When did “seeking justice” become optional?
Applying Mary's Song to contemporary concerns.
Mary’s Song is ideal for Advent liturgies. I have promoted its use in worship committees for years, from Edmonton to Ottawa. It focuses on themes of the great reversal, or the upside-down kingdom. These themes are rich in Biblical stories and symbolism, but they create some discomfort in the pews. Mary’s talk about taking down the rich and powerful makes donations to the Foodbank feel like cheap grace. The gentler Advent candle themes of hope, love, peace and joy fit better with our Hallmark Christmas culture.
I thought focusing on Mary’s Song during Advent served as a good reminder about the real meaning of Christmas. By Christmas Day, worship would shift to peace and joy because our Saviour has come. Now I wonder if that sequence might have some unintended consequences for how we think about justice and salvation.
Unsentimental Christmas
Over the years modern prophets have continued to draw attention to the themes in Mary’s Song, challenging our sentimental Christmas culture. In 2017, prophetess Rachel Held Evans applied Mary’s words to contemporary concerns, such as injustice towards refugees, misogyny, disparity between wealth and poverty in America and gun violence. “We cannot claim to embrace the Holy Family while withholding justice from those who would most identify with them,” she wrote in Mary, the Magnificat and an Unsentimental Christmas. “We cannot talk of ‘making Christmas great again’ while taking the side of the powerful and violent over the vulnerable.”
Evans refused to embrace a sentimental Holy Family scene. 2024 seems even more unsentimental than 2017. Can we find joy in $200 tax rebates in Ontario while the basic income for the poor on Ontario Works has not increased since 2018? Can we sing “Peace on Earth” while minimum measures to care for creation are rolled back because we can’t afford them, while forests burn and floods destroy squatter villages? “No Peace on Earth” might be a more appropriate song.
In 2023, church leaders in Jerusalem decided not to celebrate Christmas as a way of focusing their minds and their public witness on the children in Gaza. It was a modern day experience of Mary’s Song, as believers left the altar and spoke out against injustice. I wonder what Christmas 2024 calls me to do.
Centering justice
What would the impact be, if we sang Mary’s Song on Christmas morning instead of during the Advent season? The Bible seems clear that doing justice is central to Jesus’s good news. He called it out from his pulpit in his first unsentimental sermon in Luke 4, and he practiced it after his resurrection.
Somehow Christians made seeking justice secondary to salvation – nice to do but not essential. Good for Advent services but not Christmas Day. Would 2025 look different if we made Mary’s Song central to the way we talk about salvation all year long?
