A song of the Bible
The Magnificat, Mary's Song
The song of a young woman carrying the Messiah, sung in the hill country when her cousin's unborn child leapt in recognition. Mary magnifies God for regarding her lowliness, and her praise swells into a revolution, the proud scattered, the mighty pulled down, the hungry filled, ancient mercy kept.
“And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,”Luke 1:46
The song
Mary's song begins in personal wonder and grows into a manifesto of God's kingdom. Her soul magnifies the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God her Savior, because He looked with favor on her humble state, so that every generation will call her blessed. From there the song turns outward to describe how God governs the world. He scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts, casts down rulers from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly. He fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Every reversal is grounded not in politics but in mercy, the mercy that reaches from generation to generation and remembers the promise made to Abraham and his seed forever. It is a quiet girl's song about a God who overturns the order of the world.
Its occasion
It was sung in a house in the hill country of Judea, when Mary, newly told by the angel that she would bear the Son of God, hurried to visit her elderly relative Elizabeth. At Mary's greeting the child in Elizabeth's womb, the future John the Baptist, leapt, and Elizabeth, filled with the Spirit, blessed Mary as the mother of her Lord. Mary answered with this song. She was young, poor, unmarried, and pregnant in a way no one would understand, yet she responded to the greatest news in history not with fear but with worship, pouring out a hymn that had been forming in the memory of Israel since Hannah stood at Shiloh.
How it rises to Christ
This is one of the New Testament canticles, and it sings of Christ directly, though with a mother's reticence. Mary calls God her Savior, and the salvation she means is the child she carries. The whole song is her theology of who this baby is, the fulfillment of mercy promised to Abraham, the King whose coming means thrones fall and the hungry feast. Her reversals are the shape of His kingdom, announced before He is born and enacted through His life, cross, and resurrection. She stands in a long line of singing mothers, consciously echoing Hannah, so that the Old Testament's hunger for a deliverer and the New Testament's arrival of Him meet in her voice. The Magnificat is Advent set to music.
Questions people ask
What is the Magnificat and who sang it?
The Magnificat is Mary's song of praise, named from its opening in Latin, my soul magnifies the Lord. Mary sang it while pregnant with Jesus, during her visit to her older relative Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. It celebrates God her Savior and describes the great reversals of His kingdom, the proud scattered, the mighty pulled from their thrones, the hungry filled, and the lowly lifted up.
Why does the Magnificat sound like Hannah's song?
Mary deliberately echoes Hannah's song from First Samuel. Both women magnify a God who casts down the proud and raises the humble, and both sing before the birth of a deliverer. Mary draws on Israel's memory of singing mothers, showing that the Old Testament's longing for a Savior is fulfilled in the child she carries.