About the Magnificat - A talk given by Sr Tamsin Mary for a 'Teams of Our Lady' event.

I thought for the purposes of this retreat we should look at the Magnificat, since it is the prayer that all Teams members are asked to say every day, and which is said every day in religious houses. As with many things like this it is easy simply to glide over it in a state of tired acquiescence, or to think of it simply as ‘that prayer about Mary’ without further consideration, but there are reasons why the Holy Spirit inspired Mary to pray this prayer, St Luke to record it and St Benedict and others like him to choose it as one of the daily texts of Christian prayer, and one of those is that it is a prayer of absolutely universal human significance, to the extent that I think you could probably pray it – or at least part of it – even if you were not a Christian at all.

On Friday we read the Old Testament background to the Magnificat. In fact this was a very partial and incomplete account of the matter, since seen rightly the Magnificat is a summary of everything in the Old Testament and the New. However as there is not world enough and time to explore how every scripture text relates to it, today’s talk is more specifically about how this prayer belongs to every Christian – almost one might say to every pray-er, since it lies at the heart of having a right relationship with God.

So let’s look at it in detail: Firstly the prayer is a response in prayer to a greeting in prayer. Elizabeth has just felt the child John leap for joy in her womb at the presence of his living Lord. The foetus John the Baptist greets the embryonic Christ! Elizabeth has said

‘“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”

Secondly, and very importantly, the Magnificat is not a prayer ‘about’ Mary. Rather it is a prayer by her, a response in faith to the fact that she has just become the mother of the incarnate Word of God. She prays : “My soul magnifies the Lord,How does Mary’s soul magnify the Lord? Quite literally, her life makes the tiny Jesus grow within her womb; but this is only a fraction of the meaning. When you magnify an object, you do not literally make it bigger, but you make it so that it can be seen. God is infinite, so He cannot be ‘magnified in any literal sense, but He can be brought near and shown. Mary brings Him close to us through her 'fiat'.

But how can we apply this to ourselves? Each of us has the task of showing God to those about us - to our children, to our spouses, in our communities, in our places of work, we can act as magnifying lenses, and if we are sufficiently transparent we can show forth the glory and the grace of God so that seeing our good works people can give the glory to God – as it were see Him more clearly through us.

The prayer continues:‘ and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour’Mary makes a difference between soul and spirit; the highest part of our souls, the capacity of rational and loving attention and decision – this is our spirit, and it is with this part that, in common with the mother of Jesus we can rejoice in our saviour. Notice that Mary calls Him ’Saviour’. It is Catholic teaching that all grace – even the super-abundant grace that we ascribe to Mary – comes through Christ. Notice too that the first specifically Christian prayer meeting is suffused with joy. If we focus on God there is an undercurrent of joy that flows through and under all the toils and pains and sorrows of everyday living. This was not the prayer of someone in a a safe comfortable situation – Mary had not even told Joseph – and probably not even her parents – that she was carrying the Child. She knew the possibility of danger and the threat of death lay ahead of her, and yet she prays with super-abundant joy. Joy is not a sweet feeling, but a recognition of God’s loving action in the world, no matter how bad things may look. About this text St Ambrose writes, applying this to ourselves: ‘let every one have the spirit of Mary, so that he may rejoice in the Lord. If according to the flesh there is one mother of Christ, yet, according to faith, Christ is the fruit of all. For every soul receives the word of God if only he be unspotted and free from sin, and preserves it with unsullied purity.’ (Catena Aurea )‘

'For he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaid’Mary speaks out of a culture in which there are slave-girls who watch their mistresses for the slightest movement. In one of the psalms it says ‘Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he have mercy upon us.’ Mary sees herself as completely insignificant – in relation to God she has the position of a chattel – and yet God has seen her, looked even at her. In our own lives we should remember to hold on to this two-fold tension – on the one hand it is true that we are created things made of dust, or as Our Lord said to St Catherine of Siena ‘I am He who is – you are she who is not.’ On the other hand, and gloriously, God has seen us and loved us. He saw us in the depths of His creative Being, and loved us into being, and loved us into human life, and loved us into the possibility of having Christ at the centre of our souls and bringing Him forth to the world.

‘For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;’This prophecy has already begun to be fulfilled – Mary has been called ‘full of grace’ by the angel Gabriel, and ‘Blessed’ by Elizabeth. But notice both that Mary places the emphasis in the right place, as later in the same Gospel, the Gospel of Luke, we see Our Lord making the same distinction: Mary does not say ‘All generations will call me Blessed because I will have carried the Saviour in my womb for nine months and will have given him the breast to feed on.’

