Thoughts on the Magnificat

The readings today are joyful. They announce good news.  The gospel today is the magnificat; Mary’s magnification of the Lord.  

After reading the magnificat, one could ask the question: “When did God scatter the proud, and when did he bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly? When did he send the rich away empty?”  These are joyful words, for they speak of victory, but when in history did this ever happen? He certainly didn’t do that in the first century. Herod slaughtered the innocents, and the first 300 years of the Church’s existence was trial and persecution by ruthless emperors. The lowly were being killed; the mighty and the powerful remained where they were.

In many ways, this magnificat is like the first story of creation in Genesis. At the end of the creation story, after the creation of the world, God saw all that He had made and it was very good. But what did God see? I think the best interpretation of this text is that God beholds the entire order of creation, including time and history, not simply a portion at the beginning of time. And so we know that history will end in a way that is pleasing to God. He will be victorious over darkness, which entered the picture on the first day of creation, if you recall that account–God said ‘let there be light’… and he separated light from darkness.

In this magnificat of Mary, she rejoices at the coming of the Messiah, the son of David. He is king. He came to establish his kingdom, and his kingdom will have no end. He will be victorious, according to Scripture. This magnificat takes in the entire picture, it sees the completion of the Messianic age. If the Messiah has come, if she carries the Messiah in her womb, then victory is assured. But this victory is to be worked out in history. The kingdom of God has been established, and Christ reigns in the lives of the faithful. But he does not reign in the hearts of everyone. His kingdom grows not by coercion and force, but by the free assent of the individual person to allow Christ to reign, to have dominion over their lives. And we know from the parables that the kingdom of God grows gradually, larger and larger, throughout history. That kingdom is victorious, but the victory unfolds gradually, through time. In the end, God saw that it was very good. The proud of this world who govern according to their own principles will in the end be on the losing side. And so our task is to continue in the knowledge, through faith, that Christ is victorious, and not to despair, but to do our small part, and in doing so we become part of that victory in the end, and Mary’s joy that we discern in this gospel will be a reflection of our own, just as the song of Hannah in the first reading is a mirror of this joyful song of Mary in the gospel.