Luke 6 (NRSVue): 17 He came down [from the mountain] with them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. 18 They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases, and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 “Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled. […].”.
What does the Kingdom of God look like? Till Sunday morning, I’ve got to confess, I had no idea whatsoever. It hadn’t occurred to me even to ask the question. Instead, I’ve always inclined to the belief we can’t look for a physical location. Like Jesus of Nazareth once told a Pharisee (Luke 17:21 NRSVue), we can’t say, “‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you,” (Some ancient manuscripts say “within you.”)
But now I’m reconsidering. I still think the kingdom is within us, but I also think it must look a lot like a hillside that gently slopes down to the Sea of Galilee. About halfway down the hill, on sort of a level terrace, a Franciscan shrine called the Church of the Beatitudes celebrates the tradition that Jesus preached the Beatitudes in this level place.
Or the kingdom just might look like Jesus’ mother Mary singing to him.
The song of Mary, perhaps better known as the Magnificat, is among my favorite passages of scripture. In its many settings, from the Anglican plainsong I grew up with to Bach and, more recently, the “Canticle of the Turning” by liturgist Rory Cooney of St. Anne Catholic Community in suburban Chicago, it’s one of my very favorite pieces of music.
I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but the Magnificat and the Beatitudes — blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, those who weep and so on — proclaim the same message. Especially Luke’s version. “Blessed are the poor. […] But woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation. / Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” Woe, woe, woe.
Yes, it is the kingdom message. But in a lullaby?
Well, yes, it makes sense. Maybe not to an infant, but I can imagine an older Jesus hearing his mother sing the canticle. At 13 he’d be ready for bar mitzvah (or its first-century equivalent), and he’d be familiar with the ethical implications of the law and the prophets behind it. Especially, again, if you compare Luke’s version of the Beatitudes to the corresponding passage in the Magnificat:
(Luke 1 NRSVue): 52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.
But first, we need to set the scene in Luke’s account. It’s a bit different to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, which has a slightly different setting and is somewhat spiritualized. “When Jesus saw the crowds,” says Matthew (5:1-3 NRSVue), “he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he began to speak and taught them, saying: 3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’.”
So does Matthew let the rest of us off the hook?
I’ll leave it to others to argue that. I can swing both ways. He may spiritualize poverty, but he adds, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Surely there’s some leveling at work here; in fact, Luke’s account is sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain to distinguish it from the Sermon on the Mount. The setting is important. Matthew has Jesus isolated with his disciples up on a mountain; Luke brings them down to a bit of level ground, mingling with everyone else.
Kind of like the folks in the pews today on a Sunday morning.
So Sunday in church, I’m listening to Pastor Mary and I’m daydreaming — just a little, let the record reflect I’m still paying attention — about the warm November day I visited the Church of the Beatitudes on he north shore of the Sea of Galilee. I wasn’t much taken with the neo-Byzantine architecture — I’m more of a neo-classical or Gothic revival guy myself — but it’s surrounded by lovely gardens, and the bougainvillea was in full bloom. But Pastor brings me back, at least partway back, (around 17:00 in the livestream video linked below) when she says:
There’s usually a mix of people, isn’t there, in any crowd. There’s probably some poor people, there’s probably some sick people in that crowd there that day. There are probably people who are tired because their dog kept them up all night. There are probably some rich people there, some successful people. And there may have been some people who just tagged along to see what was going to happen.
Not all of these people are going to like this stuff about blessed are the poor. (At least Matthew helpfully adds, poor in spirit.) The disciples who had recently left their boats, their nets and their livelihood must have wondered exactly what they were getting into! But I’m sitting out there in the pews, nodding my head and thinking, yeah, that’s what the kingdom must be like.
And then Pastor hits me upside the head with the Magnificat. Very gently, of course, but I’d never made the connection with the Beatitudes before. She laid it out like this (beginning around 24:30):
In Matthew’s gospel he’s up on that mountain and in Luke’s gospel he comes down to that level place, and I wonder if standing in that level place, wanting to lift up the lowly and bring down the high, I wonder if he isn’t remembering his mother’s song. My soul proclaims —. Right? Bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly. It was a song that announced what the kingdom of God, God’s reign, was like. Very different from this world’s reign. God’s economy is vastly different from ours.
