And Mary said: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’.
My soul magnifies the Lord… As I was thinking this week about what I might say this morning as we celebrate our patronal festival and hear again those amazing words attributed to Mary herself, I found myself increasingly intrigued by the image of magnification with which Mary opens her great proclamation.
What does it mean for this young woman, miraculously pregnant with God’s Son, presumably still trying to make sense of what all this might mean, for her and for her unborn baby, but clearly having already grasped something of its life-changing – no… world-changing – import, to announce that her soul magnifies the Lord?
To magnify something is, of course, to make it bigger. But God – at the risk of stating the obvious – is already big. God is bigger, in fact, than we could ever imagine. Mary’s song, Mary’s soul, does not – cannot – make God bigger. Rather, it seems to me, Mary’s words here act as a sort of magnifying glass, not making God bigger, but bringing God closer to us, helping us to see God more clearly through the lens of her soul, a soul which God has already touched and transformed forever.
To see Mary as a lens, illuminates both her role as the mother of our Lord, the God-bearer, and her words in the reading we have heard today. Mary literally brings God close to us. She allows God’s Spirit to touch her and to fill her, she bears God’s Son in her womb and brings him into the world through the blood, sweat and tears of the ordinary miracle of childbirth and, simultaneously, through the wholly extraordinary miracle of God made human flesh, of heaven reaching down and touching earth, of light illuminating our darkness. Mary brings God close to us… as close as a newborn baby held in its mother’s arms.
And that is extraordinary enough. But it is not all. Because the miracle of God’s closeness realised in her body also seems to provide Mary – at least, if we take seriously the words of the Magnificat – with a lens by which the whole world can now be viewed, a lens which brings the world into a new focus, radically changing our vision of the world, just as much as the birth of Jesus radically changes our vision of God.
The world that the Magnificat brings into focus for us is a world in which God’s will is done, a world in which God’s kingdom comes – miraculously, magnificently – on earth as it is in heaven. It is a world where those who place their faith in their own strength fall by the wayside, while those who trust in the strength of God flourish. It is a world in which corrupt kings and emperors see their power taken from them and given to those who are habitually overlooked, the lowly, the downtrodden, the outsiders, the voiceless. It is a world where the hungry are fed and the well-fed go without. It is a world where God’s long-articulated promises come true. It is a world turned upside-down. And it is, at one and the same time, a world put absolutely right.
Moreover, to look at the world through the lens which Mary holds up for us in the Magnificat is not only to see the world through God’s eyes, but also to see ourselves in it: another miracle, for who are we to place ourselves in this picture, frail and fractious and soaked in sin as we are?
But Mary models this for us, holding up a lens to herself, her own life, too. ‘My spirit’, she claims, ‘rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant’. The God who raises up the humble and weak and feeds the hungry and empowers the powerless begins by raising up, nourishing, and empowering Mary herself. The God who hears the cries of the dispossessed and gives a voice to the voiceless, gives a voice, first and foremost, to Mary herself.
And if Mary can see herself, blessed and favoured, in the image of God’s kingdom that her lens brings into focus, then might we too not see ourselves in that kingdom? If we look closely enough through her magnifying lens, might we not catch a glimpse of ourselves, healed by God’s mercy, filled with God’s love, and empowered by God’s transforming grace, not, of course, through our own efforts but through the very transformative power that Mary brings into the world?
Our first reading, from the letter to the Galatians, certainly implies something of the sort, when it promises us adoption as God’s own children. God’s kingdom is inaugurated, in the fullness of time, when Mary gives birth to Jesus, God’s own son; but it is populated by the followers of Jesus, from that moment on and throughout the centuries, who are adopted as God’s children, sisters and brothers of Christ, and sisters and brothers in Christ, heirs, with him, to God’s kingdom. The same Spirit by which Mary is impregnated, also touches us, giving us – like Jesus – the right and the ability to call God ‘Abba’, ‘Father’. Unworthy as we are, we are, through the miracle of Jesus’s birth, no longer slaves but children. God looks with favour on our lowliness and offers us his kingdom as our inheritance.
All this, Mary sees through the magnifying lens of the insight that her brush with the divine has given her. All this, through her words, Mary holds out to us. She has already glimpsed the coming-close of God’s kingdom. For her, the Magnificat is not a promise held out for some future time when all will be well, but a vision that is already real. She does not promise that, in the fullness of time, God will have mercy on those that fear him, that he will scatter the proud, or bring down the powerful, or feed the hungry… No, she speaks with confidence of a God who, through the miracle growing inside her, has already done all these things. She speaks of a promise that has already come true. And she brings that promise close to us, so that we can see it too.
Mary, whom we celebrate today, is a lens held up to God, one of the ways in which we are able to see God clearly, to know God’s closeness, to glimpse God’s kingdom, and to be assured that there is a place for us in it.
As I was preparing this sermon, I found a poem written during her ordination training by a friend of mine, Rosemary Mitchell, who sadly died only a couple of months after her ordination as deacon alongside me in 2021. I will end this morning with her interpretation of Mary’s words. Her poem is entitled, appropriately enough, ‘Magnificat’.
Who would have thought that
the tiny lens of my soul
would be enough to make God huge,
or that someone as lowly as I –
his servant, his slave –
could shoot God up in glory
to the skies?Really, of course, it is he who has
made me huge, swelling
my belly with the strange holiness
of his name. Who can tell
what the heart’s pity of God –
which falls on all who fear him –
can do?But it will reverse the way of things:
of that, I’m sure.
Heart-dreams of the proud will be
knocked out of their heads
by his strong arm; chairs will be whipped
out from under the powerful
and the humble will sit down.And the hungry will swell
with God’s good things,
while the wealthy wonder
at their empty bellies.