Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; December 15, 2024
Readings: Luke 1:36-38 (children’s talk), 39-56; Secrets of Heaven §§7550, 4459.4
In this portion of today’s service, we’re going to continue to follow Mary’s story, as it’s recounted in the gospel of Luke. This next reading picks up exactly where the reading for the children’s talk left off. We read: [1:39-56].
This scene is full of tender moments, and full of joy. Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps in her womb—the innocence that surrounded that baby was alive and awake to the presence of the Lord, though the Lord’s human form had only just begun to grow within Mary. The deference that Elizabeth shows to Mary is also touching. Elizabeth was older than Mary, and theirs was a culture in which seniority was important. But Elizabeth suggests that she’s unworthy that the mother of her Lord should come to her (v. 43). Mary and Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s baby all seem to be sharing a sense of joyful astonishment. Then Mary praises the Lord, and her praise begins with the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (v. 46).
The psalm, or prayer, that Mary voices in this scene is often called the Magnificat, because in Latin translations of the Bible, the first word of this prayer is magnificat, which means “magnifies.” Magnificat anima mea Dominum—“my soul magnifies the Lord.” To magnify the Lord is to make Him great. The rest of this sermon is going to be about the Magnificat. Mary’s joy in the Lord, and the humility that she voices here, set an example for us to follow. We aren’t Mary, but the Lord loves us just as much as He loved her—so in the end, we have just as much to rejoice in. The specific question that we’re going to explore today is, Does it cost us anything to magnify the Lord? The answer is both “yes” and “no.”
We’ll look first at why the answer is “no.” In general, it doesn’t cost us anything to praise anybody. If, for example, we say that another human being looks good in the clothes they’re wearing, we’re not simultaneously saying that our own clothes make us look bad. Another person’s profit doesn’t have to be our loss. Praising another person doesn’t cost us anything, because it isn’t about us at all. At least, it shouldn’t be—sometimes we praise people because we’re hoping to receive compliments in return. But that isn’t real praise: real praise is a heartfelt expression of joy, and it looks outward, not inward. Praising the Lord isn’t so very different from praising another person: it isn’t about us, so why should it cost us anything? What do we lose when we magnify the Lord?
That said, the reality might be that when we try to do as Mary does in this story, we’ll feel like we’re losing something. There is a sense in which magnifying the Lord costs us something. It can feel like it costs us a great deal. This is assuming that our praises are heartfelt. Empty praise is cheap: we can pour out empty praise all day, and the only cost will be a tired throat. To praise the Lord from the heart takes a little more than that. We’re going to spend some time exploring why this is; the first thing we’re going to do is look more closely at Mary’s words.
Some of the things she says are completely self-explanatory: “My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior… He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name” (vv. 47, 49). But other parts of the Magnificat are less obviously connected to the good news that both Mary and Elizabeth had received. Mary says that the Lord, “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty” (vv. 51-53). Obviously it’s good to fill the hungry with good things… but what do the proud and the mighty and the rich have to do with any of Mary’s blessings?
One interpretation of these words is that Mary is exulting because she—and not some rich or powerful woman—was chosen to be the mother of the Lord. At the beginning of the Magnificat Mary identifies herself as a lowly maidservant (v. 48). Since that’s how she saw herself, it makes sense that she would be surprised to receive the honor that she was given. That sort of surprise is lovely and admirable. But for Mary to exult over the rich and mighty women who weren’t honored as she herself was honored wouldn’t be so admirable.
A better interpretation of these words is that the terms “rich” and “mighty” and “lowly” and “hungry” are all being used symbolically, and that what Mary is really celebrating is that justice is being done. The Lord has come to bring justice to his people. There are a number of passages in the Old Testament that associate the rich with profiting at the expense of others. For example, in Jeremiah we read, “For among My people are found wicked men; they lie in wait as one who sets snares; they set a trap; they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become great and grown rich” (5:26, 27). This doesn’t mean that people who are literally rich are also always wicked and deceitful. The point is that the word “rich” has these symbolic associations in passages like that one from Jeremiah, and that Mary’s words in the Magnificat draw on those associations.
And if Mary is using symbolic language when she speaks of the rich and the mighty, then she’s also using symbolic language when she speaks of the lowly and the hungry. And she associates herself with the lowly and the hungry. As part of her praise of the Lord, she identifies herself as someone who is low and in need—not literally or externally, but in a deeper sense. In other words, she magnifies the Lord, and—subtly—she makes herself low. There is a connection between those two things.
