Advent, like Lent, is a speed bump in the galloping year, slowing us down, and waking us to deep realities. And how we need Advent in the blur of the pandemic and the rush of Yuletide. Advent and Lent are also confessional seasons and, in effect, extended Sabbaths. They exist in Kairos time, the time of reflection, of prayer, of communion.
It’s, as it were, folded time. We remember other Advents in our lives as though through a wormhole in time, and they seem near as we enter into the familiar patterns of Advent worship, even in this strange, isolated year. Perhaps especially in this particular year, we also anticipate future Advent seasons. Times of gathering together again in worship, retreat, caroling, and feasting.
In Kairos time creation and eternity exist together. With brothers and sisters nearby and far away, we remember Jesus’ birth and anticipate his coming again. We yearn toward Emmanuel. God with us—two thousand years ago and at some time in the future. Remembering and yearning toward God’s presence is the stance of Advent, the adventure. The people who participated in Jesus’ Nativity yearned for God, and they prayed.
Mary’s prayer comes to us through the millennia. We call it “The Magnificat,” and it is the prayer she spoke when her elderly, and also pregnant, cousin Elizabeth recognized the miracle standing in front of her.
The words of that ordinary, pregnant teenager constitute one of the most frequently repeated prayers in the global church. Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans recite the prayer at evensong every evening, 365 days a year. The prayer is the longest speech made by any woman in the New Testament.
In those few sentences—ten verses in the middle of Luke Chapter 1—Mary brings a magnifying lens to God’s eternal power and divine nature. Christians have peered through the lens of her prayer for centuries, letting her keen spiritual vision help us see God.
Mary was an unlikely, God-ordained mother, like Elizabeth, but she was also different from her. Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah had prayed for a child long past the time such a gift would be possible. And then, a miracle.
But Mary was nearly a child herself. We know nothing about her prayer life or the desires of her young heart before she was approached by an angel. As far as we know, she was minding her own business, a good Hebrew girl living at home, awaiting the time of her marriage.
When—shazam!—Gabriel appeared and told Mary she would bear the Son of God. Amazingly, Mary grasped who Gabriel was and what it was that he was saying, such a difficult message both socially and theologically. Nevertheless, Mary trusted God.
Gabriel, on God’s behalf, was exceedingly gracious. In the midst of that astonishing, weighty announcement to the young, virgin Mary, he told her about Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy. Mary was simultaneously given a child and a soul friend.
Mary immediately set off on the 80-mile journey to visit Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was to Mary God’s provision of a living, breathing, gestating, hugging, and loving witness to miraculous incarnation, and to her own up-turned life. We see in this story the hallmark of God’s grace: the holy and fortifying combination of love and truth. These two women—one too old to be pregnant and the other too young and chaste to be so—lovingly helped each other live out the world-shaping destinies God called them to.
Mary and Elizabeth bore witness to each other’s inconvenient, socially questionable truths and to God’s grace. God also gave them husbands who—remarkably—grasped their situations, thanks to a very active angel.
Elizabeth—by virtue of her son John leaping in her womb as Mary approached her—recognized that Mary was carrying God’s son and told Mary so, saying, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Luke 1:42).
C. S. Lewis said Christ is hidden in each of us—not as uniquely, physically, and historically as in Mary—but there in us, nonetheless. May we see that presence in each other and respond to it!
The words for compassion in biblical Hebrew and Greek signify the womb or the guts moving empathically in response to another’s situation, prompting loving action. Jesus had that experience when he was moved to heal, feed and teach people. He spoke of the gut-moving compassion of The Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son’s father.
Elizabeth was granted the visceral experience of recognizing the Lord in Mary. That grace flowed from her to Mary as she celebrated, and then grace flowed from Mary in her prayer. Mary was steeped in Scripture, and her prayer echoed the ancient, biblical prayer of the elderly Hannah, who had rejoiced in becoming Samuel’s mother.
I invite you to speak aloud this prayer of Jesus’ mother (from Luke 1:46-55):
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices/ in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor/ on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on/ all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done/ great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud/ in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful/ from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry/ with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise/ he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever. (NRSV)
God’s grace flows: Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.
We receive God’s affirmation of our belovedness, and we participate in the work of God’s grace in the world. The grace isn’t for us alone. Mary’s prayer holds the personal and the prophetic together, as do most prayers of the Bible.
Mary is exalted by God and testifies to the great reversal of the Kingdom. This is the word of the Lord: The first shall be last and the last, first; the poor in spirit shall be called blessed. The powers and principalities shall tumble. Radical words. They come from the mouths of improbably pregnant women and the suffering, incarnate King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The Good News overturns things. Mary’s prayer is bold and assertive. We think of her as “tender and mild,” but the first Christmas carol was “The Magnificat,” a blazing hymn of praise and social restoration.
There have been times in church history when the reciting of “The Magnificat” was banned. In India, for example, in the 1800s the evangelical Anglican missionary Henry Martyn went out from England to Calcutta, India, as a chaplain. When he arrived there, he was appalled to discover that the British authorities had banned the recitation of “The Magnificat.” The Indian people living under the rule of the British Empire were not allowed to pray a prayer that is a daily part of the Anglican evensong service. Why? It was dangerous! The lowly just might be lifted up and the powerful brought down.
More than 2000 years ago, Mary, a teenage, pregnant Palestinian girl living under the tyranny of the Roman Empire, magnified God in a prayer that has continued to encourage the oppressed. She, too, was oppressed. Several months after she recited her “Magnificat,” the Romans required her to walk 70 miles to the rural town of Bethlehem so she and Joseph could be registered. (There might have been a donkey.)
Mary was told later that a sword would pierce her soul (Luke 2:35), and we know that prophecy came true. For a while she and her family were refugees from persecution, living in a foreign land. And eventually Mary accompanied her beloved son to his torturous death. There, too, she showed the fortitude of her young prayer. She didn’t flee. She stood at the foot of the cross. As in her pregnancy, she was accompanied by other women who bore witness to her experience and to God’s love. Love and truth, the personal and the prophetic, go hand in hand in our Lord’s Kingdom. That is the bracing adventure Advent ushers us into.
O God, may we, like Mary, have the faith to receive Your grace with open hearts, and the courage to allow it to flow through us in compassion and justice for the world. May we magnify You with our words and in our lives. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Susan S. Phillips (Ph.D.) is executive director of New College Berkeley, professor of Christianity and Sociology, and a member of the Graduate Theological Union’s Core Doctoral Faculty.