I have to say, that the Year C (Luke) Advent lectionary readings are my favourites, not just because you get Mary and the Magnificat (Luke 1:39-55)—but it doesn’t hurt.

Special thanks to Jemar Tisby for talking about the MLK Jr Nobel speech in a recent newsletter (https://jemartisby.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web) - it helped unlock this for me.

“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.”

What is a revolution?

For Marx, it was seizing the ‘mode of production.’ Lenin once said that the task of the Revolution was to smash the State.

We tend to associate revolutions with violence. We might think of the French or American Revolutions, or any number of demonstrations and protests over the past 100 or so year, that have sought political and social change and become violent—think perhaps of the Arab Spring.

Revolutionary violence was what the Romans feared, as they ruled Judea in the years around Jesus’ birth. A century of off-again-on-again civil war had not long been ended by the establishment of Augustus as the emperor.[1] They were not keen for a recurrence. And revolutionary violence is what many  people expected to accompany the coming of the Messiah. How else, after all, were God’s people to be freed from conquering powers? Some of you may be familiar with the people’s front of Judea, or the Judean people’s front…

Now, of course, revolutions are often violent—let’s not take that lightly. But at its core, a revolution is simply a fundamental transformation of something — a turning around of something. We might also say a revolution revolves around something – like the earth revolves on its axis.

And revolution is what the Magnificat is describing, the great proclamation of Mary that we read in today’s gospel—and sang in the wonderful hymn, Tell Out My Soul. In the world God is bringing into being through the child that Mary carries the poor and oppressed will be favoured; the arrogant scattered; rulers overthrown; the rich sent away empty-handed, and the hungry filled with good things.

This is not the world of the political order of the first century BC. It is not our world, either, if we are honest. It is a totally different kind of society, brought into being by the coming of Jesus. This is the kind of vision that made Desmond Tutu say that the Bible is the most subversive and revolutionary gift you could give someone.

When Mary arrives, John ‘leaps for joy’ in Elizabeth’s womb, and his mother is filled with the Holy Spirit, as they recognise the baby that Mary is carrying as the Lord and rejoice at his coming.

I wonder—do our hearts leap for joy at the vision of the Magnificat and what it tells us about what Jesus comes to do in the world? If they do not, what is it that causes us to quail? Perhaps it is something about the size and scale of the vision, the dramatic and revolutionary nature of the transformation it describes that nudges at our fears and feelings of being powerless or of things being out of control. I certainly think it has something to with revolution’s tendency to violence in the desperation for change.

***

60 years ago this month, the Rev’d Dr Martin Luther King Jr visited London and preached at St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral have been commemorating this recently,  and you can watch some of the events online. King was on his way to Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in the civil rights movement in the USA. In his acceptance speech he said, “nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time—the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression… nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation”

Nonviolence, for King, was not inherently law-abiding or ‘nice.’ It sought to actively challenge the ways in which the systems of the world in which he lived prevented the love and justice of God coming to fruition. To challenge the ways in which the world humiliates and impoverishes some and concentrates power and wealth amongst others. It intended to be discomforting and disruptive and to stand against oppression, but not to initiate violence—although, as King well knew, it might meet with it.

King recognised that it is easy for people to feel powerless in the world, to feel that they are not able to make a difference to challenges and evils that are historical, entrenched, and entangled in many aspects of life. He described this as feeling like being, “like flotsam and jetsam in the river of life”.

It is a feeling I often have at the moment, as I read the news and look at the state of the world. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Trump. Our own health and social care systems. The climate. The ongoing safeguarding crisis in the Church of England. These problems all feel too big, and it is easy to wonder if any change, let alone radical, revolutionary change is possible. This feeling, if you’re familiar with it, is the beginnings of despair.

But in his Nobel speech, King insisted that human beings always have agency, the ability to act, rather than being passively swept along, subject to the tides of history. Such agency, in defiance of the challenges of the world, does not require violence. Indeed, rooted in love and hope, and the belief that we are all called and made to participate in God’s world for good, it rejects violence—even as it may suffer it.

We find our example for this in the life and ministry of Jesus, who was discomforting and disruptive, but not violent. He was active in a tiny corner of the world And yet, Jesus’s ministry, in which the hungry were fed, the poor favoured, the rich sent away puzzling over answers that did not suit them, so threatened the rulers of the day that it provoked a violent reaction that led to his death.

***

Martin Luther King Jr, I think, took the Magnificat seriously as a vision of the world Jesus’ coming inaugurates—and so should we. The change it heralds is possible within the world with God, through Christ. He is the axis of this revolution. And even though the reality of sin and the world is such that we might not see the fullness of this transformation in our own lifetimes, this does not mean we shouldn’t work for it. We shall see it in the end.

In their Christmas letter this year, the patriarchs and heads of the churches in Jerusalem remind us that Christ’s birth sparked a spiritual revolution that turns hearts and minds towards the ways of justice, mercy, and peace.  The Magnificat is not calling just for a spiritual revolution—Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ life is deeply and explicitly political— but the external change must start internally, with a spark (like a candle flame). This comes from a vision, like that of Mary, which draws us and inspires us—causing our hearts to leap for joy. Giving us hope and courage in the face of the difficulties and despairs of the world.

Most of us will not find ourselves in positions like that of Martin Luther King Jr. But we do find ourselves in a time when disagreement, dissent and protest is met as something dangerous, to be threatened and repressed, perhaps with violence. Those who seek a change to the status quo continue to face decisions about how to discomfort and disrupt in pursuit of revolutionary change.

And revolutionary change is needed – to break us out of cycles of war and conflict, of the destruction of the planet, of rising financial inequality and social vulnerability, of protecting our own institutions at the expense of the vulnerable and those harmed by abuse. Too often, in the centuries since Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire, the church as an institution has shied away from the radical aspect of Jesus’ ministry and the revolutionary change it promises, in order to survive in the world.

I saw the film Conclave this week and was struck by the force of one of its characters’ claims that, in their worrying about the church’s institutions and their politicking over the next pope, they were failing to be the church, the body of Jesus Christ the Lord, who came to feed the hungry and scatter the proud. The ongoing revelations about safeguarding failures in our own Church of England suggest to me that we, too, have fallen prey to the same forces and fears, guarding ourselves against reputational risk and institutional failure at the expense of the vulnerable and hurt.

***

If we are to try and help change our world for the better, rather than to give in to this feeling of being ‘flotsam and jetsam’ in the flow of history, then we need to reconnect with the vision that gives us the hope to act. And we will need to look, in our own lives and places, for the processes and systems that humiliate and impoverish some and aggrandize and enrich others: to find ways to stand against them in ways that embrace Jesus’ love and courage, even at risk to ourselves.

For us, as Christians, an expression of our vision and dream is found in the Magnificat, the song of Mary. It is the promise of what God is doing and will do, of what has been made possible by the incarnation of Jesus, our Lord. A promise of a world, a society that is so radically different to that which we know that its establishment constitutes a revolution. We have, mostly, been taught to be scared of revolution, and we may need to try and get past some of that fear.

As we reflect today on the words of Mary, I pray that they will be the spark that reignites a spiritual revolution, turning all our hearts and minds towards the ways of justice, mercy, and peace, for only this can inspire and sustain the revolutionary transformation in which Jesus calls us join him.

[1] although they wouldn’t have used this title!