Elsewhere in the Gospel, John the Baptist makes the same connection, but much more overtly. When Jesus begins His public ministry, John’s disciples come to him and note how everyone is going to Jesus to be baptized (John 3:26). Essentially they point out that Jesus is “upstaging” John, or stealing his thunder. But John is at peace with this, because he knows that Jesus is Christ the Lord, and that he himself is not (v. 28). And John says, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (v. 30). As the Lord is magnified, we ourselves diminish—or at least that’s sometimes how it seems.
What all of these ideas boil down to is this: if God is great, then greatness is His, and it’s not ours. Everybody who believes in God knows this, but we don’t always get it. To magnify the Lord is to get it—to recognize and acknowledge that He is great, to feel a dawning awe and humility because He is what we can never be. And that costs us something: the cost is that we have to recognize what we’re not.
We turn now to the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, to a passage from the book Secrets of Heaven. The first part of this passage, which I’m not going to read, is about the spiritual meaning of a Scripture from Exodus in which the Lord says that He wants His name to be declared in all the earth (9:16). The passage then acknowledges that when the Lord speaks this way, it can sound to us like He’s being selfish—like all He cares about is His own glory. But the reading then explains that that is not the case: when the Lord speaks of His greatness, He does so not for His own sake, but for ours. We read: [§7550].
The Lord extols His own power and glory in the Word because it is so important that we learn to humble ourselves before Him. He wants to save us, and to give us eternal happiness—but He cannot do that unless we’re willing to worship Him in humility. To worship Him in humility is to praise Him, to magnify Him—but, according to that reading, worshipping Him in humility also requires that we acknowledge that, left to ourselves, we are dust and ashes, that is, nothing but evil. And it must be said that that is a challenging teaching.
Sure, the Lord is greater than we are… but do we really have to make ourselves so very low? It’s important to understand this teaching correctly: the Lord does not want us to believe that everything we’ve ever done or thought or felt has been evil. We’ve all done good things; we all love good things, and those loves are real. But humility is to recognize that those good loves are blessings that we’ve been given: God kindled those fires within us. The power to do a good deed—to help another human being—isn’t something that we create within ourselves. It’s God’s power moving within us, flowing through our very veins. Without Him, we really would have nothing. He is never going to forsake us, so we’re never going to be reduced to dust and ashes. But everything that makes us more than dust and ashes is a blessing from a Divine Father who loves us. And it’s when we understand this that we truly see the greatness of God.
Acknowledging our own lowliness isn’t really about making ourselves low. We are very lowly, compared to God—but when we dwell on our own lowliness, we miss the point. The point is that we understand the difference between ourselves and the Lord. He does not want us to hate ourselves, or to look upon ourselves with contempt. Far from it. That’s not the point. What matters is that we know—really know—that we are not God. We’re not God at all. If we lay claim to what is His, we’ve put unclean hands on something Holy. It is not ours. We’re not like that Holiness—not like it at all. If we make ourselves our own gods, then the Lord can’t be our God, and the stream of blessings that He would pour into us is cut off. We can’t bless ourselves with those blessings. We have nothing. Our hands are empty—our spirits are dust and our hearts are ash. But the Lord, the Lord is God, and all blessings are His to give to His children.
To truly magnify the Lord—to magnify Him from the heart—we have to understand just how unlike Him we ourselves are. And that can feel like a heavy price to pay. Humility is not easily learned. But the real truth, the deeper truth, is that in the end, magnifying the Lord costs us nothing at all—because everything that we give away when we humble ourselves before Him is paid back many times over, in the end. Humbling ourselves might feel hard at first—it might make us feel wretched and unhappy with ourselves. But that is not where we remain. Because, as we heard in the reading from Secrets of Heaven, when we humble ourselves, the Lord flows in with the life of His love (§7550). In the Gospel He says, “whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11, 18:14). When we acknowledge the difference between ourselves and the Lord, the Lord is able to lift us up—to fill our spirits with elation. The reward for humility isn’t a pat on the back or a spiritual gold star for us to stick on our foreheads: the reward is a living awareness of the blessings and the power that the Lord gives to us. In Secrets of Heaven we read: [§4459.4].
To conclude this sermon, let’s circle back to Mary: Mary humbled herself before the Lord. She called herself lowly (Luke 1:48) She called herself a servant of the Lord (vv. 38, 48). Did choosing to regard herself that way make her feel miserable? Not in the slightest. The Lord had blessed her, and she knew it. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior” (vv. 46, 47).
Amen.