Mary Sings A Prayer

“My soul magnifies the Lord.” – Luke 1:46

What does it take to know scripture so well that its words are the ones that you think and speak during the most critical moments of your life? 

Mary’s song in Luke 1 is very similar to Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel chapter 2: too similar to escape notice, yet not an exact replica. Both are about God exalting the lowly and bringing down the proud, about the poor versus the rich and the hungry versus the full. Both rejoice in God’s holiness and have the same movement from personal to corporate deliverance. But the phrases are never exactly the same. “My heart rejoices… in your deliverance,” prays Hannah. “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” sings Mary. “The bows of the mighty are broken,” prays Hannah. “He has brought down the mighty,” sings Mary. “My heart exults in the Lord,” prays Hannah. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” sings Mary.

It’s almost as if Mary has taken Hannah’s words and internalized them so deeply that they can rise back out of her, transformed now by Mary’s own experience. And Mary was, well, a nobody. She was a poor peasant girl from a small town nobody cared about. She was no Jewish scholar. When she goes with Joseph later to present Jesus at the temple, they bring two birds, meaning they couldn’t even afford one lamb. She calls herself someone “of humble estate.” Yet at this significant moment in her life, words rise out of her that Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls, “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung.”

What does it take for scripture to rise out of us like that? The picture I get is a steepening, a saturation, a deep kind of working-through. The way tea leaves steep in water: received, unfurling, releasing, until every part of the water is changed, the new aroma rising up into the air. This is no momentary encounter. Think of the things that rise unbidden in you: lyrics of an oft-played song, stanzas of a well-loved poem, words spoken by someone loved but now gone. Who knows if Hannah was a person like that to Mary, a mentor perhaps, who gave her hope through her own trials? Are there people in the scriptures who have been that to you? How do you saturate yourself with scripture?