6. The World Turned Upside Down

Have you read the Magnificat lately - that song that Mary sings when she gets together with her sister-in-faith Elizabeth and both are pregnant?  Two women, one old, one young, singing in a house.  And what are they singing?  They're singing seditious revolution!  Go on, read that song of Mary in Luke 1. It's about social upheaval, about God's overthrow of the rich and elevation of the poor, the seismic change in the world that happens when God's kingdom comes.  If any Roman soldiers had been listening, Mary and Elizabeth would have been arrested for fomenting rebellion.  Or not, because hey, they were only women, right?  What sort of kingdom has this sort of revolutionary song between a girl and an old dear?

The Magnificat: not so much this...

 as this...

Face it, the Magnificat is the manifesto of a God who loves the poor, who hates their subjugation and who's coming one day to kick some rich ass into the middle of next week for seeing the poor as either commodities to make money from or else demonised.  Naming no governments, obviously…

So what have Christians often done with this dynamite duo's song?

I'll tell you.  Because Christians are very good at hiding away the cutting edge of faith.  Very adept at concealing the backbone of being a follower of this God.  Very practised at ignoring the real-world implications of justice, possibly in case it demands more of us.

And so this revolutionary protest song is given a Latin title, when it should be called “bolshy promises of God overturning the world order.”  It was hidden in Latin for centuries, sung by robed choirs so that the english-speaking among us might not notice the potential in it and what it might call us to believe and do.  Under the British rule in India, the Archbishop of Canterbury of a different age banned the use of this song in services in case it gave the natives any ideas.  He was a smart man: he’d read it, and he knew it was dynamite.

And today it’s a meek song of a meek young lady who said, “let it be unto me as you have said.”  But read it and it’s not harmless, it’s not airy-fairy.  It has teeth.  I’d like it set to some other music that reminds us as we sing that it’s a message with teeth.  If only it was a trenchant, mordant protest song in the mould of Billy Bragg…  In fact, go and listen to Billy singing The World Turned Upside Down.

I want this man as a worship leader.

Imagine the Magnificat sung like that.  A protest song.  It has two lines that sum up the middle part of the Magnificat: “You poor take comfort, you rich take care.”  That’s a scarlet thread that runs through the Bible and surfaces in the Magnificat... in the blessings and the woes... in the Beatitudes and judgments... in the prophets and the law... in Revelation...

At Christmas we sing “O tidings of comfort and joy” - maybe we should also remember “tidings of comfort and heed...”

Right, who are we?  Are we the rich or are we the poor?  

If by poor we mean humble, maybe we’re poor.  If by rich we mean well-off, then we have a roof at home (oh, and a home), and quite possibly heating, and food in the pantry.  We are bits of both.  We are rich.  We are poor.  And so we can take comfort... but we must take heed.  

Yes, us.  Take care, take heed.  We are rich to the extent that we are people with greater wealth than much of the world and the choice how to use it... to the extent that we have a nation that isn’t seething with civil war or having the hell bombed out of it, to the extent that we are not fleeing like the Syrians or like the holy family after Christmas, we can take heed and see how wide we’re willing to open our eyes to human suffering, and how much we’re willing to canvass MPs or sign petitions or give to causes or speak up when people knock refugees.  To that extent, we might acknowledge our power, and our opposition to the trafficking of people or the demonisation of people of other lands or the underclass of this land or the sweat shops we hear about.

Take comfort.  Take heed.  Christ is coming back.