It is often reported as quite irritating that when meeting with people, we are so quickly questioned about our job. In french “Qu'est-ce que tu fais dans la vie ?” as if the only meaning of doing something in life was to have a job ! But I guess that, about this question, we're all a little guilty. I confess I am. I think I'm curious to know what is someone's job because I think it's the better way to get to know him. Our job says something about our personality. Curiously, nobody seems to wonder about God's job. It sounds silly to say that of course, but most of the time we just think of who God is, and we don't think about what he does. As Christians, we consider God as a person, so we should really wonder what he does, and how, and perhaps it's to that kind of question that the text of Luke leads us today.
We all know well I think this beautiful song of Mary. A song of worship in Israelite tradition. It reminds us of Hannah's song, a song she sings at Samuel's consecration. What should strike us in most of those traditional Israelite songs is the focus on what God DOES for his people. What does he do ? God rescues his people and take care of them. It's a job of salvation. In the Bible, God acts because he is a living God, he is the God of the living ones. Time passed and God's people understood that this salvation was mostly a salvation from sin, from eternal death, the death of the soul and the death of the heart. That became clear with the coming of Jesus. God comes to save us but he saves us by the incarnation, in the human person of Jesus, and why ? Because God doesn't want to work alone. Is he just a sociable worker ? Does he want to make friends ? Or can't we think a bit more and understand that if his true aim is to save us from sin, if his true aim is to make us live of his life, it should be considered that we have to work with him for that. I think this is the great lesson Mary can teach us. Elizabeth says “Blessed is she who has believed”(v45) because this young girl understood she could play a part in God's work. We can even say that she played her part so well that” all generations had call her blessed”(v48). So let's follow her for a little while !
It always seemed to me a little difficult to consider Mary. We hear so many different things about who she was, and especially when coming, as I do, from a roman catholic background. Our culture makes it also difficult for all of us. So perhaps the best thing to do is to open the Gospels. What strikes me is that Mary, very often represented in our religious art and churches as joining her hands and looking at the sky, is in fact a really active woman. We focus on who she is, but we ought to focus on what she does.

First of all, we can notice that if the Gospels don't say a lot about Mary, she is there at each important time in Jesus' life, and not only in his childhood. For example, we can find her at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, at the wedding at Cana. Then we find her following him on the road, either listening to him with the others, or trying to bring him back home ! She is there at the cross, but also with the early church. We can guess that there must have been for her great times of wondering and misunderstanding, but she remained faithful. Seeing Mary as an active woman, I like to believe that her pregnancy wasn't “an accident” ! What I mean is that we can guess that she had great hopes for her people and she was open to God's will, open to take an active part in salvation, even if she didn't know what she could exactly do. An old tradition teaches that she had decided to remain a virgin. Perhaps it's a way to understand that she entirely gave herself to God, not only her soul, but also her body, and in fact God acted through her body.
The story of Mary, the question of her body, her pregnancy, seems to me very important in a theological way. We have to be concrete with God, because he acts with us in a concrete way. Our spiritual life isn't a virtual life. The life we live with God isn't in our brain, or just in our spirit. This life is shown in our words and acts, our bodies have to make a connection with the world. Believing in God makes a real change and leads to act...but do we really think we could respond to God and act with him ?
We can have a bad opinion about ourselves, thinking we can't do anything to change the world. As a consequence, we can just keep on complaining about the (bad) way it is. But if we think a little about this attitude, it seems also quite comforting to believe everything should come from God. How comforting for many people today to think that if there is suffering in this world, if everything goes wrong, that simply means that God doesn't exist....Believing in God implies a way of seeing ourselves, accepting us as sinners, accepting that we're not acting as we should, and this is why lot of things can go wrong. It is said to be pessimistic to consider human being as a sinner, but on the other hand, it means also that if we act well, things around us can be better...
The least we can say about Mary is that the way she acted made a difference to the world ! Even if we don't believe, we have to admit it !In this song of Luke's gospel, we can see that she understands that she won't keep this salvation for herself. What happens to her, happens in fact to all mankind. When God reveals himself to one person, it is always in order that this chosen one reveals what he saw, and what he heard. God's love is communicative. Salvation comes from one person to the whole world. Are we aware of this responsibility ?
So before starting working with God, the right question is “Do we believe we can work with God ?” . In fact, it is not so much the way Mary acted which changed the world, but her faith in God's power : “Blessed is she who has believed” (v45). Our faith must come first and that's what Jesus often reminded to his disciples. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you. (Luke 17,6). The problem Jesus seemed to have with his disciples wasn't they didn't act enough. He never tells them : “How lazy you are, why don't you work more ?”, but he reproaches them that they don't believe enough ! We have to be realistic, we have our own human strength which isn't very great, but as Christians we also believe, or should believe, that God could give us his strength. Mary was convinced of God's intervention in history and in human life. If she, a virgin, became pregnant ,is that there are things that don't depend on our human means ! We just have to cooperate, and Mary teaches us what kind of person we should be to be able to work with God.
Mary tells us that God “has been mindful of the humble state of his servant” (v48) and if Mary has been “blessed among women”(v42) is because she is the kind of person God loves. What is this kind of person ?
