How can Mary sing that the Lord has done great things for her? It's a little crazy: how can this young, lower-class girl who finds herself knocked up sing that God has already–in the past tense–ended injustice and oppression? All she has to do is look around her to find evidence to the contrary.

I answered the question, working in the requisite readings. But days later the question is still haunting me.

What intrigues me is the gap between what the song proclaims and how the song is commonly used. As the exam question implied, we tend to get confused about the song's verb tense. It isn't simply past tense, announcing the fulfillment of the eschatological vision in which rulers are brought down and the lowly are lifted up. Nor is it simply a future hope for a time when all will be made right.

Instead it's both; it's the already and not yet. This can be hard to understand, in part because English lacks the aorist tense. The Magnificat testifies to God's work to reconcile all creation, work that has already begun and will continue forever. Like Mary, we are invited to be intimately involved in this work.

Mary wasn't crazy. She was carrying the hope of the world inside her; she knew that God had entered the world in a dramatic way. This changed everything–but to accomplish the change, the hope had to be proclaimed with assurance. We don't just place our hope in a past event or a future reward; we live into it.

When God sent Jesus to the world to reconcile all things, his incarnation and work on the cross did the job. Salvation dealt with the world's injustices and oppressions. But as humans we could not be transformed all at once–that desire is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden. God works gradually in our lives and world, helping us grow up into the hope that is already there.

Like Mary, we magnify the Lord for already overcoming injustice and oppression–and we also work to end such evils. Mary trusted so profoundly in the reality of the baby she carried that she asserted God's fulfillment of hope in the past, present and future. Her faith challenges me to join her in magnifying God by making this hope a reality.

Births aren't generally unexpected.  I mean, you kinda know they are coming.  But that doesn't mean that you won't be in the early stages of labor and not wonder if you still have time to rethink the whole thing.  Birthing is hard, it's messy, and it doesn't always go a planned.

I think of Mary, unexpectedly pregnant, having to face the scorn of her culture – a taint she and her son would have to carry through life.  Then she is forced to travel to Bethlehem, "now obviously pregnant," as some translations put it.  She was anticipating a birth, a special birth, but I have to wonder if even so it took her by surprise.  Was she at term?  Or did the long journey send her into preterm labor, forcing a child into the world before anyone was ready for it?  Having two children born prematurely, I understand how even something anticipated and desired can still unexpectedly alter one's world.

I think we often in the church have to face these unexpected births.  When we are pregnant with ideas or passions or a call, we have to see it through.  As much as we want to live in denial that there is new life growing within us, that life is going to emerge whether we are ready or not.  That baby's coming out.  And it's guaranteed to be messy.  It's guaranteed to be painful.  And sometimes it may even come early.  Difficult journeys strain the body to the point that new life has to be birthed in order for both the mother and the child to survive.  It's sudden sometimes. And it's scary.  But it's still a beautiful child.

Mary willingly birthed the messiah – the one she knew would bring rulers down from their thrones and lift up the humble.  And she did it without the support of family, with a strange midwife at her side, and a dingy manger to lay the child in as her broken and bleeding body was tended to.  Was this what she envisioned as she sung the Magnificat? Will generations call her blessed for this?  Or do we forget the pain, and the mess, and the unexpected in our vain attempts to sanitize the way God worked in history?

Are we willing to let God birth new life?