How a song can say more than its lyrics do

Friday 22 December, 2018

1 Sam 1:24-28; Lk 1:46-56

Songs have the power to convey profound truths and evoke feelings that words alone cannot express. Lovers sing to each other. We sing when we are happy and in good company. We sing our prayers to God. The psalms were meant to be sung. The very word Psalm comes from the Greek verb used for "plucking the strings of a lyre." Hannah and Mary both sang, and for good reason.

In the first reading, we heard how Samuel's mother, Hannah, who was unable to have children has her prayers heard and she presents her son at the temple of the Lord, where he remains till his youth, under the care of Eli. She too sings a song of praise, which we recited in today's psalm. In fact we notice that there are a lot of similarities and parallelisms between Mary's Canticle and the one that Hannah sings.

In her song of thanksgiving, Mary teaches us how to respond to Jesus's birth. She was definitely afraid. There must have been many things worrying her and many questions she did not have an answer to. Nonetheless, she was full of hope and her fear did not detract her from experiencing fully the joy of Jesus's birth. She takes time to pause and see how God has blessed her, how he has done great things with her, and articulates her prayer of gratitude. This is the first thing we can learn from her, that amidst the fear, the questions and the doubts that fill our mind, we still make an effort to pause and see how God has worked with us in the past and how he is working with us right now, and then to move on to pronounce prayers of thanksgiving for all we have received.

What strikes me in particular is that she is not happy because simply because she has been chosen to be the Mother of Jesus. Her joy is even deeper than that and more far reaching. In fact she speaks not only for herself but in the name of so many other people. She mentions "those who fear him", "the lowly", "the hungry". In her own rejoicing, we see the rejoicing of all these groups of people whom the world does not usually consider as people who have anything to rejoice about. But Mary does, because the birth of Christ has brought joy even to these. Among those groups of people too there might be ourselves or people we know. We might sometimes be discouraged by the proud, the mighty or the rich and think that after all it pays to be proud, powerful and rich because those always seem to have it their way. Well, today we have an answer to that. The proud are ultimately scattered, the mighty are cast down, the rich, at the end of the day are sent away empty. This is the logic of God, which is completely opposite to the way that we think.

Finally, she mentions the covenant God made with Abraham, and which is about to be brought into fruition. It is not only God who remembers his promise of mercy - as if God can ever forget! - but it is us who ought to remember the promise of mercy God made with us. To remember is not simply to think about and to recall but to "re-member", that is, assemble together and make present again.

This is what Christmas, ultimately is all about. What are you going to proclaim the greatness of the Lord for today?