- The poor : Mary reminds us of God's preference for the poor. Knowing Jesus' message, but also as good westerners as we are, we often insist on “the poverty in spirit”, but it's sometimes a little hypocritical. I'm wealthy in fact but in my spirit I am poor ! Luke's gospel really insists on the poverty of a social and economic condition. As I said before, if Mary brings us back to concrete things, we have to understand that God loves people who are poor in their way of living. Of course, God doesn't want us to starve, to be cold and uncomfortable, but he wants us to share with one another and he likes us not to be afraid of tomorrow, not being afraid of being hungry, cold or uncomfortable, because we should “seek first for the kingdom” (Matthew6). Question de priorité...
- The humble : in the same way, we should sometimes wonder if our humility isn't more in our words than in our acts. Do we just seem to be ill at ease with compliments, trying to minimize the good or interesting things we can do ? This may be polite, but it isn't the humility God wants for us. We have to be humble in our acts, in serving each other, in acting as if my neighbor was more important than I am...Then we can freely respond to God. We don't have to worry about satisfying our ego, or about what other people would think about our behavior.
- The willing : So being humble doesn't mean we should consider us as being nothing, and so we should do nothing. If we have to serve, we have to serve voluntarily, with all our will, as Jesus gave his life for his friends freely and willingly. God doesn't want us to be victims, and the least we can say is that Mary doesn't seem to be a victim of God's will ! Do we agree to do God's will only from time to time, when we fancy it, (and in this case, we take the risk to become a victim), or are we ready to invest our life in his service, in our neighbor's service ? Is God's service making sense for our whole life ?
- The joyful : What I've just said : being poor, humble, willing, can make us think that God's service has to be difficult, as if it were a kind of sacrifice. Well, some people consider serving God and one's neighbor as a sort of chore. They don't necessarily say it, but it is shown in their faces. I don't think God wants us to do something too hard for us. Sometimes we can have to give a lot of our strengths, sometimes we may have to face hard times and fearful situations, but if we don't feel joy, then there is a problem. God wants us to do exactly what he created us for, so that can't make us unhappy. We are not meant to be slaves. See how Mary is absolutely filled with joy in this song. Yet, she could be very afraid & she could be very worried. And perhaps she was, but her joy is stronger. God wants us to be as little children : can we be a little more confident ?
- The hopeful : In fact, what really seem to lack in our today's world is hope and confidence. Optimistic people are always seen as strange people. That's true that there is a foolish way of being optimists : when you don't want to face the real problems, you just try to persuade yourself that everything will be all right. In fact, those are the real pessimistic. See today, for example, with ecological problems, how often we hear “it's too late to do anything”, so the conclusion is to let go things the way they are. It can be linked with lack of faith, thinking there's nothing we can do, but do you think it was obvious for Mary to believe she could do something for her people ? A young girl was nothing in ancient society, and moreover, at that time, with the roman occupation...what could she expect to change ? But perhaps she thought of Hannah, and what the Lord would be ready to do if she accepted to let him act through her life.
So, we don't have to be a VIP or a superhero to do something for the kingdom ! See in Mary's song, how God is the subject of all the verbs. That means that God doesn't rely on us to make everything all right, as if he couldn't manage alone...but he wants us to be active with him, because the way we act in our life is our response to his love.
- That doesn't mean we should be busy all the time ! It's even the other way wrong : God wants us to be available. We don't have to accomplish a list of tasks to satisfy a boss ! The job we have to do is mostly to open the gate to God's spirit, nothing more, and nothing less. It's a hard job, but running everywhere and trying to do everything won't help. Sister Emmanuelle tells that, arriving in Cairo, she wanted so much to save the world that she didn't take time to breathe, even forgetting to pray. After a while, she realized she had to slow down, because she became sad and nervous, and everything she tried to do went wrong. God knows we have little power, he doesn't want us to save the world, he did it, he wants us to accept being saved, so our real job is about changing ourselves, it's a person to be.
- So yes God works with the poor, the humble, the willing, the joyful and the hopeful but this is also all of our job : becoming poor and humble, becoming a willing person, joyful and hopeful. Because God is like that, God is poor, God is humble, God is a willing God, he is joyful and filled with hope ! We have to learn how to imitate Jesus. By incarnation, God shows us exactly the person he wants us to become like.
- But becoming like Jesus is still something impossible for our own strength...So I better say : to let Jesus fill in our lives and our hearts. We have to let Jesus grow inside of us, at the image of Mary's pregnancy. Mary is filled with joy because she can feel God's life growing inside her. THAT IS INCARNATION, everyday we can live and renew God's incarnation in our own life.
So, who is God ?
What kind of worker is God ? Seeing his actions, what can we say about Him ?
Through incarnation, God gives deliverance to the despised, restore the poor and makes his justice reign, so we can say with Mary that God is holy.
Through incarnation, God comes to share our lives, to share our suffering and joys, our doubts and anguishes, to free us from sins by his own death. So yes, God is faithful, he doesn't lie, we can rely on him, so yes we can say with Mary that God is merciful. Through incarnation, God defeats the devil and the power of sin, and God makes us pass from death to a new life. So we can say with Mary that God is strong.
But most of all, see how mercy is said to be the root of all God's acts. The word is repeated twice, at the beginning and at the end of the list of all his actions. God is merciful because Incarnation means that he comes to us. “He has been mindful of the humble state of all his servants”
God comes to share his life with human beings, that's his definitive covenant in JC. He doesn't need us, but he wants to need us. He accepts that we can work with him for our salvation, because he is merciful. It's Elizabeth's wonder : “But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”.
So let's remember this great favor for the next coming days, and let's try to live conscious of the great blessing we have in Baby Jesus : God coming to us, God waiting for us, God hoping for us.