All the Songs – Luke 1:39-55

A text – Luke 1:39-55

³⁹ In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰ where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴² and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³ And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴ For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

⁴⁶ And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷ and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
⁴⁸ for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,
⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name;
⁵⁰ indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
⁵⁴ He has come to the aid of his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

A reflection:

If you pay attention to the scriptures better than I, you will already know this. I didn’t, though looking back, I should have picked up on it before today. The Gospel of Luke makes a very big deal about Jesus’s birth, and it is FULL of singing. John the Baptist’s father Zechariah sings a psalm of praise, Mary sings her “Magnificat,” the angels sing to the Lord, overheard by shepherds on the hillside, and Simeon sings in the Temple when Jesus’s parents bring him in for his dedication.

Why? What does a song do that regular spoken words do not do? What does poetry do that ordinary human speech does not do? It captures something in art, and art that is repeatable down the generations.

When I was in high school and college, I wrote a lot of songs. Why did I do that, when there was plenty of great music around in the 60s and 70s, right? There was a song for every occasion and feeling and experience. I suppose I was trying to find the exact words, along with the exact melody, that could capture something very specific happening at a very particular moment. Some of those songs I still sing today.

Those who sing in Luke’s Gospel are capturing a real, specific event happening at a particular moment in the long timeline of human history. All of the singers are praising God, first, for being so faithful to human beings across the span of history. All of the singers are grateful to be alive to see the work of God happening right in front of their eyes at that moment. All of the singers recognize what is happening as something big or even unheard of before – God, Creator and Ruler of the universe, coming directly into the human race and living upon Earth as a baby, then a boy, then a man. This amazing act of God is worth a song that can live on for thousands of years and even be sung by us. We can sing along: “My spirit rejoices in God my savior!”

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for the songs of the Gospel of Luke. Thank you for Mary’s song that praises you for favoring the poor and forgotten ones. You came to live as a human being, you know our lives and our joys and our sorrows. Thank you for living as one of us.  Amen.