What does your soul sing?

Today we celebrate the Feast and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Every evening, at Evening Prayer, the Church has sung Mary’s words for centuries:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

It is familiar, but perhaps we can forget just how radical it is.

The opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel are rather remarkable. Two women: Mary and Elizabeth take centre stage. They recognise what God is doing, speak and interpret what is happening. And the men are, rather conveniently, either absent or silenced!

Luke deliberately gives women a remarkable theological voice at the very beginning of the Gospel. And that matters.

Because these stories announce one of Luke’s great themes: that in the Kingdom of God, things are not necessarily as they appear to be.

The last will be first. The first will be last. The proud will be scattered. The powerful will be brought down. The lowly will be lifted up. The hungry will be filled. And the rich will be sent away empty.

God’s Kingdom turns our assumptions about power and status upside down. God’s plan starts as he means to go on.

The Son of God is not born into a palace or a family of worldly power. He comes through Mary. A young Jewish woman living in an occupied land, with very little worldly power or status, is chosen to bear the Christ.

And Mary understands something profound about what God is doing. She understands that God’s choice of her is not simply a private blessing. It tells us something about the character of God.

God sees the lowly, hears the cry of the oppressed and notices those whom the world overlooks. God’s salvation reaches into the structures and assumptions by which human beings organise the world.

Mary sings of a God who has scattered the proud, brought down the mighty, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty.

This is not a sweet little song for a Christmas card!

It is a prophetic song. A song of revolution.... but not revolution through violence or domination. It is the revolution of God’s Kingdom: the reordering of human life according to love, justice and mercy.

And Mary is not simply describing what God might do one day. She sings as though God’s future is already breaking into the present.

That makes the Magnificat so powerful.

Mary has long been portrayed as meek, sweet, passive and submissive. There is nothing wrong with gentleness, humility or tenderness. But the Mary we meet in Luke is also courageous, questioning, challenging, passionate, intelligent, full of agency and faith.

She says yes to God, travels to Elizabeth, stands beside her son, she is not afraid to question him at times and remains faithful through suffering, and sings a song which challenges the world’s understanding of power.

Pope Paul VI wrote that Mary was “far from being a timidly submissive woman”, proclaiming that God vindicates the humble and oppressed and removes the powerful from their privileged positions.

That is the Mary of the Magnificat.

And perhaps that is why Mary continues to speak so powerfully to us. Her song is about all those whom the world has failed to see: the poor and hungry, the refugee and stranger, those who are excluded or whose voices are dismissed.

And it is about us too. Mary challenges us to ask where we stand when God’s Kingdom begins to turn the world upside down…  and whether we are willing to allow God to change our hearts and our way of seeing.

Mary is amazing.

But there is something else I want to say about her today.

For all our devotion to her, we must remember that Mary is not God. Mary is not divine.

In our tradition we may ask Mary to pray for us, as we ask the saints to pray for us. But it is God who answers prayer. It is God who heals. It is God who saves. It is God who blesses.

And I sometimes wonder whether there is a danger that, without realising it, we make Mary carry all the feminine imagery of our faith and leave God sounding exclusively male.

We speak constantly of Father and Son and rightly, because that is how Jesus teaches us to pray. But Holy Scripture and the teachings of Jesus also gives us profoundly maternal images of God.

God is described as a mother who comforts her child. God is like a woman searching for a lost coin. And the prophet Isaiah gives us God’s own words:

“As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.”

Julian of Norwich understood this deeply. In her Revelations of Divine Love, Julian speaks of Christ as our Mother. For Julian, maternal imagery helps us glimpse the tenderness, nurture and self-giving love of God. Our language about God can never contain God.

Perhaps that is one reason why Marian devotion can be so powerful. But perhaps it can also become a kind of safety valve  allowing us to place the feminine alongside God rather than within our understanding of God.

Mary is female. God is not male. God is not female. God is God.

And perhaps Mary helps us discover that the God revealed in Jesus is infinitely richer than any of our human categories.

But Mary herself would not want us to stop with Mary.

She points beyond herself.

She says, in effect: Look at what God is doing. Look at Christ.

Mary calls herself “the servant of the Lord”. And that word matters. She does not make herself the centre of the story. Her whole song is about God:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.

Mary magnifies God. She makes God bigger in the eyes of the world.

And that reminds me of something said by an Anglican Franciscan friar at the first Eucharist of my dear friend Fr Dominic.

The friar had been praying before a statue of Mary. He said that it carried an important message, but it was easy to miss.

She was holding Jesus out and before her, also pointing towards Jesus and showing him to the world.

And he said: that is our calling too.

To hold Christ before the world to show Christ through the way we live, love, forgive and care for one another.

That, I think, is the deepest meaning of Mary’s discipleship.

Mary doesn’t say, “Look at me.”

She says, “Look at what God has done.”

And perhaps that is why her song is still the song of the Church. We too are called to magnify the Lord, make God’s love visible and stand alongside those whom the world pushes aside.

And when we come to this altar, we do something extraordinary. Mary once carried Christ within her. Through the mystery of the Eucharist, we receive Christ into ourselves, and then are sent out carrying Christ into the world.

That is why Mary is not simply someone we admire. She is someone we follow.

She teaches us to say yes when we are uncertain, trust when we cannot see the whole picture, remain faithful when life becomes painful, and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

So perhaps Mary’s prayer can become our prayer.

When we are wondering and doubting, when our faith is shaken, when grief overwhelms us, or when we cannot see where God is taking us…

may we remember Mary.

May we remember where she looked.

May we trust the promises in which she trusted.

May we learn to say, with her:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

And may we, like Mary, hold Christ close and then hold Christ before the world.

Amen.