A Magnificat Christmas

The first Christmas was a Magnificat kind of Christmas.

It wasn’t a Dickens kind of Christmas, and it wasn’t a Midwestern kind of Christmas, and it wasn’t a tender Tennessee kind of Christmas.

It was a Mary kind of Magnificat kind of Christmas. Mary’s Magnificat Christmas still speaks across all these generations.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

A Magnificat Christmas is about God.

Mary was poor. Mary was oppressed. And Mary was yearning, with the rest of the poor in Galilee and Israel, for the Day God Would Come Back and Liberate Israel.

Mary’s kind of Christmas was a Christmas about God — about God returning to Act for Israel. To bring justice. To liberate. To establish peace.

So, if we simply read the Magnificat we will see that Mary’s understanding of Christmas, which she believed was now at work like Deep Magic in the Land of Israel through the birth of her son, was the kind of Christmas when God was at work.

Read these words and mark in your Bible the words that speak of what God has done, is doing, and will continue to do because of that first Magnificat Christmas.

Mariam said,

My self magnifies the Lord,
My spirit was overjoyed in God, my Deliverer,
Because he looked upon his impoverished slave.
For Look! From now all generations will bless me,
Because the Powerful One did greatnesses for me,
his name is devoted.

His compassion is for generations and generations who are awed at him.
He made a grip with his right arm, he scattered status-mongers in their hearts’ intelligence.
He took down the powerful ones from thrones and raised the status of the impoverished.
He filled in the hungering ones with goods and commissioned the rich ones away hollow.

He attached himself to his young servant, Yisraēl [Israel], to remember compassion,
just as he spoke to our fathers, to Abra’am and to his seed to the Era.

The God of Christmas, the God at work in the Magnificat kind of Christmas, is a Saving, liberating, mighty merciful God who is faithful to his promises. And this God sides with justice and peace for all — not just the rich, but for the poor too.

With you and me. Today.

That’s a Magnificat Christmas.

The kind where the poor get the present they’ve longed for from the God who brings it: justice.