Creative History - Luke 1:39-56
I grew up watching reruns of Dragnet, hearing Sergeant Friday tell people he was only interested in getting the facts. Those comments came out of an understanding that facts could be distilled and transmitted with no shadow of interpretation. The Enlightenment brought with it the concept that history could be told without interpretation. We could supply and report facts and know exactly what happened with no fear of spin, propaganda, or twisting a narrative for any particular purpose.
The academic community recognized the pitfalls in that understanding early on, but a generation or more never caught on. History writing is teeming with interpretation, as it ever has been. We select those stories we deem important to pass down. We select portions of dialogue to preserve. We determine what elements to skip over and which ones to emphasize. We report only those factors in a movement we find to be relevant, leaving out so much else.
On one hand, we might criticize the writers of history for their biases, but there is really no other way for us to record history. We cannot include all the themes and contributing elements to recording the stories of our lives. We must select and deselect material for inclusion. In the process, however, we find that we record certain themes and even skew our narratives according to the purposes and priorities in our storytelling. Sometimes we do that consciously, sometimes unconsciously. At times, we have seen people create stories out of whole cloth to transmit their understanding of the importance or meaning of a larger narrative.
The gospel writers did not write history per se; they wrote theology. They wrote extended sermons which included narratives about Jesus' life and ministry. These are much more than documents of history, though. They are messages which arose to address the early church's need to remember who Jesus was and why that even mattered. They present us with snapshots of Jesus' life, ministry, and teaching. Mark is a 45-minute sermon on Jesus' life and ministry. There is no way to consider that as anything other than a summary of who Jesus was and what Jesus did in a course of three years' of ministry. Matthew, Luke, and John present other versions, but they, too have their specific purposes in drafting their accounts of Jesus.
It is in Luke's birth narratives that we see some of this process most clearly. We find Mary in today's passage traveling to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Mary would have been a girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Nazareth was about 70 miles from the hill country of Judah. I don't know anyone who would allow a young teen girl to travel to a distant town by herself, much less while pregnant. Luke records her travel, but he glosses over the presence of anyone else as accompanying her on the journey.
Luke does not expect us to believe Mary made the trip by herself, but in his telling, she is the only one who matters. His focus is on the interaction between Mary and Elizabeth, not the unnamed band who accompanied her on the week-long journey. His purpose was not to give us all the facts. Instead, it was his purpose to interpret the meaning and importance of Jesus' birth. That is what he gives us in his description of Mary's encounter with Elizabeth.
Luke did not hear Mary and Elizabeth speaking. He had no recordings of the exchange. What we have instead is Luke's perhaps creative interpretation of the significance of the encounter. The words on Mary's lips are stylized poetry, presenting the meaning of Jesus' birth in a way we would never expect a young teen to speak off the cuff. Luke did not expect us to believe this a transcription of Mary's words. Instead, he set forth an introductory preamble to the stories of Jesus he was gathering and presenting.
The poem he sets down as Mary's words is a message of reversal. It is the message that Almighty God is interested in blessing the lowly, humble, and outcast of society. It is the message that in Jesus' very birth story God chose not a castle with an appearance at court, but the home of people disregarded by the power structures of the day. Rather than blessing and honoring those we might call mighty, powerful, and important, God chose those we might brush aside as irrelevant.
This is the story of Jesus' ministry in the nutshell of 10 lines of poetic verse. These are words of God's redemption accessible to the multitudes, rather than limited to the upper-crust of society. This was drafted as a declaration that Jesus' birth was purposed to bringing not only healing, but restoration for all to enter into full participation in the nation as God's people. This was a preamble to all Luke had yet to say about Jesus' life and ministry. This was a manifest of the significance of this birth to all levels of society, but as good news specifically for the poor and marginalized.
Luke recounts for us in these few lines of verse his summary of what Jesus' coming would signify. Jesus would take the lowly and disregarded, making them the center-point of his ministry. Mary was emblematic of God's choice to bless the lowly as a demonstration of God's character and power. Jesus would offer mercy to those who reverenced God. He would respond to the proud by raising up the lowly. Jesus would feed the hungry but offer no material blessing for the rich. All of this began with God's selection of Mary as the vehicle for Jesus' birth.
Mary was of no social consequence. She lived in no palace. She was not surrounded by the trappings of wealth and power. She was, however, the chosen vessel for the incarnation, seemingly due to the fact of her lack of status. Her declaration in the Magnificat may well be Luke's reconstruction of the significance of the event, rather than any words she may have uttered. They capture, however, the very essence of why it was important for Christ to be born among the lowly and disregarded. This very birth and pregnancy bore a message of great impact.
By pointing out the significance of Jesus' birth to Mary, Luke was paving the way for our better understanding of the impact of Jesus' ministry. Reading forward in chapter 4, we will see Jesus making an identification with a passage from Isaiah which focused his ministry on this same theme of reversal for the benefit of the poor and otherwise vulnerable. We will find Jesus healing those on the margins of society and calling the rich to account for their failure to meet the needs around them. We will find Jesus preaching that it is the poor who are blessed in God's eyes, rather than the rich. We will find these themes of reversal sprinkled throughout Jesus' ministry and embodying the body of his message.
Luke's words at the beginning of his gospel are so much more than history. They function as a theological opening statement to all the rest of what he will write. They serve to open our minds to hear the things Jesus will teach and preach and so understand the implications of his actions. As long as we read these words simply as history, we miss the point of what Luke has written.
This is a script to help us understand the Jesus to whom Luke is introducing us. It is the introduction we need to better interpret all that is yet to come. Whether or not these are the actual words of Mary is beside the point. These are Luke's words to help us understand what God was doing in Mary's life and in the world beyond her womb. More than history, this is a theological portrait of the very God who was coming into the world through Mary's life. Are we ready to embrace this God on a mission to turn the world upside down?
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