The Magnificat, Mary’s Song of Praise
The Gospel reading, we are given for the fourth Sunday in Advent is Luke 1:39-55, includes the Magnificat, Mary’s Song of Praise. Mary’s song gives voice to the subversiveness of the incarnation that she embodies. Mary opens her song in amazement “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant” while the rest of her song proclaims the effects of the “up-side down” world that God has initiated. In the Middle Ages Mary's Song inspired the Feast of Fools celebrated after Christmas usually around New year. This feast was a literal acting out of the Magnificat as a rather strange way of witnessing to God’s kingdom that inverts human power structures and raises up the oppressed to places of honour.
For example in 1685, apparently, the Franciscan church of Antibes lay brothers and servants "put on the vestments inside out, held the books upside down, ....wore spectacles with rounds of orange peel instead of glasses, ... blew the ashes from the censers on each other's face and hands, and instead of the proper liturgy chanted confused and inarticulate gibberish." Masking as animals, wafting foul-smelling incense, and electing burlesque bishops, popes, and patriarchs was used to mock conventional human pretensions. All this to celebrate the political, social and ecclesial subversiveness of Jesus Christ. May we always live our lives embracing and celebrating the radical subversive invertedness of the Kingdom of God through Jesus Christ.
God Bless you
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