Advent 4: The Promise of Justice
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Well, here are. The 4th Sunday of Advent! Where did these 4 weeks go? Each Advent, I look forward to hearing the voice of Mary.
For the past couple of weeks, we have heard about the promises that the prophets foretold (Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Micah). We’ve heard from the messenger preparing the way—Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist. We’ve heard about the promises of Truth, Compassion, and Restoration. Today we hear from a different messenger: Mary. And what she has to say points us in the direction and tells of the promise of Justice! Perhaps we can even call her Mary the prophet!
Today is just as good as any day to remind us that women are very much underrepresented in the bible. In the entire Bible, women speak about 14,000 words collectively – that may sound like a lot, but this represents merely 1.1% of all the words in the Bible. (Christian Jennert, “Listen to Mary”, sermon, St. Matthews Lutheran Church).
But women are crucial to the whole story of God and God’s people. We know that. At least I hope we know that!
Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, is the first one to hear what Mary has to say. She, too, is pregnant — about six months further along than Mary, and much, much older. (Remember—2 weeks ago we heard about her and Zechariah’s story.) Elizabeth greets her cousin loudly because she is excited that Mary has come to see her; because her own baby has jumped for joy inside her. Behind the sudden events of this story lie the long years when Israel waited in hope for the promised Messiah. Now there is hope of a new life. And it’s from women.
FYI:
This story, known as “the Visitation,” is the longest account in all the New Testament in which women hold center stage.
Mary’s Magnificat is the longest set of words spoken by a woman in the entire New Testament. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary sings “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” https://jasonporterfield.com/the-subversive-magnificat/
Mary has a voice, a strong voice, a powerful voice. It may even make us uncomfortable, with all the talk of sending the rich away empty. She has faith in God, who, through the angel Gabriel, announced to her that the child she is carrying would turn the world around.
Mary’s voice is a voice we need to hear still today because there is still so much injustice, so much suffering, in our world today. Her voice has the power to inspire us to speak up and act when we encounter that injustice.
For Mary, the acts of God reveal God’s heart for the weary, oppressed, anxious, exiled, and afraid. God is flipping the world upside-down (or perhaps right-side up) by seeing the overlooked, humbling the proud, lifting the lowly, feeding the hungry, and keeping God’s promises (1:50-55). God’s faithfulness stretches from generation to generation and is better than anything we could have imagined. A Savior is born to an unlikely mother who cannot contain her joy. A joy not only for herself, but for everyone who finds themselves left out or skipped over, for the generations who have waited for this promise to be fulfilled. (Kate Bowler, A Weary World Rejoices)
Let’s just sit with that for a second. It is powerful.
At the end of our Gospel reading, she bursts into song—called the Magnificat: (It is named after the first word of its first line in Latin (“Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” or “My soul magnifies the Lord”). And this is not just any song, but a radical, hope-drenched song that soars with promise for the world's poor, brokenhearted, and oppressed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the Magnificat this way:
"It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings.... This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind."
We can set aside the picture of Mary as “meek and mild.” She is nothing less than the first disciple, a force to be reckoned with. Her world-turning “yes” and “let it be” come from her conviction, her fierce, bold, deep-down-in-her-bones trust that God’s love, even now, is making all things new.
But at the same time, this is a gentle revolution, not some grand show of power. God chooses the margins of society, where God will be born in dire circumstances, to an unwed mother in unsanitary conditions without even a proper roof over her head. To a new dad, forced to take his family and flee the country from a powerful and vengeful king.
This is the world that God chose to enter at Christmas.
Our world.
So God could be the difference we didn’t know it needed.
And may our response to that act of love be, “Thank you, God.” Amen