Has God been merciful?
Remembering Mary's singing in the wake of the U.S. election.
“He has shown strength with his arm;/ he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts./ He has brought down the powerful from their thrones/ and lifted up the lowly./ He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
Luke 1: 51-53
I’m writing this column the day after the U.S. election. I know that some of you will disagree with me, but I think that it was a bad – potentially disastrous – day for some of the things that I cherish: civility, international cooperation, social pluralism, democratic culture, minority rights, religious liberty (for more than just people like me) and economic justice. It was a good day for chauvinistic nationalism, ill-informed arrogance, financial and political self-aggrandizement, petty vengefulness and the vainglorious technical and cultural aspirations of the stratospherically wealthy.
So, Mary’s encomium to God’s merciful judgment in Luke 1 struck me in a new way today. I guess I knew, but never really noticed, that she casts this mercy in the past tense: “He has scattered the proud . . . He has brought down the powerful from their thrones . . . He has filled the hungry . . . and sent the rich away empty.” Has he?
Birth-pangs
In my disquiet today, I don’t see it. I feel more like Jürgen Habermas – the preeminent intellectual of German constitutional democracy in the wake of fascism and the confrontation with communism – who recently said: “At present, everything to which I dedicated my life is being lost bit by bit” or maybe like Bob Dylan; “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
Mary’s praise for the righteous judgment of God on the powerful on behalf of the downtrodden echoes a consistent theme in the Bible. But often – whether in Micah 2 or Isaiah 58; whether as pronounced judgement on the arrogant rich or promised vindication for those who “share your bread with the hungry” – this seems to be set in the future. Even later in Luke, Jesus puts the blessings on the poor and curses on the rich in future terms: “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry; woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep” (Lk 6:25).
So why does Mary sing as if it is already accomplished? And what are we to take from that when it seems very much like no such thing is in the offing?
The short answer is that, with the child in her womb, God’s merciful judgment is already an embodied reality; the victory won, the promise fulfilled. But – even so – for singing Mary, that reality is still literally in utero: it is still awaiting its full unveiling. It is “already, but not yet.” And perhaps we’re not in such a different situation: in a world pregnant with the possibility and promise of justice, “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” and what we are seeing isn’t the coming dark (“creation . . . subjected to futility”) but the birth-pangs of the Kingdom. But birth-pangs sometimes herald hard times as well as promise of joy.
Thank you for this encouraging article to one who feels pretty bleak after the U.S. election and trends in Canadian politics that are similar.
Really? Who would disagree with you? Maybe the dispensationalist or let’s-get-Armageddon-started people. But for those who test the spirits, the election of the blasphemous DT would not be seen as a good thing.
I have come to the conclusion that the American vote for what many view as a choice for a rather crooked ‘stick’, was actually a vote against a rather corrupt, elitist party that has let down the ordinary, hard-working person they traditionally used to represent. Let’s see what the next four years will bring and hope the media will be less biased in its reporting.