Undermining the Overlords

Undermining the Overlords--December 14, 2016

[Mary said...] "His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts." [Luke 1:50-51]

Here is one of the places where Mary's words--the very words of Scripture, the words of the Mother of the Messiah no less--are hard for me. And yet, to be honest, it is the difficulty that gives me a surprising kind of hope.

What is hard for me about these words of Mary's is that she speaks them like they are accomplished facts, rather than wishful thinking.  She doesn't simply long for the proud and puffed up to be taken down a few pegs.  She doesn't merely say, "Wouldn't it be nice if the world worked like that?" like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, pulling Marshall McLuhan out from off-screen to chastise a pompous blowhard in line ahead of him at the movie theater, before Allen looks at the camera and says, "Wouldn't it be great if we could do things like this in real life?"  Mary doesn't just imagine, a la John Lennon's famous song, that things might be or could be different.  Mary sings like it is true... like God has already done it.

And the thing is... in this life, it sure doesn't look like the proud and pompous have been scattered or quieted.  The arrogant have a way of shouting more, barking louder, and patting themselves on the back, and it sure can look like they win the day.  From the days of the obnoxiously narcissistic Roman emperors and generals going on victory tours to try and impress the crowds of the vanquished and conquered people, and ever after, there is this recurring impulse with the proud ones of history to overplay their hand. They can't just win--they have to convince you it was an utterly overwhelming triumph.  They can't just leave wounded hearts to heal--they have to rub salt in the wound.  They cannot imagine that somehow there are minority reports like Mary's that dare to say the emperor is wearing no clothes, and they cannot hear a word of reality to bring them back down to earth--that sounds too much like criticism to the ears of the proud.  And here is the terribly irony--it is often the proud and puffed up who have the most fragile egos, in all reality.  I suppose that makes sense by the laws of physics, too--a balloon that is fully inflated with the hot air of your breath will explode with just the slightest prodding from a sharp pin. So it is with history's "proud."  They sure seem to win the day an awful lot, though.

That's what makes it hard for me to hear Mary's words.  So often, the proud aren't scattered--they are clumped together in seats of power and prestige, from Pharaoh in Egypt to Babylon and Rome and in every empire since.  But Mary speaks with such confidence, such certainty.  And that's odd just by itself, because surely Mary herself hadn't seen much evidence of the proud being scattered in her own lifetime.  Just the opposite, really.  Every year (at least), the Romans would march into Jerusalem, their occupied capital, with swords and helmets flashing and banners with Caesar's image flapping in the wind, just to remind everybody in Judea who was in charge.  Thirty-odd years after Mary's pregnancy, of course, an itinerant rabbi would stage his own subversive version of this imperial parade coming into Jerusalem riding on a borrowed donkey while the crowds waved palm branches--but when Mary sang the words of Luke 1, that moment we know as Palm Sunday was barely a gleam in her eye.

So Mary has something in common with us--we still live in this world order where the proud don't seem particularly humbled yet, and they still lord it over everybody else.  For that matter, if we are unflinchingly honest, there is that proud and puffed up streak in all of us to some degree, and we have a tendency of resisting anything that would let the hot air out of our balloons.  We don't like to admit we are, or ever were, wrong.  We are the ones who don't like to hear or consider the possibility that there is more to the story than we can see.  We don't like to admit our own blind spots or biases.  We, all of us, are all sure we've got it right, and "they" are the ones who have it all wrong.  And we have conveniently engineered news channels, social media feeds, and our circles of friends to become echo chambers that will only reinforce what we already think.  If all I ever hear are stories and comments that already fit with what I already believe, well, then, I'll never have to admit to being incorrect or incomplete, and I'll never have to have my perspective widened.

But Mary's song keeps calling to us and pulling at us.  Mary sings about a God who has scattered the proud, and with that, at the very least she forces each of us to ask ourselves where we are in need of being brought back down to earth, and where each of us has been the arrogant one tromping on the people around us.  And you know what else--Mary forces us to consider that God just might have already begun to humble the proud... by coming among us in Jesus.  Maybe, just maybe, Mary was onto something--and the way to undermine the puffed-up and pompous powerbrokers of history is to begin to undermine the way they define themselves.  Instead of accepting the rules they play by, where shows of power or influence or prestige or force or wealth are the measuring rods of being "great," what if you save the world without an army or two coins to rub together, and instead save the world with self-giving suffering love that breaks open the grip of death?  What if you save the world, not by raising up one more empire to take down the last one, until the next one comes along, but by refusing to play the world's ridiculous game of "King of the Hill" in the first place? What if it turns out that God is an awful lot more subversive and surprising than we realized, and if God is not the one propping up the powerful in their comfortable positions, but rather the One who calls into question all of history's pompous victory tours by riding into town on a donkey toward his own execution?  And what if Mary was on to that all along, and wants us to see that from the beginning, too?

If you have found yourself, now or ever, in that place of darkness and despair because it doesn't feel like the arrogant of history get the humbling they deserve, then maybe what we most deeply need is Mary's song to point us to Jesus, and then to take up the cause of dethroning the proud by taking an honest look inside ourselves for blind spots and biases we did not want to admit were there.

Thank God for inspiring the revolutionary voice of Mary, who sang this subversive tune into the ears of her infant son, so that he could indeed break open the stagnant old patterns of history.

Lord God, give us the courage today both to look at ourselves for places we have puffed ourselves up, and to look hopefully at your way of turning the tables on the arrogant and the pompous, so that all of us may find ourselves lifted up together.