A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Mary said, this is the magnificent. It follows Mary's entrance to visit her cousin Elizabeth, whom the angel said was with child. And Mary said, upon hearing Elizabeth's words, my soul magnifies the lord and my spirit rejoices in god, my savior. For he has regarded the lowest state of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth, 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 on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their throes and exalted those of low degree.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich, he has set away empty. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy As he spoke to our fathers to Abraham and to his posterity forever. And Mary remained with Elizabeth about three months and then returned to her own home. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
For the last few days, I have been remarking about this matter of the credibility of the infancy narratives. Now here we have a prime example. Here's the scene. Mary receives a message from an angel, whatever that name, whatever that actually was, that she is to become the mother of God and that the father of the child would be the holy spirit. And then without Mary without Mary questioning the credibility of the the angel, The angel says, your cousin Elizabeth, who is an old lady and who has been barren all her life, she is now with child and in a certain month of her pregnancy.
So Mary, who's up in Galilee, she visits her cousin Elizabeth who's down in Judea or up in Judea I should say. No mean walk. And then when Mary enters the house of Elizabeth, Elizabeth said the baby, that is John the Baptist, leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth says, who am I that the mother of my lord should come into my house? And then Mary replies with a magnificent.
Now you see, here's the thing. Let's look at it as just a piece of literature. Here's a young woman from up in the Glacier area. Here she's visiting her cousin Elizabeth and spontaneously she utters this magnificat. And if you take the time, of course, as the scripture scholars have done to identify all of these phrases, you will find a number of the statements made in the magnificat in the Old Testament, and this has all been annotated.
So now the question is, did Mary say this or didn't she at the time of her visit to Elizabeth? And you know what I think? I don't know. Secondly, I don't care. Thirdly, I know something about the way they wrote history in those days.
Fourthly, I have read Caesar's Gallic Wars. I've read Herodotus. I've read Xenophon's Anabasis. I know how they wrote history. I know how they put speeches on the lips of their generals.
They didn't have a bunch of tape recorders running around. They didn't have stenographers. They didn't have prepared speeches. And so the writers on on the occasion demanding it would put appropriate speeches on the lips of their protagonists. I know that.
And so when I come to read this, I don't forget what I know. Now did Mary utter these words, acts exactly as we have them here, complete as they are here? Could she have done it? And the answer is, of course. There's nothing a priori impossible about it.
Because if you say it it couldn't happen and therefore it didn't, the burden of proof rests on you to tell me that it couldn't happen. So possibly, could it have been just as we have it here in Saint Luke? And the answer is yes. On the other hand, might it not have been exactly as we have it here in Saint Luke? The answer is yes.
And to both of these things, I say, tell difference. What difference does it make to me? I mean, in the substance of the sea. If you tell me, well, Mary didn't say this, this is what the writer put in as an appropriate speech for Mary to make on the occasion. Well, that doesn't shock me at all.
This was the way they did things in those days. As I say, if you've read some Greek history, I mean, written by the Greeks or Roman history written by the Romans, you'll know precisely what I mean. And it didn't stop with that either. And so the main thing I'm interested in here is this. Did Mary go to see her cousin Elizabeth and did she find her pregnant?
That's what I wanna know because there's the nub of the question. I want the truth of this. In other words, I could care less really about who salutes whom and what they say to each other. What I wanna know is when that angel said, look, Mary, you notice, Mary did not question the angel. I want to stress that.
Whatever this person or whatever it was that spoke to Mary, Mary didn't say, look. She wasn't like Zacharias. Mary didn't say, look. How am I why should I believe you? What Mary did say was, how can this happen?
This is impossible for me to be cut to be a mother without having a father or some man involved. And she gets the reply, look. The child born of you will be of the holy spirit. And your cousin Elizabeth, an old woman barren all her life, this was public knowledge and a great affront in those days. She is pregnant and in her certain month.
Now I wanna know, did is that true? So Mary packs her her few belongings and hikes down to see her cousin Elizabeth because she knew she needed some help. And does does she or does she not find Elizabeth pregnant? That's what I want to know. And so the substance of this is definitely she does Because the first thing we're told is Elizabeth says, when you entered the baby in my womb, left with joy.
Now I don't know how she knew that it was with joy. Maybe we just had some colic. I don't know. But the point is we know she was pregnant. Therefore that message to the angel had something going.
That's what I wanna know in 1980, December 22. Now there's another little thing here. This is a matter of language, but do you notice in the Latin, it's magnificat. My soul rejoices. Notice, the whole thrust of it is on rejoicing, the same way with the Greek word.
Now we can't reproduce that in English because in Latin and Greek, you get the third person or us or the first person, we don't need to or with any of the persons, in those languages, we don't need to use the pronouns. In Latin, if I say, that means I love. But you see, notice, with the Latin word or the or the Greek word, notice this, the personal pronoun doesn't even appear. The emphasis is on the action of the verb. You'll say this is just linguistics.
There is more to that than linguistics. When you when we come to the English and you say, the first word is what? My soul magnifies the lord. The whole emphasis is on the pronoun, but that's not the way it is in the original. The emphasis is on the verb, and the pronoun doesn't even appear explicitly.
Now to me, there's meaning here. I know this is far fetched, but it's the whole difference between that ancient thinking and our thinking. Today, it's the self. It's the ego. I praise the lord.
I hope he enjoys and I hope he isn't too proud of this fact that I got around to praising him. You see the emphasis on that personal pronoun? Whereas when you go back to the Latin and the Greek, the pronoun doesn't even appear. And the and the whole emphasis is on the verb, the action. In other words, Mary loses herself in what she what has happened to her passive voice.
It had she is on the receiving end. You see the difference? And that's the thrust of Mary's magnificat. It isn't that she's so great. Not at all.
It's what has happened to her that is so great. And that's how that nonnificat builds up. Of course, some of these texts, you can find them in the Old Testament. Why not? It's easily possible that Mary knew enough of the Old Testament to use it.
It's easily possible that that Luke put them in on his own accord, and so what? They express a real sentiment, and the whole thrust of it is God and what God has done to me. And I wanna add this finally. This is the thrust of Saint Augustine's Confessions. It's a horrible title in English because it doesn't mean English Confessions.
What Augustine does in that book, the first autobiography that we have, that we know of, what does he do? He lays out his life. Why? To thump his chest? Not at all.
He's saying, look, here is my life and as messy or as beautiful as it was, it praises God. Praises God. You see the difference in emphasis. We have become so man centered, human being centered that God has put out on the periphery someplace. Whereas the ancients and those who aren't so ancient put God first and thought of him first.
And as as we head in now to this Christmas season, we're there, you know, you can't miss it. But we can miss the real meaning of Christmas. Don't forget that. And the real meaning is what God has done for us, not what I do for God. And when I think of what God has done for us, that brings me with true humility and with gratitude to the crib where we bow down and worship before the baby of Mary's womb whose father is god.
Name of the father, son, holy spirit. Amen.