Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Luke · About this commentary
My Soul Magnifies the Lord
Luke 1:46-56
46 Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord. · WEB
A village girl answers with a song that turns the world upside down and puts it in the past tense.
"My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior" Luke 1:46–47.
The song is the first of four in these two chapters, and it is built almost entirely out of the older Scriptures — most of all out of Hannah's song, sung by another woman who had been given a child against expectation and answered with a poem about God overturning the strong 1 Samuel 2:1–10. Mary is not being original. She is singing the song of her people, and finding that it has come true in her.
God my Savior is worth noting in passing. She does not exempt herself.
"For he has looked at the humble state of his servant. For behold, from now on, all generations will call me blessed" Luke 1:48. Two halves that are hard to hold at once, and she holds them without strain. The word rendered humble state is lowness — not modesty of character but smallness of position. What she says is that God looked at someone with no standing, and that everyone afterward will know it.
Then the song widens from her own case to the way God works, and the verbs go into the past.
"He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty" Luke 1:51–53.
Nothing in that list has visibly happened. Herod is on his throne, Rome is in the country, and the singer is an unmarried pregnant girl in a hill village. The tense is the point: she is describing what God has done, repeatedly, all through the history she was raised on, and treating what has just happened to her as one more instance of it. Once you have understood that God works this way, the future can be sung in the past tense.
And the reversals are concrete. Thrones, food, money. This is not a poem about inner attitudes, and the book will not treat it as one — the same reversals return as blessings and woes on a plain Luke 6:20–26, as a rich man building barns, and as a beggar at a gate.
"He has given help to Israel, his servant, that he might remember mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his offspring forever" Luke 1:54–55.
The song ends by tying all of it back to a promise made centuries earlier. What God is doing is not new policy; it is memory. He said he would, and he has not forgotten.
Mary stayed with her about three months, and then returned to her house Luke 1:56. She stays until Elizabeth's time is nearly due and then goes home to Nazareth, to face what she has to face.
settled What this mark means