In our second reflection on Mary, we move from the Annunciation to the Magnificat — from the question she asked before her yes, to the proclamation she made after it.
Mary proclaims the Magnificat in someone else’s house, in the early weeks of a pregnancy she had not planned, to a woman who is the first to name what is happening inside her. She has travelled quickly to get here, across the hill country, her yes still new on her lips. In the ordinary warmth of Elizabeth’s home, she declares the world as it is.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones.
He has filled the hungry with good things.
She speaks these words in the past tense as though the thing is already done. She is a young woman who has spent her life in a community that knows what hunger is, what power does, what it costs to live under the decisions of those who hold authority over their lives and their land and their daily bread. Mary’s words come from inside the world she describes. Her people have known occupation, displacement, the long, slow diminishment of living under empire, and she stands there in Elizabeth’s house, young and unimportant by any ordinary measure, and speaks the reversal.
The powerful are brought down and the lowly lifted, the hungry filled and the rich sent away empty.
Mary’s words take sides. Uncushioned by piety they are unequivocal about who holds power and who does not. She states clearly that this is not how it will remain. Her words stand in stark contrast to the unmarried, newly pregnant woman who speaks them. Mary has little and holds nothing that the world would name as power in Roman-occupied Judea.
Our Sisters who live and work across Africa, in the Middle East, in South America, and even here in Europe know the truth of Mary’s circumstance. They have sung the Magnificat for one hundred and fifty years… In the evening light of village chapels, in mission stations, in the company of women who have lived inside the world Mary describes. They have prayed it beside women who have buried children, stretched food through lean seasons, watched those with power make decisions that reached into the smallest details of daily life. The words do not change, but the truth they reveal depends on who is singing them and what they know from the inside.
The Magnificat is a proclamation of the world. Mary sees clearly what is in front of her, and what has always been in front of her people, and she is unflinching.
She declares it before anything has changed, before the child is born, before any of the promises are visible in the world. She speaks into the air of a domestic afternoon to Elizabeth, who has already recognised what is under way.
We continue to sing it this way. Ahead of what is to come.