You’ll please turn with me your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke in the first chapter, beginning at verse 46.
And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior; for he has looked on the humble state of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his Mercy is for those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his Mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.’ This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you give us examples in scripture of songs and prayers that we get to raise to you. Help us to echo them in our hearts, to pray these prayers with joy as Mary once did. Help us to live as you call and command us to in faith and hope and joy. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
After considering Gabriel’s prophetic pronouncements to Zechariah and Mary alongside their immediate reactions—namely, Zechariah’s disbelief and Mary’s belief—the next two Advent stories which we’ll consider concern their ultimate or final response to God’s work within their lives. When Gabriel informed Mary of her impending pregnancy, she believed and trusted the Angel’s work because he mentioned Elizabeth, her elderly relative’s pregnancy. But although she believed the angel and she willingly submitted herself to the Lord’s will and divine decree, she did not take her situation on faith alone. Instead, Mary did what every reasonable person ought to do as they’re able: she trusted and she verified, which would surely have made Ronald Reagan glad.
She had faith; she believed the angel, but she still went to the source to get confirmation that what he said was true. It is very likely that Mary had already heard about Zachariah and Elizabeth’s good news through the local or familial rumor mill, but after what she had just been told, she needed to ask Elizabeth herself. So she went down to the small town where her relatives lived, traveling to Judea from Nazareth for a quick family visit because she needed to see and hear the truth for herself.
When Mary arrived and greeted Elizabeth, she received the most extraordinary response. As Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.’
Thus inspired and prompted by the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth pronounced and uttered a blessing upon Mary, proclaiming something that she could not have possibly known about Mary’s impending pregnancy except through divine revelation. She proclaimed a trifold blessing—calling Mary blessed, Mary’s son to be blessed, and naming herself as blessed because of Mary’s visit.
She blessed Mary because of her faith, and she blessed Mary’s child because both she and the unborn child within her recognized him as the Lord God, her Lord and Savior. They each and all were blessed because they recognized and knew that the Lord was very present with them, for he is Emmanuel.
Between Elizabeth’s obvious condition and being a six-month pregnant woman and her prophetic greeting, Mary’s initial trust in Gabriel’s word was affirmed and her confidence in the Lord’s Providence and plan was increased. Immediately after this, Mary responded to her understanding of God’s grace upon her life with the words of our scripture text—a passage that the church has always interpreted as being a joy-filled song that’s been named The Magnificat from the Latin term ‘to magnify’ or ‘glorify’ because that is what Mary’s response to the confirmation of Gabriel’s word was: to give God glory. Her ultimate response was to choose joy and glorify God.
And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.’ For he has looked on the humble state of his servant. Mary said that her soul magnifies and her spirit rejoices; she described what is our proper attitude for all our worship.
Her response to magnify means to increase God’s glory, to rightly ascribe him glory for all of the amazing things that he has done, to recognize and acknowledge Him as who he is—the Sovereign of creation—and to humble oneself before him as the Majesty on high. To really say that he is greater than I and mean it.
Meanwhile, her response to rejoice is the choice which is made by all of us—all those who believe, those who have been given the faith and desire to believe and trust in the Lord—to trust Jesus. To rejoice means to feel and express the joy that is welling up within your soul, a joy that comes because of who God is and what he has done in each of our lives.
Joy is something different from happiness or gladness, although those mere feelings are born up within and out of joy. Because even the redeemed of the Lord, we still experience bouts of sadness or depression or fear throughout our present lives, just as Mary certainly would through Jesus’s crucifixion and death.
The joy of the Lord is the joy that comes from knowing that we are beloved by the king of the universe, that we were chosen as his children from before the foundation of the world, that he gave his only begotten son as a sacrifice of atonement to redeem us from our sin. And that when—not if—when he raises us up on the last day, we shall stand justified in the righteousness of Christ, and we shall hear him say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ and then we shall receive our eternal reward.
When that day comes, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. All the sorrows of this life will fade, being outshone by the glory and honor of the king’s presence. The response to magnify is the most natural and ultimately the required one because it is what all must do one day—every person from every time and every place in history—because when that day comes, every knee shall bow; everyone will bow because they must. But only God’s elect will do so while choosing to rejoice in doing it.
Every soul will magnify the Lord, but only some will rejoice in God our savior because when that day comes and he looks down on the humble estate of his servants and we are under his gaze, we will feel either the grace of his love in mercy and forgiveness or the justice of his love in judgment and wrath. Which will you be on that day?
