2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
7:1 Now when the king was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him,
7:2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent."
7:3 Nathan said to the king, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you."
7:4 But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan:
7:5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in?
7:6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.
7:7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"
7:8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the LORD of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel;
7:9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth.
7:10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly,
7:11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house.
7:16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.
Luke 1:46b-55
1:46b "My soul magnifies the Lord,
1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
1:50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
1:51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
1:52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
1:54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
1:55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26
89:1 I will sing of your steadfast love, O LORD, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.
89:2 I declare that your steadfast love is established forever; your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.
89:3 You said, "I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to my servant David:
89:4 'I will establish your descendants forever, and build your throne for all generations.'" Selah
89:19 Then you spoke in a vision to your faithful one, and said: "I have set the crown on one who is mighty, I have exalted one chosen from the people.
89:20 I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him;
89:21 my hand shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him.
89:22 The enemy shall not outwit him, the wicked shall not humble him.
89:23 I will crush his foes before him and strike down those who hate him.
89:24 My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him; and in my name his horn shall be exalted.
89:25 I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers.
89:26 He shall cry to me, 'You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!'
Romans 16:25-27
16:25 Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages
16:26 but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith --
16:27 to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.
Luke 1:26-38
1:26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth,
1:27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.
1:28 And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."
1:29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
1:30 The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
1:31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.
1:32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.
1:33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."
1:34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"
1:35 The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.
1:36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.
1:37 For nothing will be impossible with God."
1:38 Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.
Let the reversals begin.
Mary does everything right. Her cousin’s husband, Zechariah, despite being a priest of the Lord, despite entering the inner temple on a holy day, despite being a man, does everything wrong. And when his son, John, to be known as the Baptizer, is born, he sings of God’s actions in history. When Mary sings, it’s about the reversals that are coming.
Now, I’m not going to universalize this into a grand cosmic scheme that is absolute Truth. This is Luke’s version of the euangelion, the gospel, the good news. For Luke it’s about reversals which we haven’t yet seen; but we could, if we were looking.
Mary is the exemplar of the pathos of God; but Mary is not God; nor filled with the Holy Spirit of God. Mary is just…Mary. “Ne timeas, Mary,” the angel says; and she is not. Zechariah is startled; he says “I’m too old for this, and my wife is, too. We can’t have children.” He rejects the very idea of a reversal. Mary, however, is open to it: “How can this be?”
Thus Emmanuel Levinas is correct when he writes in his own mystical, lyrical way of the human person:
"But his soul, which Genesis 2:7 calls divine breath, remains near the Throne of God, around which are gathered all the souls of Israel, i.e., Iwe must accept this terminology!) all the souls of the authentically humna humanity, which is conceived in Hiam of Volozhen as being subsumed beneath the category of Israel. . . . Hence, there is a privileged relationship between the human soul, the soul of Israel, and God. There is a connaturnality between man and the manifold entirety of the creature on the one hand, and a special intimacy between man and Elohim on the other."
Levinas goes on to speak of "man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world.
Which puts me in mind of Anti-Climacus, in The Sickness Unto Death:
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.
Now we could say, fairly, that these are two phenomenologists, about a century apart, struggling to define, or even describe, the self, that thing we are all sure we have, but find it hard to talk about. Myself, when I consider how I talk to myself, take comfort in these struggles by these eminent thinkers; because it means that when I talk to myself, there is someone listening and responding. Although all of them are...me. Although I think Kierkegaard is mocking 19th century Hegelianism with his "definition;" but that's a discussion for another time. We don't have to take either of these efforts as dictionary bedrock for a discussion, nor for an examination of what Mary means by "My." But they make a good starting point.
Before we go much further, I would add this, about the Hebrew Scriptures, and broaden it to include the Christian scriptures as well:
At the root of reality is a limitless generosity that intends an extravagant abundance. This claim is exposited in Israel's creation texts, sapiential traditions, and hymnic exubranances. This insistence flies in the face of the theory of scarcity on which the modern world is built. An ideology of scarcity produces a competitiveness that issues in brutality, justifies policies of wars and aggression, authorizes an acute individualism, and provides endless anxiety about money, sexuality, physical fitness, beauty, work achievements, and finally morality. It seems to me that, in the end, all of these anxieties are rooted in an ideology that resists a notion of limitless generosity and extravagant abundance.
