Last December I texted my friend Beth, who was raised Catholic: “I cannot stop thinking about Mary the mother of Jesus? And kind of weeping a little??” And she responded: “’TIS THE SEASON TO CRY ABOUT MARY.”

And now in 2023, a year of weeping for the world and memorizing the Magnificat, 'tis the season...to guttural-yell with Mary.

Why the Magnificat matters

It does little good to study sacred text without knowing a bit about its context, so I’ve been doing some research into first-century rural Israel, and obviously I want to share it with you.

I think the Magnificat’s revolutionary significance lies in the contextual details that most readers of Luke’s gospel would’ve understood implicitly, but that are lost on most contemporary readers. Some of these I learned only recently, after a whole life of Christianity. (I'm not talking slogans like "Mary was a refugee," which—though true—don't convey the full power here.)

Now I’ll welcome third-grade Michelle into the room, to share her report. Please imagine that it is immaculately (HEYo!) handwritten on wide-ruled notebook paper, with excellent margins.

Alexis Rose shimmying

My Report on Mary, by Michelle Augustine

Here are some things we can confidently guess about Mary, from either (secular) historical record or general societal norms of the time:

  • Mary is Jewish. When our story begins, her homeland has been forcibly occupied by the Roman Empire for about 60 years. She’s not a Roman citizen; she has no rights of citizenship. During Mary's lifetime, Rome is tangibly and often capriciously exerting control over Jews (e.g., demanding that everyone—even if heavily pregnant—travel long distances to register with the government. A pretty onerous power play).
  • The Roman Senate has installed a puppet “client king,” Herod the Great, to rule the people of Israel on its behalf. Herod is a brutally tyrannical psychopath; when he dies (within a couple of years of Jesus’ birth), the Jews rebel against Rome.
  • Peasants like Mary’s family are either subsistence farmers or, having lost their ancestral land to the Romans, tenant farmers or manual laborers. They owe crushing taxes to at least three entities: the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, Herod, and Rome. They are poor poor.
  • Mary is between 12 and 14 years old—betrothed young to maximize childbearing—and in an arranged engagement to an older guy. He’s a manual laborer; i.e., he can’t support himself on the land and has to travel to find work. (He’s not a “carpenter” as in “crafter of artisanal rocking horses;” he’s a day-laboring handyman.)
  • Mary’s a peasant in a tiny backwater village located about four miles from the city of Sepphoris, a site of repeated and violent Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupiers. (For example: to quash the rebellions after Herod’s death, Roman legions besieged and reconquered Sepphoris, crucified hundreds of rebels, and sold countless others into slavery.) Sepphoris is near enough to Nazareth that, in a few years, Joseph and Jesus might walk there daily to contract themselves to the Roman governors as stonemasons.
  • She’s named Miriam (“Mary” is anglicized, obv), after Israel’s primary revolutionary heroine. Miriam saved her younger brothers, Moses and Aaron, from an early death and helped deliver Israel from enslavement in Egypt. A prophet, Miriam sings the well-known and terrifying hymn in the book of Exodus about God throwing horses and riders into the sea. Revolution is in Mary's very name.

This is Mary.

All of this context was likely understood by Luke’s intended readers. The insistence on Mary's social nothingness is almost excessive, really, a spotlight shining on the Magnificat: Mary is extra-poor, young, a girl. She lives in a hotbed of pathetically, violently failed revolutions against history’s strongest political power. She’s unmarried and pregnant, and it’s not like Nazareth is Diagon Alley, where magical explanations like angelic visitation are routine or acceptable. (According to the gospel text, she and Jesus both continue to get shit for his conception: when people call him “son of Mary,” they’re pointing out that no one knows who his dad is.)

Luke puts the Magnificat—a revolutionary hymn extolling God’s plan to (euphemism alert) flatten all human hierarchies—into the mouth of Miriam, who is least and last on every single power spectrum.

Luke is saying: “Listen. This is how the story of Jesus starts, with the poorest of the poor calling down God’s wrath on the rich and powerful. This furious firebrand with nothing to lose? She’s mother and teacher to Jesus, the Christ. Buckle up.”

I want to say more about this: about how, from my privileged place in the world, honestly reveling in the Magnificat is masochistic; about the incongruity between the Magnificat and the limp lil Mary we’ve seen depicted through the ages; about how so many churches cut Mary’s mic after verse 50, before she hits her revolutionary stride, while she still sounds like a Nice Grateful Lady instead of the slightly crazed protestor with her fist in the air and tears streaming down her face.

But instead I’ll just leave you with impoverished, adolescent and pregnant, least-of-the-least Miriam, and with her breathtaking prophetic roar.

And omg come back next week for maybe the best thing I’ve learned all year.

Did you know all of this about Mary/Miriam's life? What does it do for/to you? Or are Beth and I the only ones crying about Mary? xoxo