Reading 1The Song of Mary
Gabriel, the angel of the Lord, came to Mary and announced, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High.” With the courage that comes from obedience, the teenager from Nazareth responded “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
When Mary said “yes” to God, she was saying “yes” to a unique and “blessed” part in the drama of salvation. Her “yes” to all the longed for hopes of Israel would give meaning and fulfilment to the suffering and sorrow of her people’s history.
The young girl from the rebellious province of Galilee understood only too well the dark forces that stalked outside her door. She grew up under the tyranny of a puppet king; crippled by unjust taxation and the greed of absentee landlords, her people had lived with poverty and destitution and the indifference of the rich in Jerusalem; she witnessed the brutality of the occupying army while her neighbours nursed their tribal grievances and their paramilitaries plotted against Rome. Mary, a peasant girl from a backwater town, lived in the eye of the storm of human history with all its hate and hurt.
But Mary was also a child of a different history, a daughter of Israel and steeped in the prophetic tradition of her ancestral sisters – Sarah, Rachel, Tamar, Rebecca, Miriam, Ruth. Through obedient lives their radical voices had sung out the story of Salvation history, in the face of injustice and despair.
And now it was Mary’s turn to sing, and sing she did. Not some vague, woolly religious sentiment of a song, …but a song of radical hope and transformation:
My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant...
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
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.
Salvation history beat in her heart. The longed for hope of the ages was growing, cell-by-cell. The promise of shalom kicking in her womb. And Mary knew that in her Son the non-violent-coming-of God was breaking into the world.