Then Mary continues, ‘For behold from now on all generations will call me blessed.’ But neither she nor Luke nor the Holy Spirit intended for the application or practices related to this statement that the Roman Church has since established because Mary is not a subject for worship or veneration. She was a sinful human person just like any of us, no better or worse than any other human. She was not particularly special apart from the specific and unique circumstances and events of her life. So then, what is meant by us calling her blessed?
Unfortunately, our 21st-century culture has a very poor understanding of what it actually means to be blessed. We’ve cheapened the term, and this term has devolved from being a positive invocation of hope and petition to receive divine favor into just becoming some generic statement of well-wishing, as in ‘Have a blessed day.’ This is now habitually used by people regardless of their faith beliefs or Christian understanding. I mean, you’ve surely heard it from countless fast food or other service industry professionals who’ve been trained to just say it without meaning it, at least not in the biblical sense.
So, what is the biblical meaning behind being blessed? The Greek term used here, and similarly in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5, is ‘makarios,’ a term that involves the concepts of happiness or good fortune and may be used in the same manner that we might wish someone good luck. Except that as Christians, we don’t believe that there is any such thing as luck. ‘Makarios’ is specifically used in scripture to describe someone or something that receives God’s favor and also their response after receiving his grace.
So, being and considering ourselves blessed in this biblical sense is something that we all need to be reminded of, and we each should do more of because it would improve our attitudes and our worldly outlook. We are all blessed with life while we live; we are blessed with sunshine, rain, and even snow.
We’re blessed with family and friends; we’re blessed with time alone. We’re blessed to have the scriptures and even more so to have them written in our common language. We are blessed to have our church, and we’re even blessed to have the secular government, although sometimes we forget why. They don’t particularly make us feel blessed all the time, but we are blessed to have them.
Simply put, every person is so blessed by God, by our very existence and for everything that we have, as much or as little as that may be, that it’s easy for us to forget our blessedness and how extraordinary everything around us truly is. Our sinfulness blinds us to it, and so we fail and sin to get by, not giving God the glory that he’s rightly due. All of us are so well and truly blessed that at times we are each very guilty of taking it for granted.
However, even more so, all Christians, like Mary, are even more extraordinarily blessed because of our special relationship with the Lord—our adoption as his chosen people and beloved children, accomplished by his condescension in relating to us by covenant. It is in this specific sense of being blessed that Mary proclaims and claims for herself here.
In her specific case, it is reasonable for us to presume that she does have a degree of blessedness greater than ours. We should all agree it’s reasonable to say that Jesus’s disciples—the twelve apostles—were more blessed than us because they had the opportunity to walk and talk, eat and drink, live and laugh with Jesus.
So being the mother of Jesus and being present with him for the entirety of his earthly life, Mary surely possessed a greater degree of blessedness than even the twelve. We say this confidently because Mary further declared, ‘For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name,’ proclaiming her extra special blessedness because she recognized the great personal things that the Lord has done, was doing, and would do for her.
Because now that she fully believed, she understood that her son to be truly would be the Son of God. See, Mary’s son Jesus is the great thing which the Lord had done for her; and so, by proclaiming ‘holy is his name,’ she reaffirmed Gabriel’s word to her that therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.
Jesus would be holy because God is holy; because Jesus is God. Then Mary invites and welcomes us into her joy by proclaiming the blessing that is upon all of God’s chosen people, that his mercy is for those who fear Him from generation to generation.
The mercy of which she speaks is God’s attitude, his inclination and feeling towards his people. This is about God’s emotions—the pity and compassion that he feels for us because of our sinful state and for all the damage that our sin has done to the world we live in—damage to the world and damage to our relationships.
Those who fear Him are those who are his people, the elect—everyone who honors and reveres him, who love him and give him the glory that he is due. But out of his mercy, what really has the Lord done for us? How has he especially blessed his children?
Mary reminds us that he has shown strength with his arm. I mean, he did deliver the sons of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, and he gave them the land of Canaan as their possession and repeated victory over their foes. He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he’s bringing and has brought people to repentance—people like Miriam and Aaron when they opposed Moses, David when he sinned with Bathsheba, and even King Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King, when he asserted his greatness as being above God’s.
