God has helped God’s own child, Israel, a memorial to God’s mercy, just as God said to our mothers and fathers, to [Hagar and] and Sarah and Abraham, to their descendants forever. – Luke 1:54–55 (as translated in A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W)
Mary’s Magnificat always makes my spirit dance. I feel my heart reaching in gratitude towards God in a very physical, almost sensual, way. I imagine Mary’s embodied joy as she consented and celebrated what God was doing through her and the child she would nurture in the darkness of her womb.
Given the dismantling of women’s right to choose what happens to their bodies in the United States, Dr. Wil Gafney’s Year W commentary is prophetic when she writes, “Mary’s Magnificat is not thanksgiving for fertility in the place of barrenness. … Her thanksgiving is about what this child will do with his life, not whether he will create life. As an Advent reading, this lesson calls us to that life and that work while we await his return” (p. 52).
What a timely reminder! In some traditions we would joyfully proclaim, “Look at God!”
Dr. Gafney teaches us that Mary remembered God’s promises amid oppression by the empire. She believed in her ability to take part in this revolutionary movement, to do her part. What she was chosen to do. What she was prepared to do. (Come on, her response was so political she must have already begun to be radicalized! Imagine those dinner conversations).
Mary knew that her child—Jesus—would transform not only her life, but the life of her people. He would disrupt the way the world was operating, and reorder things based on an ethic of embodied love.
Look at God!
Prayer
Thank you, God, for Mary and Dr. Gafney’s reminder that the Advent story is not about a baby born in a manager, meek and lowly—but a story about a revolutionary who is yet calling us to a movement of joyful rebellion. ¡Aleluya! Glory to God!
