Canticles
Reflections on the Lectionary for December 17th
In this season of distinctive songs and musical traditions, it’s worth noticing that the Gospel of Luke begins its story of Jesus with four songs—or, at least, four canticles, which is a genre of literature that lives somewhere between a speech, a poem, and a song. These four canticles are:
· The “Magnificat,” or the Song of Mary, found in 1:46-55, which is one of the lectionary texts for this week, so called because of its opening word in Latin;
· The canticle of Zechariah, sometimes called the “Benedictus” because of its opening word in Latin, in 1:68-79;
· The song of the angels in their appearance to the shepherds in 2:14;
· Simeon’s song upon meeting the infant Jesus in 2:29-32.
Luke is the only gospel to use canticles this way—as set-piece speeches that announce something important that the audience (the reader) needs to understand. This is actually a feature of Luke’s work all the way through, in one way or another. Both the Gospel of Luke and the same writer’s second volume, the Book of Acts, use speeches throughout as a means to let the reader in on key moments, and especially to frame those moments in terms of the history of Israel and of salvation. The canticles in Luke 1-2 are perhaps more lyrical than the rest, but all of Luke’s speeches have a certain flair about them—they tend to be dramatic and attention-getting. It’s almost like the other three gospels are plays, and Luke’s gospel is a musical, when the humdrum action of storytelling stops every once in a while, and a musical number breaks out.
It’s not accidental that the Magnificat of 1:46-55 is the first of these four numbers, because it’s a crucial link backward to the story of Israel and forward to the way the gospel’s author wants the reader to understand Jesus and his place in the world. The Magnificat is patterned on a similar song, or a prayer, to be precise, in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, in which Hannah responds to the birth of her son Samuel with a song of thanksgiving and appreciation of divine power. Hannah’s version is ostensibly a meditation on the way God provided her a child despite the threat of barrenness (itself a persistent and difficult theme in biblical texts).
But many scholars have pointed out that Hannah’s song, or Hannah’s prayer, isn’t actually very much about the experience of bearing a child after being barren. Instead, it reads as kind of a generic praising of God. To make it more complicated, the manuscript traditions are somewhat messy around this passage, with both the LXX (the Septuagint, one of the Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible) and one of the manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls preserving a longer version of the prayer, which has a strong textual relationship to the Greek text of Jeremiah 9:23-24. It’s complicated, in other words—and that is usually a signal that scribes were working with a fluid text that might have existed in a few different forms. So in the case of Hannah’s song, many scholars think that it was an older poetic or liturgical fragment (it reads a lot like a Psalm) that got quoted or cited here as an example of what Hannah might have been feeling in that moment of bearing a child—but that the text itself was not originally composed about that subject.
In the Gospel of Luke then, Mary in turn quotes or cites Hannah’s song, but she remakes it in certain ways. The thing that both have in common, and the thing that makes the older one a good model for the newer one that Mary utters, is the theme of God lifting up the lowly, and throwing down the powerful. Mary is pretty upfront about this: God, in her song, “has scattered the proud,” “has brought down the powerful from their thrones,” and has “sent the rich away empty.” Meanwhile God has also “lifted up the lowly” and “filled the hungry with good things.” It's striking, how thoroughly Mary’s song is a song about social justice, even verging on the idea of a social revolution. The Magnificat imagines a remaking of the social order, an inversion of it, with the old powerbrokers and kings and wealthy folks getting their comeuppance.
This theme of inverting the social order is a very consistent and important one in Luke’s gospel; just think, for example, of Jesus’ address to the synagogue only a couple of chapters later in 4:16-30, in which Jesus reads Isaiah’s words about “good news to the poor” and “release to the captives” and “recovery of sight to the blind” and the promise to “set free those who are oppressed,” and then scandalizes the crowd by declaring the scripture fulfilled because he was the one reading it. (The source of Jesus’ reading in that passage, Isaiah 61, is also in the lectionary for this week). Elsewhere, too, Luke goes to great lengths to get the reader to understand that Jesus’ life and ministry is a signal of what scholar Justo González has called the “great reversal,” the overturning of social strata and the privileging of the oppressed and downtrodden. It’s one of the major consistent themes of the gospel, and Mary is the one who announces it in chapter 1, with her riff on Hannah’s song.
If Luke’s gospel is working hard to tell Jesus’ story as one of a “great reversal,” beginning with Mary’s Magnificat, then we are presented with a complicated interpretive task. The problem is that there are plenty of proud who remain unscattered, lots of powerful who still sit on their thrones, and more than enough rich who have not been sent away empty. You can point to aspects of Jesus’ life and career where the reversals envisioned by Mary’s song actually happened, but on balance, a couple of millennia later, the proud, the powerful, and the rich are doing just fine. Jesus’ life did not bring about the kind of dramatic social change that the Magnificat envisioned. The lowly, by and large, have not been lifted up.
This is why I actually really value the cyclical nature of liturgical cycles: because the cycles of readings and seasons invites us to understand the biblical story not as a story about the past but as a story about our present. Telling the same stories again and again reminds us that they are about us, not about the past, and that their meanings are created in the present any time someone reads them and interprets them. Every year we read these Advent texts—the ones from the prophets, and from the gospels, about the expectations of redemption and a remaking of the world—and we are invited to imagine the world we live in, in conversation with the texts. We don’t tell this story once, as a tale about things that happened two thousand years in the past, but instead we tell this story over and over, as an intervention into the things that are happening today. This is actually precisely what Mary herself is doing; she’s reinterpreting Hannah’s song for her own moment, and making it mean something new for her unique circumstances. The Magnificat fails if it is a set of predictions for what would happen in Mary’s future (but our past); the things envisioned in the song have not come to pass. It even fails as a description of Mary’s own past. But the Magnificat succeeds as a charter for ourselves, as a plan for how to live in a world that’s still full of injustice, and as a promise for what a divine remaking of the world might look like. The Magnificat is written in the past tense, as a record of what God has done, but as we encounter it again and again, year after year, we begin to understand it as a way of imagining what still might be possible.