And if I weren’t such a nice, well-mannered, decorous Lutheran, I’d be shouting, “Amen! Preach, sister!”
So I did what might be considered a very Lutheran thing. I went home and looked it up. Sola scriptura, and all that. Turns out Martin Luther wrote a couple of commentaries on the Beatitudes and the Magnificat. One, on the Sermon on the Mount, need not detain us very long. Luther comes down heavily on Matthew’s side of the equation: “For it is said plainly and bluntly: Blessed are the poor; and yet there is another little word along with that, viz. spiritually poor, so that nothing is accomplished by any one’s being bodily poor, and having no money and property.”
In this, I would imagine, Luther was a typical 16th-century German. Or European. Or a 16th-century man, period. He added, in tones that I am quite sure I would have approved of if I heard him preach at the town church (Stadtkirche) in Wittenberg, where he occasionally filled in as a supply pastor. “Therefore a lord or prince must and cannot be poor; for he must have all sorts of possessions suited to his office and rank.” Not a whole lot of help here for 21st-century Lutherans looking for guidance in a dying secular empire.
Of more interest is a commentary Luther completed in 1521 when he was hiding out in Wartburg Castle at the behest of his patron Elector John “the Steadfast” of Saxony. Titled “Das Magnifcat verdeutschet und ausgelegt” (the Magnificat laid out and translated into German), it was written for the elector’s 17-year-old son, Duke John Frederick. Romanian theologian Maria Curtean says it was similar to Erasmus’ Education of A Christian Prince and “one of the most beautiful and illustrative of [Luther’s] writings concerning his concept of education for rulers.”
More to the point for our purposes, however, Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat offers an extended glimpse of his concept of Mary, mother of God. An extended excerpt is availible on the Göttinger Predigten im Internet (Göttingen Sermons on the Internet) website.1 It’s thoroughly grounded in Luther’s time and place, but it offers 21st-century Lutherans in the pews a better vision for how to go about daily living.
To get there, I have to set aside some preconceived ideas. For one thing, I relate to Mary’s song through a liturgical lens. Growing up in the Episcopal Church, I chanted the Magnificat during Christmastide and festival days. (We had a shorter version for vespers; in my parish church choir, we called it — what else? — the Magnifi-kitten.) As an adult, I have tended to see it as a call for social justice: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; / he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” But I don’t know how I’d relate to that if I were a comfortable burgher hearing it in the Stadtkirche on Sunday morning.
And I can’t quite wrap my head around the mental image of Mary singing “he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” to the baby Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem with shepherds and philosophers from the East gathered around.
Luckily, I don’t have to. Mary, as Luther describes her in his homily dedicated to Prince Frederick John, is all about humility:
The tender Mother of Christ […] teaches us, with her words and by the example of her experience, how to know, love, and praise God. For she boasts, with heart leaping for joy and praising God, that He regarded her despite her low estate and nothingness. To her neighbors and their daughters she was but a simple maiden, tending the cattle and doing the housework, and doubtless esteemed no more than any poor maidservant today, who does as she is told around the house.
Whatever else you can say about him, Luther was a man of his time, and his time was very much a time of patriarchy and unquestioned hierarchy. (Luther’s beef was with Rome, not hierarchy in general and certainly not with the Electors of Saxony who were his patrons.) It also needs to be said he was still a single monk when he wrote the commentary on the Magnificat. It was only later that Luther married Katie von Bora, who not only managed a sprawling household in the former Augustinian monastery, bred cattle, operated a farm and a brewery, and apparently turned a profit on the entire enterprise. I don’t want to speculate what she would have made of Luther’s assertion about maidservants “who [did] as they were told around the house,” but I suspect she found effective ways of dealing with it.
Surely it’s worthy of notice that Mary, as Luther imagined her in 1521, was nobody’s fool. At least she had a shrewd eye for the hierarchy of first-century Palestine, name-checking the high and the mighty. Her thoughts (expressed very much in Luther’s 16th-century German voice) also offer an interesting whiff of justification by grace through faith:
This is what Mary means: God has regarded me, a poor, despised, and lowly maiden, though He might have found a rich, renowned, noble, and mighty queen, the daughter of princes and great lords. He might have found the daughter of Annas or of Caiaphas, who held the highest position in the land. But He let His pure and gracious eyes light on me and used so poor and despised a maiden, in order that no one might glory in His presence, as though he were worthy of this, and that I must acknowledge it all to be pure grace and goodness and not at all my merit or worthiness.
