers in Nazareth wagged about how she was pregnant before they got married. And then Jesus' family fled Herod the Great's murderous purge of the boys in Bethlehem and went into Egypt, making them refugees. And when they returned to Nazareth years later, Jesus was a stranger with, probably, a strange Egyptian accent. He was the new boy in town with rumors about the circumstances of his conception and paternity. When Joseph died, as is evident by how he drops out of all the gospels after Jesus' childhood, Jesus was responsible to making a living to support his widowed mother and 4 brothers and we know not how many sisters. (Mark 6:3) Which is why from the cross Jesus arranges for his mother to be taken care of by his beloved disciple. (John 19:25-27) Jesus and his family knew poverty and how hard life can be. Which means God does too, firsthand.

God has always championed the underdog. (Deuteronomy 10:17-18) Through his son Jesus he knows what it's like to be one. And he promises that in his kingdom that will change. The first will be last and the last will be first. The meek will inherit the new earth. Those who suffered in this life will be consoled and rewarded and made whole. We can either be onboard with helping the destitute and the disabled and the disadvantaged as an expression of God's love, or we can go on blithely ignoring the plight of others. But remember in Jesus' parable of the last judgment it's the neglectful that get condemned. It's those who help Jesus by helping the least of his siblings who are called righteous—just and fair—and who go on into eternal life.

If we truly believe in Jesus and in his word, we will ask for the grace to change and to be like him: one so guided by the love of God that he thinks not of how helping others will negatively affect him but how not helping others will negatively affect them. Jesus on occasion would forgo a nap or a meal to help others. He even gave up his life to save us all. We have made a fetish out of convenience and comfort and are loathe to give them up. But Jesus is calling us to love and treat fairly all people, as he does, regardless of the cost. And he cost him more than we ever can pay.

We cannot bring the kingdom of God about by ourselves. Only Jesus can. But we can lay the groundwork. We can prepare things for him. We can plant the seeds and help establish little outposts of his kingdom that create networks of love and caring. And we can show the world that it is possible to have a community in which might does not make right, where those who deviate from the norm or from the ideal are not discarded, where people are not valued for their usefulness, like machines, but whose value resides in the fact that God loves them and created them in his image and that Jesus died for them. So let us with Mary magnify the Lord and let our spirits rejoice in God our Savior.