The Magnificat: The Hymn of Mary, the mother of Jesus

‘’“”—

Olivia Hussey as Mary

The Magnificat is a hymn, a sort of poetic declaration, by Mary the mother of Jesus, on the occasion of visiting a cousin, Elizabeth, who was to be the mother of John the Baptist.  It is interesting to study the words attributed to the womenfolk of Jesus: his mother Mary; Mary and Martha of Magdala, especially Mary, who was according to some accounts actually the wife of Jesus, and an important leader of the early church; the female relatives, according to legend, of Mary the mother of Jesus: her mother Anna, and her cousin Elizabeth.  Very little has come down to us about these last two, but there are a number of references to Mary Magdalene, if not direct quotes, enough to give us a small idea of what she was like.

There seem to be (at least) two sorts of people in America:  Those who call themselves Christians, but who are familiar with little of their holy book, The Bible; and those who are outside established Christianity, atheists and agnostics, who have grown up within Christian culture, and are, in fact, more familiar with the contents of, and the context for, much of the Bible.  I count myself among the latter.  As I was growing up, as I was saying to my wife just this morning, I found it a chore and a nuisance to read the Bible, or to have anything to do with it.  Somewhere along the way I decided that it was misguided in the extreme to believe in any sort of divine intervention in the affairs of humans, and it seems to me that it was at that moment that I found my affection for the Bible gradually growing!  It is impossible to actually hate a book written as a cooperative venture by so many, with such varied experiences, motivations and intentions.  I am no expert, but I understand that large chunks of the so-called Old Testament was written under the supervision of priests, around the time of the Exile in Babylon.  (Evidently a large portion of the Jewish people were taken as slaves to Babylon after a particularly successful conquest by the Babylonians.)  Nevertheless, despite the imposition of a particular political view on large portions of the Old Testament, it is difficult to believe that a single individual was able to make all the various books in the collection conform to his view, which makes for just a little more believability of events in it than would otherwise be the case.  But there are bigger problems with it, namely selection.  Over the course of time, various authorities have enforced which books are included in all the sub-collections of the Bible, and the history we have received is more skewed by the omissions in the collection than in what remains in it.

In the light of the checkered history of the book, it is highly amusing that fundamentalist Christians (or any Christians who believe in the veracity --if that’s the word I want here-- of the Bible) accept it as divinely inspired.  Perhaps they believe it to be so precisely because it is a compendium, and for reasons similar to the ones I offered, feel that it is a valuable document for understanding what Christianity is all about, or at least Theistic Christianity.  There are only apologetic terms for the rest of us who admire the life and the teachings of Jesus, except for the distortions that we believe have been deliberately introduced into the New Testament, to suggest that Jesus considered himself divine in any sense.  Or at least in a literal sense; after all, anyone can be divine in a metaphorical sense, as the Hindus are happy to point out.

Some decades ago, the Magnificat enjoyed greater popularity, since it was read as a sort of anti-establishment oration.  Here it is, according to one translation:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly!

He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty!

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever!

In simple English, it goes like this:

1. “Praise god, because he has noticed me, I who am nobody special!

2. “My name will go down in history, because I have been blessed by god.

3. “God has always been good to those who fear and obey him.

4. “He has shown his strength, and confounded the proud!

5. “He has humbled the powerful, and exalted the lowly.

6. “He has fed the hungry, but denied anything to the rich.

7.  “He has come to the rescue of his servant Israel,

         as he promised to Abraham and his descendants for ever!”

Lines 1 and 2 seem in line with hymns by women of Asia, to my knowledge, in the culture of the times when a proud woman was an abomination.  (I don’t know enough of the anthropology of New Testament times to be able to categorically state that this is true of women’s poetry of that era, and I’m sure Biblical scholars will be quick to point this out.)  They do seem to show that Mary was impressed with the importance of her unborn child, or that the writer of this poem, if not Mary herself, was at pains to represent Mary as being so impressed.

Lines 3, 4 and 5 are simple lines of praise in the tradition of the Psalms, but they begin the pattern of the next several lines which praise god for confounding the proud and humiliating the powerful, and supporting and supplying the weak and the meek.

At the time of the Roman Occupation, of course, as we learn from this same New Testament (and other Roman historical documents, such as Herodotus), the rich and powerful of Judaea were only as successful as their ability and willingness to collaborate with the Roman conquerors, and the poor had only their hope in god on their side.  The venom of any public utterance a woman would dare to make would have to be aimed not at the Romans, but at their own oppressive religious leaders, and to that extent, line 4 supports the belief that this hymn was composed by a woman, or was very carefully written as to be plausibly in the voice of a woman.

Despite the fact that the content of the hymn might have been entirely for the purpose of underlining that it was by whom it was purported to be, the subversive tone of it resonated with the authority-despising Christian youth of the 1960's, and it was a key text of the social gospel of that era.  It must have resonated even more among Korean, Filipino and Japanese Christians of that time, because of how Asian Christian women identified with the status of women in the time of Jesus.  It does appear that Asian women were more emancipated than their American counterparts of that time, and even today, in certain ways.  Witness that women have emerged as elected national leaders in Asia, while they are yet to do so in the USA.  However, US social anthropologists have been eager to point out reasons other than simple emancipation for this phenomenon.  (One very unfortunate reason must be pointed out: women of the Asian economic elite have been relatively far more emancipated than their poorer Asian cousins, and of course, most women who run for public office are generally economically well off.)

But, having said all that, it most certainly seems to me that this hymn was in fact written by a woman, and I just feel that at least some key phrases of it must have originated with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and must have been made popular by word of mouth in the early community of Jesus’s disciples!

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