“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.”
Mary continued her song, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty”
Mary seems to understand what most of our reasonable standards do not: what is important to God. She sings of a God who cares deeply and passionately about people and how they live, the conditions of their lives in the world. God cares a lot about those who are shut out and marginalized. God cares a lot about people who, in this plentiful world are hungry or in this active and bustling world are forgotten or in this loud world of bravado are silenced. God cares about injustice and suffering and inequality of any kind.
And with every word Mary sings, this vision is personified in her – a peasant girl, poor, young, vulnerable. The kind of woman who would birth the son of God and have no place else to place him but into a manger. If God was choosing someone to birth God’s own son in a way that seemed prudent and wise to us, you might start to think God would choose someone elevated, with great social power. Unless of course, the choice of Mary – poor, vulnerable – represents something important about God. Unless of course who Mary is – poor, vulnerable – tells us something about who God is – that God comes into the world this way, works in the world this way, and wanted the Son to be born to this woman, to know her wisdom, and from those earliest moments stretching into this world in her womb, to hear her song. Because Mary can see what others would miss – that the child in her womb will envision a new world, and a new way. She understands that her child will challenge the way things are, the established order of things.
Mary was a woman of humble estate, a sinner unworthy of grace, yet one upon whom God had fixed His gaze in saving mercy. No one, there is no one so small, no one so insignificant that the saving eye of God cannot fall upon you in redeeming love. There is no one here, no one beneath the gaze of God who loves sinners in Jesus Christ. Mary is small, insignificant, yet the Lord has fixed His eye on her and He has fixed His eye on you as He holds out His Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to you to be a Savior for you. Mary sings here first of all about the sight of God.
“The good news of great joy changed the course of every silent night to come.”