December 20, 2007
Magnificatharsis
Advent 4A Mt 1.18-25
“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way” (Mt 1.18).
It was when Gabriel told Mary about the fix she was about to be in that the venerable old trumpet player’s unswerving loyalty to God was faced with a major challenge and test. StoryTeller Frederick Buechner imagines the scene this way:
“She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.
“He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said.
“As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl” (Peculiar Treasures, Harper & Row, 1979, p 39).
Gospeler Matthew’s accounting is not quite so colorful. He starts with a kind of biblical once-upon-a-time plainly and almost with resignation when he says, “Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way.”
And then he tells the story through the medium of Joseph’s dream and about how it took the power and authority of Joseph’s angel to turn him away from abandoning his young betrothed altogether as he had every traditional right to do. But for us, the Annunciation is more than “the medium is the message,” no matter how profound. For the medium is also the answer.
First, there’s Mary’s answer. Her Yes, and her subsequent paean that we call her Magnificat (Lk 1.46-55; BCP 91f). And then, there’s our answer. These antiphons combine to model for us what God expects from all his children and his church as they gather, now and in every generation past and future. God wants a Yes from us in whatever way we can say Yes with the most integrity. And our souls, as well, are called to a Magnificat in however and whatever way we can proclaim the greatness of the Lord. It is ours, as well, again in our way, to magnify the Lord, to rejoice in God. It is our calling to show God’s strength. It is our ministry to scatter the proud in their very heart of hearts. It is our responsibility and, indeed, privilege to put down the mighty from their thrones and exalt those of low degree, to fill the hungry, and to empty the rich.
In a very real way, this, our Magnificat, is what we call our Baptismal Covenant. When we take up that vocational commission to give birth to this Christmas Jesus in our way, we’re asked to respond ever so much as did Mary in her way. “Yes. Let it be to me according to your word.”
We enter now into a season marked by great expectations. These hopes are of the ways in which this season’s joys are informed, given shape and expression — and become flesh. The pulse of Christmas that courses through us may be in this entire coming year as near as we can ever an approach to our own Christ-in-us-and-others character that we confess and seek in the Baptismal Covenant.
We know the pattern, we know the evidence. It’s the same evidence that Jesus sent to an emprisoned John Baptist — the “blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense in me” (Mt 11.5f). And we know the ways this brokeness in our society can be mended, can take shape, can become a reality.
Once again, we’ve got the Twelve Days, the partridge and all the rest, the better part of a fortnight to load and lock the arsenal of grace that we’ll proclaim in Epiphany.
Once again, the Yes.
Once again, the Virgin’s cry, that magnificatharsis for the church.
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