The Church and the Magnificat

Reading Luke-Acts as one of the privileged is an excruciatingly painful task. It cuts to the self-centered, self-absorbed heart like Aslan’s claw cut into Eustace’s greedy, scaly, dragon-skin in Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Luke’s theology of the great reversal is nothing less than a stinging critique of the modern evangelical individualistic, pietistic focus of Christianity. Very early in the narrative, it becomes perfectly clear that Luke’s vision of how the Kingdom of God has broken into the world through the visitation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and what salvation looks like in that kingdom is very different from the most common understanding of salvation.

Yesterday I was reading a wonderful commentary piece on the Magnificat and the role of Mary as the ideal believer and a social paradigm for the church in Luke’s narrative. I have now reread it three times, continually stunned by the power and beauty of Talbert’s call to the church to be a subversive community that “embodies God’s will,” a “creative minority” that, “through the way its members deal with one another, demonstrates to the world what social relations directed by God are.

I hope this section of Talbert’s work will send you back to the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah to hear Mary sing her song anew.

Talbert, Reading Luke, 27-28:

Stanza one of Mary’s song speaks of God’s might act for one woman only: the emphasis is on the gracious initiative of God…. Stanza two of the Magnificat expands the horizon to speak of God’s social revolution through eschatological reversal. In both stanzas God’s surprising concern for ht lowly is revealed. God’s regard for one humble woman becomes the sign of his eschatological act for the world. In one small event the greater event lies hidden (Tannehill 1974). In Luke’s understanding God’s social revolution, like the conception of Jesus, is not the perfection of the human by human striving but the result of the divine breaking into history. The reference is eschatological and refers to the Last Day.

The third evangelist here foreshadows his views about the relation between Christ and human culture. On the one hand, it is certainly not Luke’s view that there is an identity between God’s will for human life and cultural realities. Stanza two of Mary’s song proclaims God will ultimately overturn the values and structures of this world’s culture. For this evangelist Christ cannot be identified with culture. On the other hand, Luke is no advocate of social action to transform culture, in the sense that we know such action today. Jesus did not go to the top (to Caesar or Pilate) to get things changed; nor did he go to the left (to the Zealots). He went instead to the poor and sinners, offering forgiveness and deliverance and calling them into a community whose life was to embody God’s will. Only God, from Luke’s perspective, is able to achieve a just society in the Last Day. In the meantime the evangelist presents Jesus and his church not as having a social ethic for society at large but as trying to have one in their own life together. In the Lukan mind the first duty of the church is to be the church, to be a community that, through the way its members deal with one another, demonstrates to the world what social relations directed by God are. So understood, Jesus and the disciples fulfill their social responsibility not by being one more power block among others but by being an example, a creative minority, a witness to God’s mercy. “The church therefore does not fulfill her social responsibility by attaching directly the social structures of society, but by being itself it indirectly has a tremendous significance for the ethical form of society” (Hauerwas 1974, 212)…. In Luke-Acts Jesus and his church do not attempt to change society at large by attaching it directly by whatever means—violent or nonviolent—but by subverting its values as they live communally our of God’s will before the world (Hauerwas 1977, 262). The ultimate transformation of society’s structures generally awaits the kingdom of God at the eschaton.

Mary’s song reflects her confidence in this ultimately victory of God and the reversal of human values…. For Luke it is the same God who acts redemptively for an individual and for society at large. It is the same God who acted in the past, who acts in the present, and who will act in the future. If it is the same God, then his acting partakes of the same character: gracious intervention to create anew.