The Song Mary Sang

A pregnant teenager in an occupied province sings a song about thrones being emptied. This is the magnificat Bible meaning behind it.

We have domesticated it thoroughly. The Magnificat turns up on Christmas cards, set in a gentle typeface beside a picture of a young woman looking serene. It gets sung in cathedrals at evening prayer in settings so beautiful that the words slide past.

Read it cold and it is one of the most startling passages in the New Testament.

What she actually sings

Luke gives the scene almost no decoration. Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a town in Judah, and went into the house of Zechariah. Elizabeth — six months pregnant herself, and old — hears the greeting, feels the child move, and says the two lines everybody knows: blessed art thou among women, and whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Mary does not answer her. She sings.

It opens personally. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

Then it widens, and the temperature changes.

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Thrones emptied. The proud scattered. The rich sent away with nothing.

That is not a lullaby. It is closer to the prophets, which is unsurprising, because it is deliberately built out of them and out of Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel.

Then Luke closes the scene with no ceremony at all: and Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her own house. Whatever the song was, it was not a performance. It happened in a house, once, in front of one other woman.

The tense is the strange part

Here is the detail that changed the passage for me.

Those verbs are aorist. In Greek that is the tense for a completed action — something done, viewed as a whole. English translations usually render them as perfect: he has brought down, he has filled.

She is not singing about what God is going to do. She is singing about what he has done.

And at the moment she sings it, nothing visible has happened.

Herod is on his throne. Rome is in charge. The rich are not noticeably emptier. She is an unmarried pregnant girl from a small town in a client kingdom, staying with a relative, with no status whatsoever, and she is singing in the past tense about the overthrow of the powerful.

Two ways to read that

One is that she is reaching back into Israel’s history. God has done this before — the exodus, the judges, Hannah’s own reversal from barrenness. She is naming a pattern that is genuinely established, and saying it again. That reading is solid and probably right as far as it goes.

The other is that she is doing what the prophets do: speaking of a certain future in the past tense, because the certainty is what matters and the timing is God’s business. Isaiah does this constantly.

Either way, the effect is the same and it is not a small thing. She is treating the reversal as accomplished while standing in a world where it visibly is not.

The word she uses of herself

There is a link in the Greek that English cannot easily carry, and it is worth knowing about.

In verse 48 she says God has looked on the humble estate of his servant. The noun there is tapeinosis — a low condition, lowliness of circumstance, the state of being down. It is not modesty. It is a description of where she is standing.

Four verses later comes the reversal: he has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate. That last phrase is tapeinous, from the same root — the plain Greek word for low, not rising far from the ground.

So the group God is said to lift is named with the same word she has just used for herself. She is not outside the song, reporting on something God does to other people. She has put herself into the second line of it, on the bottom side, and then sung about what happens to people in that position.

It is a small detail, and it changes who the song is about.

She is not the only one singing

It also helps to notice that Luke’s opening chapters are unusually full of songs, and that they all do the same strange thing with time.

Later in the same chapter, after John is born, Zechariah gets his voice back and sings: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people, and hath raised up a horn of salvation for us. Those verbs are aorist too. Same construction, same problem. Nothing visible has been redeemed. There is a newborn in the house and an occupying army outside it, and he sings about it in the past tense.

A chapter later, an old man named Simeon takes an infant in his arms in the temple and says he is ready to die now, because his eyes have seen. And then he says the other thing, to Mary directly — that this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel.

Fall and rising. Brought down and lifted up. That is the Magnificat again, compressed into a sentence and said back to her by a stranger.

What this is not

It would be easy, and I think dishonest, to turn this into a straightforward political program, and equally dishonest to spiritualize it until it means nothing.

Christians have argued about the balance for a long time and the traditions weight it differently. What none of them can do is remove the material edge. The hungry are filled with good things. The rich are sent away empty. Those are not metaphors for interior states; the words are ordinary and concrete, and Luke’s gospel goes on to be relentlessly interested in actual poverty and actual wealth.

Nor is it a song about Mary’s own achievement. She is explicit that God has looked on her low estate — the point is her insignificance, not her merit. Every tradition affirms that much, whatever else it says about her.

And there is an “else,” and I should be straight about it rather than tiptoe. Elizabeth calls her blessed among women and the mother of my Lord. Mary herself says all generations shall call me blessed. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant readers all have those lines in their Bibles and all of them mean them. What follows from them — how Mary is honored, and what may rightly be said of her — is one of the places the traditions genuinely part company, and it will not be settled in an article about a song. What I can do is stay with what she sang, which is plenty.

Where it lands

I find this passage most useful on the days when the world looks exactly as unreformed as it did to her.

Because the honest observation about the Magnificat is that it has been sung continuously for two thousand years, in every century, including centuries when the proud were doing extremely well. It was sung through the fall of Rome and through the plague and through wars nobody now remembers the names of. It is being sung this evening in places where the mighty are very comfortably on their thrones.

That could be read as evidence against it. I have felt that.

But the song was written in exactly that condition. She sang it from inside an unreformed world. It was never a report on current events. It is a statement about which direction things finally run, made by someone who could see no evidence for it, in the past tense, because she believed it was as good as done.

A small practice

Read Luke 1:46-55 out loud, once, slowly. It takes ninety seconds.

Then read 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Hannah’s song, and notice how much of it Mary has in her. The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They that were full have hired out themselves for bread; and they that were hungry ceased. Full and hungry. Mighty and stumbling. It is the same shape, a thousand years earlier.

Two women, in situations that had looked closed, both singing about God turning the order of things over.

The church has kept this song in daily use for most of its history, in every tradition — at evening prayer in the West, and in the Byzantine churches at the morning service, sung near the end of the canon. Not weekly. Daily, for centuries, by people who mostly did not see it happen either.

In the West it settled into the evening, and that is a good place for it. It is a good thing to say at the end of a day when nothing changed.