No, she says: ‘for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’ Our Lord corrects the woman from the crowd who cries out ‘, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” by sying: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” This is not a repudiation of Mary’s blessedness in either case – but it is giving it the right cause. Mary is blessed because she has had great things done for her, because she has hear the Word of God and kept it in her heart. Can we say this part of the prayer in our own behalf? Yes we can, in this way: whenever we are given a grace by God, whenever we do some good thing for love, the whole company of heaven, every generation of every age knows about it and calls us Blessed. No good thought, no kind action is without this crowd of witnesses, if we could but hear them, praising god because of the good He does in through and for us.

'And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.' Mary sees the action of God in sending the Messiah as mercy, not only for herself, but for all generations for those who fear God. Here we should focus on two concepts which have been forgotten or trivialised in modern thinking: Mercy and the fear of the Lord. Mercy implies that God give beyond what He might be imagined to owe in justice – in fact in justice He owes us nothing. The other implication of mercy is that on the contrary, we owe to God more than we can pay. We are the sort of criminals who turn up in court so often the judge knows them by name before he is introduced. We promise again and again that this time it will be different, and each time we receive mercy – but that mercy comes at a price and the price is the blood of Christ. All that is asked is that we acknowledge the debt. And God, in Christ, like a mother I once saw in a court, stands bail for us over and over again.

That brings us to the second important concept: Fear of the Lord. This is not the servile fear that decides to behave well because of the possibility of punishment. Fear of punishment may be a type of common sense, but it is not a virtue that we can take with us to heaven, or indeed one that would go very far in getting us there! The type of ‘fear’ in question is a very different thing – the awe that made Moses take off his shoes at the sight of the burning bush, that made Isaiah cry out ‘“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” that made Peter say in dismay ‘“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

If we recognise that response – I am unworthy of the holiness of God, we should take couage and understand that He has shown mercy.

'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 thrones,and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things,and the rich he has sent empty away.'

These next three stanzas hang together with the theme of God re-ordering the world, raising up the humble and feeding the hungry while scattering the proud, putting down the mighty from their thrones, and sending the rich away empty. These are things, Mary says, which God ‘has’ done. Yet what has happened so far? A tiny invisible scrap of humanity has entered the sanctuary of her womb. That is it. How extraordinary a faith she is shown as having, in seeing this tiny being as having done all these astonishing things – that from the moment Christ enters the world, the battle is already won!

There are various things we can take to ourselves from this part of the prayer; we can as it were pray it from the inside, or hear it addressed to us as a message for repentance from the outside. If we are feeling embattled – the tide of difficulty and wickedness in the world seeming to be about to overwhelm us, we should remember this part of the prayer – God has already won the victory, and we can see him and receive him at Mass in the Blessed Sacrament. I remember once a conversation with an evangelical who said that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary, because there was a huge statue of Mary in the Church he went into. I tried to explain to him that for Catholics the most important thing in the Church was really quite tiny; I should have remembered to say that there was a time in history when the most important place in the universe was smaller then a five pence piece!

But we also need to take a health warning from this part of the prayer: It is important to be as it were on the right side of this equation. It is no good approaching God in pride, in riches and in power – We have to draw near as little children, in humility of heart. All of us, vis a vis God are poor blind, crippled, naked. We cannot even approach Him if we do not understand this. As it says in an ancient commentary:

‘They also who desire eternal life with their whole soul, as it were hungering after it, shall be filled when Christ shall appear in glory; but they who rejoice in earthly things, shall at the end be sent away emptied of all happiness.’ Catena Aurea

'He has helped his servant Israel,in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever’

The last two stanzas on the surface return from the generality of mankind to the particular promises made to Israel, to Abraham and his children for ever. Again the striking use is made of the past tense – all of this has been achieved by the mere presence of God incarnate among His people as an unborn child. One might feel that this at least was personal to Mary, or to the Jewish people, but to think this would be to forget the liturgical prayers that call us the New Israel, and Abraham our Father in faith. God’s promise to Israel according to the flesh must stand forever, because if He could ever break His promises how should we trust Him? But now we too are partakers in that promise by spiritual adoption into the mystical body of Christ. God has made promises to us too, if only we are prepared to lay hold on them.

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