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.
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
We pull these
verses from the middle of Mary’s Magnificat.
They do not track well with our typical American flavors of doing
things. For the next posts, speaking to the foundation of peace, we shall be looking to Mary's song to the Lord when she knew she would be the mother of Jesus.
These verses welcome to a most
un-American culture war. We do not toss
out the rich and lift up the poor. Every
American is supposed to be able to lift themselves up by their own
bootstraps. There is a built in bias
that the poor are lazy and ‘defective’.
But truly, how is peace supposed to take root when there is such an
economic disparity?
Those who
have will seek to protect what they’ve got.
Those who have not, where will they get but from those who have? The argument is ancient, dating back for as
long as there have been rich and poor.
‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, isn’t that that the
melody of the age? Who would dare to run
on a platform of ‘redistribution of income’ in this day and age? But here we are, bibles open
It is all
about God’s justice. This is at the
heart of the Magnificat. Mary, the
Mother of Jesus, singing that her soul magnifies the Lord! Her soul makes him larger, more
powerful. She is about to become the
mother of Jesus, the Son of God. This is
all about God. There is a chiastic
structure, a-b-b-a, the ‘a’ and ‘b’ lines paralleling their message. This is a poetic device that adds strength to the meaning of the words.
a.
He has
brought down the powerful from their thrones,
b.
And lifted up the lowly;
b-- he has
filled the hungry with good things,
a-- and sent the rich away empty.
Why has God
done this? More importantly, where has
Mary seen God doing this? Is it in the
miracle baby that her cousin Elizabeth is carrying around? When did she become such an insightful social
commentator? She is living on the lowest
of the lowly, single, female, poor, occupied in her own land, from a time and
place where ‘ownership’ of women traveled effectively from father to husband,
and she has been singled out by God. No
pressure.
How does
peace emerge from a culture war? It
could, in fact, turn into a shooting war if the rich truly felt threatened by
the ‘unwashed masses’. We have deployed
active duty troops inside this country against protesters (Los Angeles,
post-Rodney King).
The fact is,
peace does not exist under the old order.
Oppression exists, poverty exists, malnutrition exists, greed exists,
isolation exists. Not one of those will
bring peace. Not one of those is a
foundation upon which ‘peace’ can be built.
Suppression can exist, coopting the order can exist, but peace
cannot. Maybe a ceasefire, maybe exhaustion.
While I am not a proponent of
violence, peace requires the revolution of justice.
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