While we've known all winter that spring would be around the corner, it feels like we are finally seeing signs of the promised new life after the long, cold, and dark winter. The snow is melting, the sun is shining, and it is getting warmer. This in itself is enough to make any of us upper-mid-westerners break out in a song of praise, and that's exactly what I saw someone doing as they went outside for the first time yesterday morning. They literally started singing, face and hands up in the air, drinking in the warmth and sunshine.
We are now in chapter 22 of The Story, which happens to be the first chapter of the New Testament. It is all about the birth of Jesus, stories we are accustomed to hearing in December and Advent. Yet here it is - March and Lent, and we have the birth of Jesus. Which may be exactly just what we need, because like those people I saw burst into spontaneous songs of joy yesterday, our text is from Luke 1 and Mary, the mother of Jesus, spontaneously bursts into a song of praise for what God has done.
This song of praise often referred to as The Magnificat, is a glorious song that focuses on the work of God in the world saying that God has:
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| The Visitation - Mary and Elizabeth Meet* |
- looked with favor on the lowly
- given favor to those who fear God
- shown strength
- scattered the proud
- brought down the powerful
- lifted up the lowly
- filled the hungry with good things
- sent the rich away empty
- helped God's servant Israel
When we hear these words in Advent we look with hope for how God's coming among us in the flesh will make all of these things that God has done come to pass. The focus is on the future impact of God's work in Jesus. Yet we are in Lent, and so we read these words with a different lens.
During this time of Lent, these words invite us to ponder how, because of what God has done for us in Jesus, we are partners with God in making these things come about. As we contemplate our own relationship with God, our own spiritual health and well-being, our own way of living our faith and love, this song of praise becomes something like a mirror.
When you look in the mirror do you see someone through whom God is working? Do you see someone God uses to lift up the lowly or fill the hungry with good things? Do you see someone who works to bring down the powerful and send the rich away empty through justice and advocacy? This week I am pondering how this song reflects, or sadly how it often doesn't reflect my own life of faith.
Into what does Mary's song of praise invite you? How does it challenge you to live and to, like Mary, open your own life to God's work so that God's salvation can be shown in and through you? Even as we stand convicted of our own shortfalls, we remember how Mary's song starts
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
God has seen us in our lowliness, and God has sent us a companion in our journeys of faith. May this Lent be a time for us to ponder the mystery of God's gracious forgiveness and mercy, even as we continue to strive to live as God's beloved children in this world.
*JESUS MAFA. The Visitation - Mary and Elizabeth meet, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48279 [retrieved March 11, 2014].
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