He’s brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He removed his favor from King Saul for his disobedience and elevated David instead. He elevated Jeroboam and humbled Rehoboam, Solomon’s successor and son, by dividing the kingdom.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. Israel plundered Egypt when they left during the Exodus; they took possession of the land of Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey, after they drove out the wicked inhabitants in the Lord’s name. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews were returned to their ancestral homeland where they enjoyed a measure of prosperity and independence.
He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever. See, the Lord has proven himself time and time again within scripture and in the experiences of our lives, proving that he is faithful to his covenant promise made to Abraham and to Abraham’s heirs—that he will be their God and they will be his people. That as their God, he would be merciful and bless them, that he would protect and defend them, preserving them and delivering them and saving them.
So he does for us, and Mary recalls the Lord’s past works of redemption and mercy to fuel her present joy and her hope for the future. She understood that God’s past performance was indicative of his future. Just as the past informed her present, it also instructed her future.
This young girl, who had been given a very good reason to be terrified and fearful, instead chose joy over anxiety, faith and obedience over doubt and sin, and courage over fear. See, Mary’s story—her whole story really—reminds us that we must choose joy.
Being always joyful is a choice and it’s not necessarily tied to our state of happiness, as the Apostle Paul regularly reminds us. So finally, in regards to being joyful and remaining joyful, Mary’s song gives us two important lessons and reminders.
First, like Mary, we must magnify the Lord with and by our joy. Our being joyful should bring him glory because he is the source and reason for our joy. Second, to increase and support our joyfulness, we must identify and remember our blessings, like Mary did. Count your blessings; name them one by one. Count your many blessings; see what God has done.
Doing that will make it less likely for us to take our blessings for granted because remembering everything that the Lord has done for you in the past will build your confidence and hope for what he will do in your future.
So how do we magnify the Lord? By declaring his promises and extolling all the things he’s done. This does two things: It reminds us of his faithfulness and his power, and it has the added benefit of telling others about his works for his glory so that they too can know him and share in our joy and give him the glory for it—that’s called evangelism.
We glorify God by our being grateful, and so we give thanks to him for the work of his hands and our received blessings. But how do we remember or count those blessings to allow for the knowledge of our blessedness to support our joy? By remembering that everything we have ultimately comes from God—everything we think of as good and everything we think of as bad.
So we remember and trust that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose, both in this life and for the life to come.
By also intentionally looking to see how and where God is moving and working around you, we remember that because the Lord is concerned about and for all of his creations—the elect, the reprobate, and even our environment and everything that’s in it—we know that he’s actively engaged with the world despite the world turning a blind eye to his presence and influence.
We watch for those everyday miracles. Oftentimes, we only pray for the big ones—like spontaneous healing or for something humanly impossible—and we miss, ignore, or forget about the ordinary miracles that happen every single day.
Like someone who’s restored to full health after a round of antibiotics, after they received penicillin itself—a miraculous and fortuitous discovery and a natural remedy, really. Thus, a gift of God’s good creation as creation itself was the first miracle. And that the medicine was prescribed to them by a doctor who had been given by God wisdom, understanding, and skill—each themselves other miracles.
These things work together to do this miracle—or we forget that it’s a miracle that we arrived home safely after traveling, or like the sun shining and the rain falling, which all help to make a farmer’s crop grow, producing food for us.
Or like the birth of a child or finding the love of your life and marrying her, even 20ish years later. Once we start identifying and recognizing God’s many blessings around us, then as we notice them, we will pause and give God thanks for that, even if it is just a simple ‘thank you.’
Not only does this help support our joy because we increase our appreciation, but our sense of gratitude also grows, and eventually, our intentionality makes this second nature to us and we do it without thinking. So eventually, we forget about and lose our ability to even choose to not be joyful.
I think and believe that it’s that kind of attitude and these kinds of practices—intentionally looking for God’s work around you, recognizing his miracles for your good, and becoming always grateful and appreciative—that was the open secret to Paul’s ability to remain content in any situation.
I believe that that is the final lesson we should take from Mary’s choice of joy: how our joy leads to contentedness. By knowing who God is and who we are in relationship to him, it gives us this ability to trust his promises and choose to be joyful.
By choosing to be joyful in all things, regardless of how we may otherwise feel, we then become able to be and remain content in all circumstances.
So this Advent season, whenever you hear these stories of joy, remember and understand that true joy only comes with the Lord, that it is only found and known through faith in Jesus Christ and the salvation that he has wrought. So know and remember Christ—believe and trust in him—and thus choose joy. Amen.