This year for devotions, writers at my church were given a word and a set of scriptures, and this is what we used to base our devotion for Advent on. My word was “welcome,” and I chose Luke 1: 46-47. “And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
A friend of mine recently asked me if I ever wondered if Mary had post-partum depression.
“Or did God give her a pass on that?”
I laughed and responded that I don’t think God gave Mary a pass on anything. She faced all of it: a crazy Gabriel busting in on her and delivering news that seemed scientifically impossible and not at all romantic, giving birth in a barn, her teenaged son ditching her to talk with the church folk and leaving Mary in a panic, and of course, I’m assuming the slow and terrifying realization that the way in which her son would save the world would be to be brutally beaten and die.
Here she is in Luke though, proclaiming that her soul magnifies the Lord, and I am thinking now of my 5th grade science teacher who showed us how to carefully peel the skin of an onion and clip it on glass, then adjust the knob of our microscope so we could see all the intricate designs of the layer. We rolled our eyes before we looked. We wanted to dissect frogs and cows’ eyes! We didn’t even eat our vegetables, why would we want to look at them? Our teacher, Ms. Gardner (I kid you not), rolled her eyes right back and told us to look, and we wanted recess and she was a much better eye-roller, so we did.
We were quiet after that, save for our steady breathing and the scratch of our pencils on paper as we tried to capture what had been magnified.
If God gave Mary a pass what would that mean for the rest of us and what it is we’ve been called to hold, to create, to welcome into our lives? I don’t think Mary was sugar coating her situation when she sang her song of praise. I think Mary is offering a vulnerable submission for Immanuel.
O come, O come, Immanuel. Do not give us a pass. Give our souls the work of magnification.
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