This post is part of my Anarchist Bible series - see the introduction and list of posts.

Mary said,

“With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
     In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant.
    Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
         because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
     He shows mercy to everyone,
        from one generation to the next,
        who honors him as God.
He has shown strength with his arm.
    He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
     He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
        remembering his mercy,
    just as he promised to our ancestors,
        to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.”

Luke 1:46-55 (CEB)

Though these words are spoken in this story in an obscure village by a young peasant experiencing colonization, Mary’s voice carries across centuries, giving authoritative interpretation of the character of God, and making clear for generations to come what God was midwifing into history through the new life in her own body.

What do Mary’s song and the circumstances surrounding it have to tell us of God’s anarchist character? I’m sure much of this ground has been written on elsewhere among the many inspired by this passage but here are a few of my thoughts.

First, God’s invitation to Mary shows the fundamental non-coerciveness of the divine. God invites Mary to be a part of this story and she freely chooses to participate, in a significant contrast to many parallel stories of divine conceptions in surrounding mythologies. We see God's prioritization of human freedom and voluntary participation with God in shaping history, starkly contrasting with any vision of God as coercive.

God's selection of Mary as the “God-bearer” powerfully illustrates God's subversive value system. Rather than choosing the powerful at the top of the socio-political hierarchy, God chooses incarnation through and among the poorest, the weakest, the most marginalized amid the rule of a colonizing empire. God’s action here in history is intended as a message of reversal and flattening of hierarchical structures, in method every bit as much as content.

Mary reinforces this in her own interpretation of the moment. She highlights how God is reversing the normal way of the world, filling the hungry and denying the rich, looking on the low-status with favor, scattering the powerful as if they are weak, and lifting up the lowly. She even particularly names God as the one pulling down the powerful off of their thrones, making God’s anarchist nature explicit.

If this is who God is, then this is also who Jesus is and what his ministry aims to do. By extension, it is essential to our purpose as those who are meant to imitate Jesus and reflect the image of the divine to participate in filling the hungry and denying the rich, scattering the powerful, lifting the lowly, and pulling down thrones.

I think we see this young peasant woman Mary actively speaking here as a foundational liberation theologian, naming for all generations the reality of God’s subversive, anti-hierarchical, liberating character.

Her words also introduce the life and ministry of Jesus in Luke’s narrative, informing how we as readers understand his mission. Every word and deed of Jesus’ life in Luke’s good news narrative has to be read through Mary's words as an interpretive lens. But if we imagine how this worked historically, Mary’s words have even deeper impact. As we imagine Jesus’ childhood, Mary is the formative influence on his development. I don’t believe Jesus dropped into the world as an infant with full understanding of his divine identity and mission. As he was fully human, his self-understanding developed over the course of his life, like any other human. He ends up understanding himself as uniquely part of the divine life and with a particular messianic calling. However, in both of those areas, his self-understanding ends up in dramatically unexpected places within the expectations of first-century Judaism. How does this happen? Surely, hearing the leading of the Spirit is part of that story, but I also expect that the Spirit worked as much through the voices and influences of those around him as through a divine voice in his head, just as is true in our own lives most of the time. God speaks to and through Mary to shape Jesus’ understanding of his identity and mission once incarnate. And I don’t think God micromanaged exactly what that looked like. Just as God gives space for us to be fully free and shape the development of history in partnership with divine action (more on that to come elsewhere), I suspect Mary's free choices and her own creative ways of parenting and contributing to Jesus’ self-understanding truly impacted what Jesus’ life and ministry ended up looking like. Yes, God chose one who would likely shape Jesus a certain way because of her social location and character, but what Mary did as a mother, and as the first and most direct theologian of the purpose of Jesus’ messianic identity and life (as opposed to a generic expected messiah), not only interprets Jesus for the reader, but shaped the actual ministry and life of Jesus himself. Mary was not merely a vessel for the divine, but a creative improvisational theologian forming a synthesis of her people’s past experience of God, current experience of colonization, her personal experience of the divine, and her relationship to Jesus’ human development, then contributing the fruits of that synthesizing work as she spoke into Jesus’ life via that shaping into the liberation of the world.

Some might hear the final part of the song with mixed emotions among current global political realities: “He has come to the aid of his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, just as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.” However, Mary, of course, is not referring to the modern colonizer state of Israel which consistently acts like the Roman Empire of the time, oppressively extracting land and wealth and creating a permanent ethnic underclass via violent force and coercive laws. Rather, the Israel in her mind is the people who trace their story back to God’s liberating action in Egypt, rescuing the enslaved out of the oppression of empire, and who placed their hope in God for rescue again from the oppression of empire in her own day. As I've written on previously, a few simple words in the Exodus story significantly reframe our understanding of the composition and identity of Israel throughout the biblical narrative and via that lens, passages like these place God’s action on behalf of Israel within a framework of consistent action for those who are oppressed rather than of a particular ancestry. Mary’s good news about God here is that God consistently comes to the aid of those under oppression, throughout all time.

The political significance of Mary’s words have not been missed by either the oppressed or their oppressors throughout history. Many movements for liberation have taken up the words and been inspired and encouraged by them, and the powers of the world have variously banned them as subversive, including regimes in British India, 1980’s Guatemala, and 1970’s Argentina. As always, the world should take note of the words the powerful want to suppress, and explore the power within those words to undermine those powerful doing the suppressing.

Finally, I think Mary’s words, like Jesus’ own in Luke 4, begin to connect Jesus’ purpose to the concept of Jubilee in the Hebrew Bible, a vision of social and economic leveling that would end wealth inequality and systemic oppression, forgiveness of debt, freedom for the oppressed, all as the culmination of experiencing God’s presence and character as a society. In that vision, we see God’s character and key points of anarchism deeply aligned. Mary is a key figure in co-creating that messianic vision with and in Jesus, and bringing revelation to the world of the anarchist God.

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