“Remembering Forward”
4th Sunday of Advent
Luke 1:39-45
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The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, houses some of the world’s most famous art – works by Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt. Rooms and halls full of pieces by the Masters, much of it devoted to religious themes. Mary is a favorite subject. In room after room, there she is. Putting down her Bible while she receives the startling news from the angel Gabriel. Kneeling at the manger with her husband Joseph, gazing at her new baby. Presenting the baby in the temple. Many paintings simply depict her with her child, in a sort of portrait form. Some show her much later in life, weeping at the foot of the cross. In all of it, Mary is defined by those in the picture with her: the angel, Jesus the baby, Jesus the dying Savior. Her role seems to be to respond, to accept whatever life lays on her – an unsought pregnancy, the birth of a baby, the death of a child.
There is one scene, though, that is quite unlike the others. Tucked away on the third floor of the Uffizi, in the 25th room of that floor, stands an altarpiece painted by Mariotto Albertinelli in 1503. It is considered to be his masterpiece. In the center of the painting, framed by a carved stone arch, stands a pair of women. On the left is the younger woman, draped in blue, looking as if she has just stepped into the frame, her left hand at her throat, her right hand extended in greeting, her head bent forward. On the right, the older woman leans close toward the younger, her right hand holds that of the girl, her left hand reaches, grasping the girl’s shoulder. The older woman, wearing a white head covering and draped in gold, gives the impression of being stooped, but it is actually that she is leaning so far forward towards the girl that her whole body has curved in towards this greeting. She gazes up into the girl’s face. Her nose is only about an inch from the younger woman’s. The girl’s face is soft and lit with sun. The older woman’s face is in shadow; there is tenderness in her eyes, but something like concern, too. It is among the most intimate paintings I have ever seen.
If you didn’t know who they were, you wouldn’t necessarily realize that they are pregnant. Both of their bellies are covered in shadow and cloth. There seems to be a lot of movement in the painting, and there is some urgency in their meeting. Of course the painting is called “Visitation,” and its subjects are the young Mary and her older cousin Elizabeth.
Among all the paintings in the Uffizi of nativity and crucifixion, annunciation and angels, wars and self-portraits and Roman goddesses, this painting, tucked away as it seems, stands out. It is just two women, embracing, talking. And yet it pulses with expectation, immediacy, import. And something like hope.
Unlike the many other depictions of Mary as passive and acquiescent, here we see a young woman who takes action of her own. Having said her “Yes!” to the angel who brings the news that she will have a child, she now races to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is also impossibly pregnant. Elizabeth’s baby leaps in her womb at the sound of Mary’s voice, and Elizabeth recognizes what God has done. The scene of their visitation is charming, and might, because of that, seem irrelevant. Just a couple of women swapping pregnancy stories. Nothing like what has come before it – angels appearing and announcing big news – nothing like what will come after it – the child of God being born in a stable and angels announcing that news as well. There are no angels and no annunciations here. This is just two women, talking. That Luke takes the time to tell of this encounter means that it is not an unnecessary aside, not just an interruption to the forward movement of the story, but that it is crucial to the telling. In fact, this story reminds us that interruption is part of the point of what God is doing.
These two women are pregnant with impossibility. Elizabeth, like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Hannah before her, is barren. And like Sarah, she is past the age of even hoping she still might bear children. But like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Hannah before her, she will have a child. She is a reminder of the long story of God’s faithfulness, and she bears witness to the fact that the God who is acting in her life is the same God who has always acted to bring life out of barren places. Her pregnancy could be seen as yet another chapter in the ongoing story of God’s provision.
Mary’s impossibility, though, is a brand new thing. She is not old, but quite young. She is not barren, she is a virgin. She is not yet married, she is on her own. What she represents is not some sort of continuity with God’s blessings in the past, but a radical discontinuity with every expectation. In her, God has interrupted the story of the world. God has planted God’s own self right in the middle of it.