Annas and Caiaphas were high priests of Israel during Jesus’ lifetime. Their wives had their station in life, and Mary had hers. In his homily for young John Frederick, Luther makes it clear the meek and the humble are heirs to the kingdom. Good advice for a 17-year-old prince, and good advice for all of us. Says Luther:
Behold how completely she traces all to God, lays claim to no works, no honor, no fame. She conducts herself as before, when she still had nothing of all this; she demands no higher honors than before. She is not puffed up, does not vaunt herself or proclaim with a loud voice that she is become the Mother of God. She seeks not any glory, but goes about her usual household duties, milking the cows, cooking the meals, washing pots and kettles, sweeping out the rooms, and performing the work of maidservant or housemother in lowly and despised tasks, as though God had not so flooded her with grace more than the others.
By all accounts, Prince John Frederick took his instruction from Luther to heart. As a youth, he was tutored by Luther’s mentor and confessor, George Spalatin, and through him developed, as Wikipeda puts it, a lifelong “devotion to the teachings of Luther.” He was a signatory to the Augsburg Confession of 1530, a foundational Lutheran document, and succeeded his father, John the Steadfast, upon his death in 1532.
Elector John Frederick “the Magnanimous” continued in that office until 1547, when imperial troops loyal to the Vatican occupied Wittenberg in the first of the 16th- and 17th-century religious wars; in exile at Weimar, he supported Katie von Bora after Luther’s death in 1546 and established the nearby University of Jena along Protestant principles. It has always been considered “one of the most politically radical universities in Germany,” according to Wikipedia, and among its faculty and alumni are the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Romantic-era poet Friedrich Schiller and Karl Marx. Now named after Schiller, it was one of the first universities to teach the theory of evolution in the mid-1800s.
But all of that would come later. In 1521, Martin Luther wrote for the edification of his young protege that Mary sang her canticle:
[…] so that through her the hearts of all men should be filled with such knowledge of God that they might confidently say: “O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, what great comfort God has shown us in you, by so graciously regarding your unworthiness and low estate. This encourages us to believe that henceforth He will not despise us poor and lowly ones, but graciously regard us also, according to your example.”
To Luther, the Song of Mary wasn’t about Mary. It was always, and only, about the unmerited grace of God.
Notes
1 The Göttingen Sermons version carries this notice: “What follows is a translation of exerpts from Martin Luther’s work on the Magnificat. Klaus Schwarzwaeller has chosen these excerpts out of Luther’s much longer work to present the heart of Luther’s understanding and application of this prayer of Mary and to present it here in sermon length and in a form accessible to the modern reader. This English version was pieced together by Bruce E. Shields from the translation by A.T.W. Steinhaeuser in Luther’s Works, Volume 21, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956).” Formerly published by the University of Göttingen, the Göttingen Sermons were transferred in 2017 to the Center for Church Development at the University of Zurich.
Links and Citations
Maria Curtean, “Martin Luther’s Interpretation on Magnifcat. Vademecum of Christian Education for Rulers,” 9 Review of Ecumenical Studies Sibiu (2017): https://www.academia.edu/66978169/Martin_Luther_s_Interpretation_on_Magnificat_Vademecum_of_Christian_Education_for_Rulers.
Martin Luther, Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. Charles A, Hay (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1892): 12. https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/luther/Commentary%20on%20The%20Sermon%20on%20The%20-%20Martin%20Luther.pdf.
Peace Lutheran Church, Springfield, Ill., February 16, 2025. The 6th Sunday after Epiphany [livestreamed service] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29hZQcKzhbk.
Rabbi John L. Rosove, “History of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah,” ReformJudaism.org: Jewish Life in Your Life https://reformjudaism.org/history-barbat-mitzvah.
Klaus Schwarzwäller, ed., “Luthers ‘Magnificat’ (English version ),” trans. Bruce E. Shields, Göttinger Predigten im Internet [Göttingen Sermons on the Internet] Universität Zürich, Oct. 8, 2020 https://www.theologie.uzh.ch/apps/gpi/luthers-magnificat-english-version/.
[Uplinked Feb. 21, 2025]
Ordinary Time 