“You can never truly enjoy Christmas until you can look up into the Father’s face and tell him you have received his Christmas gift.”
Mary kept singing, “His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.”
Having celebrated God for his glory and majesty, she here celebrates him for his mercy, which extends to all, but especially is showed to such as fear him. She certainly respects the promise of God to be the God of Abraham and this seed, but declares this to be most eminently made good to those who are truly pious. What a comfort to remember that the Lord’s mercy and lovingkindness are to be continued. Much as we have experienced in the long years of our pilgrimage, we have by no means outlived eternal love. Providential goodness is an endless chain, a stream which follows the pilgrim, a wheel perpetually revolving, a star forever shining, and leading us to the place where He is who was once a babe in Bethlehem.
It is in the third strophe of the hymn that Mary’s feeling seems to attain its highest point of elevation. She has already referred in tender, solemn, and reserved language to the great things which God has done for her. And now she is, as it were, looking out across the centuries at the mighty religious revolution which would date from the appearance of her Divine Son on the scene of human history. She uses past tenses, because she reads off what she sees intuitively, as if it were already history. Gibbon felt the power of Mary’s words, when, as he tells us in his autobiography, he sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while they were chanting the vesper service in what had once beta the Temple of Jupiter; and the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first presented itself to his mind. That which met his eye was a comment on the language of the Magnificat, as it fell upon his ear: “He hath put down the mighty from their thrones.” Pagan Rome was succeeded by Christian Europe; and since that astonishing revolution, the last clause of this strophe of Mary’s song has been continually fulfilling itself.
Corrie Ten Boom once said, “Who can add to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world. The perfect gift is that He gave His Only Son. The only requirement is to believe in Him. The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life.”
“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.”