The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps for joy at the sound of Mary’s voice, and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. The cousins are then transformed from expectant mothers into prophets heralding a new age, as Elizabeth pronounces a series of oracles, declaring Mary as blessed, disclosing Mary’s identity as the mother of the Lord, explaining the meaning of the baby leaping in her own womb, and pronouncing a beatitude on Mary for believing that God will fulfill God’s promises. The word “prophecy” doesn’t mean telling the future, it means telling forth the truth. Elizabeth the prophet is the first one to tell the truth about who Mary really is and who is in her womb.
Mary opens her mouth to respond, and what comes out is a song as fierce as any proclamation any fiery prophet ever made. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” She is singing a new version of an old song – the song of Hannah in thanksgiving for her son Samuel, a song that praises the “power and willingness of Yahweh to intrude, intervene, and invert.”[i] Mary would have known this song from the Torah. Now she sings a new version in her own words, from her own experience of God’s powerful work in her and through her.
“Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” Her song, like Hannah’s, begins with what God has done for her. But then she kicks the tune up a notch, moving from what God has done for her to what God is doing and is going to do for all the world. She turns from seemingly simple praise to overtly radical prophecy, and what comes out of her mouth is ferocious and dangerous: “God’s mercy is for those who fear him…. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
Notice how she is not singing in the future tense? The way Mary sings it, God has already overthrown the powerful and lifted up the lowly. God has already righted what is wrong in the world. This is a song of defiance, declaring the inversion of social, political, and economic reality. And it is a song of audacity – she is singing that this redemption has already been accomplished – and it has started first in her.
How can she sing this way? Surely she, as a poor, pregnant teenage girl, Jewish in a land occupied by Rome, female in a world run by men, pregnant under questionable circumstances – surely she knows as well as anybody, that the world has not yet been set right. She is at the bottom of the world’s order. The only thing in the world that has changed is that she has said yes to God’s radical plan. Of course, that is all it took.
It is her embrace of God’s wild plot that has so transformed her that she is able to sing in the past tense instead of the future. God’s power to change the world has taken root in her own being, it is taking flesh and form even now in the inmost part of herself. Because of her transformation, she can sing as if the whole world has already been transformed – she is that certain of God’s power and God’s intention. What God has done in her, God will do in the whole world. She is remembering forward. She speaks of what shall be as if it has already been, because she knows it will be. The baby in her belly is all the proof she needs.
I take comfort in the fact that she doesn’t say all of this, but sings it. There are things I want to believe are true that I struggle with, but I can sing them. And when I sing them, something in me knows. Something in me trusts, and hopes, and believes. It is as if there is some place in us that is deeper than words and rationality, a place that can accept the most astonishing truth when it descends to our core on the notes of a song. [I like to think of that place in us as the place of purest hope – where our own deepest yearnings and God’s yearning for our world are united.] It is good that we sing a lot at Christmastime.
Even now, the world does not look like the words of her song. It has not yet been set right. Even all these years after her baby was born, there is still so much hatred, violence, corruption, destruction, and pain in our world. In the face of all of this, can we keep remembering forward with Mary? Can we choose to hope? Can we consent to give birth again to God in our own lives and in our own world?
Our lives are the songs that make our answer. We lift our notes one by one, shaky as they may be; we stake our lives on the truth that God has redeemed, God does redeem, and God will fully redeem, even when so much of our world and our own lives looks unredeemed. Mary sings with us. She sings with and through the poor, the hungry, the powerless, the grieving, the frightened. She sings with anyone who dares to hope. She sings with anyone who dares to say yes to whatever ways God enters their world. She sings with anyone who consents to embody God’s subversive plan. And she sings it for her baby boy, the One whose whole life became the words and the tune and the meaning of that song.
If you listen very closely, with the ears of your heart, you will hear another voice too, singing back. It will start very small, but it will grow if we listen and if we give our lives to singing along. It is the voice above and beneath all others. It is the voice that yearns to be sung through us and from deep within us. One day its joy will ring out loud and clear over the whole world. But for now, it is still small. Listen! Can you hear it? Just the tiniest notes now, coming from the east. I think I almost hear it. It sounds like the coo of a little baby, lying in a manger.
[i] Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Intepretation; Louisville; John Knox, 1990), 21.