Frederick Danker observes in his commentary on Luke (Jesus and the New Age, Frederick W. Danker, Fortress Press, 1988), that deities have been viewed as arbiters of justice and deliverers of the oppressed since ancient times. No people were more acquainted with the dynamics of reversal than were the Greeks, who gave the theme its loftiest expression in the Homeric epics and the tragedies of Aischylos and Euripides.

The poet Archilochos expressed a consensus:
The deities are ever just. Full oft they raise
those who lie prostrate on the darkened earth.
Full oft the prosperous are tripped, their bellies
to the sky; and miseries untold attend them.
Mindless in aimless poverty they wander.

When asked what God was doing, Chilon, the Lacedaemonian poet, replied: “humbling the lofty and exalting the humble” (Diogenes Laertius 1.69).  Mary recalls the words of her own ancient faith tradition. Mary’s Magnificat is a literary quilt that stitches together various parts of the Hebrew scriptures, first expressing Mary’s personal experience in vv. 46-50 and then praising the Savior of Israel in vv. 51-55. She echoes Hannah’s words from 1 Sam. 1:11 where God remembers those who have been humiliated (in Hannah’s case, by infertility) and she conceived and bore a son. The Magnificat also recalls Deut. 10:17-18 where God’s will is executed as justice for the widow and orphan, as love for strangers, and provision of food and clothing for the destitute. God’s mighty acts are also expressed in the rescue of the oppressed and the rejection of the wicked in Psalm 146.

By Rev. Jill Edens, Pastor, United Church of Chapel Hill (UCC)