There is an extravagant abundance in Mary's Magnificat, an extravagance that has to be rooted in the "I" that includes "we" by definition. Mary's personal pronoun should not be read as the modern individualist exclusive position, but as the modern based in personal experience posture, one that looks to concrete reality for wisdom and understanding. Having said that much:
It is a hard question how literally and how seriously to take Israel's lyrical claims, which Israel itself often did not take seriously. Do these claims mean simply that all mankind should be nice and share, and we will all get along? [That's not a bad place to start, actually.] Do they mean that as we trust abundance, we will learn a kind of joy that does not need so much? Or might they mean, in a venturesome antimodern stance, that the genuine practice of trust causes the earth to produce more, so that justice evokes the blessings of the earth? That is the claim of the blessing theology of Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14. From the perspective of our several Enlightenment metanarratives, such a claim is outrageous and absurd. But the outrage may at bottom signify nothing more than the totalizing power of the ideology of scarcity. One must depart from the narrative of scarcity in order to host this lyrical affirmation of generosity and abundance, a departure to which Israel is summoned each time it engaged in worship and reflection.
Apply that reasoning to Mary's song and, rather than reduce it to the reductio ad absurdum of literalism, or the airy nothingness of "mere metaphor," you open the door to an insight into her (and Luke's) purpose. The "ideology of scarcity" applies to the Magnificat, because Mary proclaims that God will upend human systems and establish justice and righteousness. And if she says God has, rather than God will, it doesn't reduce her claims to nonsense or mere prognostication; it attacks the present (persistent even from the past into the present) anxiety of scarcity.
Or might they mean, in a venturesome antimodern stance , that the genuine practice of trust causes the earth to produce more, so that justice evokes the blessings of the earth? That is the claim of the blessing theology of Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14.
And of Mary's Magnificat. Is it any wonder her song is considered the equal of any psalm in the palmistry?
And yet why does Mary use the personal pronoun? Psalm 89 does, but it's a song meant to be sung by the assembled, the ekklesia, the congregation. Each person is meant to take it to heart and to say it on behalf of all, the faithful and the children of Abraham. Look back at that description of self from Levinas:
Hence, there is a privileged relationship between the human soul, the soul of Israel, and God. There is a connaturnality between man and the manifold entirety of the creature on the one hand, and a special intimacy between man and Elohim on the other."
That "connaturality between man" is Levinas' interest in the human relationship, which is a human condition. When I was studying Levinas in seminary the professor told a story from Levinas himself. He saw a young child in the middle of a busy street, and a man, a stranger to the child, rushed into the street to save the child from oncoming traffic, at great risk to himself. Levinas pondered what inspired this man to do such a thing for a stranger, and that started him off on a life-long philosophical examination of the self and the other. That is the "connaturality between man and the manifold entirety of the creature;" our selflessness, and our selfishness. Our mutuality to others, presented publicly especially in December, and our tendency to treat all that is not us as "other," as the crowds do who applaud Trump's claims of "poisoned blood." Then there is "a special intimacy between man [sic] and Elohim on the other." And intimacy that can be as individual as the ecstasy of a Christian mystic, but if also one connatural with all of humanity. So is the self a part of an equation? Or is that description a fuller picture of the self than we think the personal pronoun presents?
Dicken's Marley told Scrooge that it was each man's duty to walk among his fellow human beings and offer them what help was his to offer, and if this wasn't done in life, the spirit was condemned to walk in death and see what it could not now help. So the idea is a seasonal one, and not entirely a religious one. I think the theological examination has more grit to it, but I'm more interested in presenting the idea here than in fully establishing it with defenses girded all around. The idea that our self is a monad, windowless or just with blackout curtains, is more or less the accepted one today. But what if you could say "me" and mean "My relationship to humanity", or to other human beings near and far?
The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.
To relate itself to itself, is to be in relationship. The self, says Anti-Climacus, is not singular, but tripartite. It is a synthesis, but the relation between two is itself a unity, a negative one made positive by the relation relatings itself to itself. But relationship reaches beyond the monad of the self (if you still see it that way) and reflects/echoes/requires relationship with other selves, who are both self (to themselves) and other (to selves not theirs), and, per Levinas, our relationship to each other is both connatural and in tension, just as the relationship with God is both intimate (personal) and in tension (we are not God; God is not us, individually or collectively). And yet, Mary's soul magnifies the Lord.
What wondrous love is this?
Maybe we need to complicate this just a bit more:
Such an odd linkage between the human and Israel does not mean that the Old Testament yields nothing beyond Jewishness. Nor does it mean that Jewish persons are superior human beings. It means, rather, that in the Old Testament all human persons are understood as situated in the same transactional processes with the holiness of YHWH as is Israel, so that in a general way the character and destiny of human persons replicates and reiterates the character and destiny of Israel.Now we can start to see how Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord. And that the Incarnation is a part of this mystery, this “transactional process[] with the holiness of YHWH.” What else does Mary sing about? Her song is all about the reversal of human order and expectations when we recognize, as she does as she sings, that God is active in human history. God U.S. not us, and we are not God, but we are involved in the holiness of God, the otherness of God which is not us, but with which we transact, with which we are in relationship.
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