M ARY’S SONG proclaims, “The mighty one has done great things for me.”
God, the mighty one, does great things for us. One great thing is to give us with a new picture of God and a new partnership with others.
Jesus is God made visible. That means when we see Jesus we see God. They are one. Jesus comes to show us what God is really like. Mary’s Song introduces us, maybe I should say “reintroduces” us, to our God — champion of the poor, on the side of the down-and-out, guardian of the hungry. Walking with those longing for a better life.
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IN MY LIFETIME, there have been many protest songs. A large number of those in the 1960s and ’70s. “We Shall Overcome” was sung in the fields and then brought to recordings by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. And, of course, it became an anthem of the civil rights movement.
There was my favorite, “War” (“What is it good for? Absolutely nothing)” sung by Edwin Starr. As teenagers, we’d belt it out at the Dairy Delight, singing along with the jukebox. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ”
Who can forget Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young memorializing the Kent State shootings in the song “Ohio.”
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IN THAT SAME VEIN but long before records and jukebox came the “Song of Mary.” A radical protest song. It’s the kind of song that enslaved Israelites might have sung in Egypt. The kind of song on the lips of the exiled in Babylon. The kind of song that has been sung by countless people of faith through the ages in defiance of empires, slavers, terrorists, invaders, and the like.
Mary’s Song is joyful for the lowly, humble and humiliated — the least and the last. It is a reintroduction for us of God. The birth of Mary’s son ushers in justice that makes it possible for all people to thrive, for all people to reach their God-given potential, for all people to experience the joy and the vibrancy that God intends for us all. Hear, feel, savor Mary’s cry of resistance:
[The Lord] has scattered the proud.
[The Lord] brought down the powerful,
[The Lord] lifted up the lowly;
[The Lord] filled the hungry with good things,
[The Lord] sent the rich away empty.
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THROUGHOUT THE AGES, God’s people have faced oppression. And in the face of that oppression, God’s people sang songs of resistance. But God’s people have also been oppressors. We have enslaved others — and each other. We have stolen from, oppressed, and killed others — and each other. And when we have done so, the oppressed, the enslaved, the persecuted have sung God’s songs of resistance against us.
Most of us fall into the category of the “full” and the “rich” who will be sent away hungry and empty-handed. What that means is that the only way we can sing Mary’s Song with joy and hope is for us to work at lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and restoring the disenfranchised. That was what Jesus came to do — to begin God’s work of making all things new, of setting right the wrongs and lifting the burdens we all carry.
Christmas gives us a renewed understanding of God. This holy event also offers a new way of understanding other people — a new respect for other people. Mary’s Song reminds us people are more important than things; people are not pawns to be used, but persons to be loved. Also, we learn the best way to love God is to love God’s children.
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IN HARPER LEE’S great Southern novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, there is the character named Boo Radley. Boo is a reclusive neighbor to Atticus Finch and the children, Jem and Scout. The adults don’t speak much of Boo Radley. The children are fascinated by the mystery of the man they never see. Because they don’t know him; because he is different; because he is unknown and unseen, to them he is some kind of monster.
Jem gives a reasonable description of Boo:
“Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were blood-stained — if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.”
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ISN’T THAT THE WAY we often perceive others whom we don’t know? Mysterious groups of people we’ve only heard about but have never met? Monsters. Rapists. Thugs. Diseased. Invaders.
Toward the end of the book, after Boo Radley saves the children, Scout meets Boo and learns his name — Arthur. She sees him for the first time. She knows his name and she begins to know him. What she discovers is that he’s not at all like the image portrayed.
As she walks Boo home that night, holding his hand, she realizes for the first time they are neighbors and she has failed her part of that relationship.
“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls…. But neighbors give in return…. We had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
After walking Boo home, Scout turns to leave. She sees her familiar neighborhood from a new perspective — Boo’s perspective. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
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THE BOOK ENDS with a sleepy Scout retelling a story to Atticus to prove she had not been asleep while he was reading.
“An’ they chased him ’n’ never could catch him ’cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things…. Atticus, he was real nice....”
Atticus responds:
“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
Thanks be to God.
