This coming sabbath marks the third Sunday of Advent when the lectionary forces us to hear a song that should tighten our collective sphincters. When Mary reaches the home of her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with John the Baptist, the Mother of God exclaims:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 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…”

As Samuel L. Jackson’s Jewels tells Tim Roth’s Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction,

“If you were paying attention to that bit of the Bible, it means your ass.”

For most of us upper middle class do-gooders, the Magnificat sounds like it means our ass.

No wonder many churches persist in hiring cantors to sing it in gilded but indecipherable Latin. If we’re bold to venture honesty, to hear that rich folks like ourselves will be sent empty away does not strike us as good news of great joy. The Lord showing us the strength of his arm against folks like us, toppling us from our privileged perches, does not much sound like the Jesus we think we know.

I’m not sure what it might mean for us who are prideful to be scattered in the imaginations of our hearts, but I’m fairly certain that when such a scattering comes I’d rather you go first.

Mary here seems to be the source material for her boy’s Beautitudes. Stanley Hauerwas says of the Beatitudes, “They are not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.” The Kingdom, as Jesus breaks it down— and, he should know since he IS the Kingdom— belongs to those who do not really resemble you, dear reader. 

Just as with the Beautitudes, the Magnificat begs still another question:

Can the poor and the oppressed nonetheless also be unrighteous? Are the poor blessed by virtue of being poor, possessing an inherent righteousness, or do they not also need atonement made? Can a victim of systemic sin still be a sinner in need of forgiveness? And speaking of victims, what about victimizers? If God’s preferential option is for the former, can the latter be justified?

After all, seldom do we include in our manger scenes or Christmas celebrations the last song sung in Luke’s nativity wherein Simeon calls the baby Jesus “Salvation” and foreshadows the heartache Mary will suffer as a result of her son’s sufferings, for our sake. 

For us and our salvation, as the Nicene Creed confesses it. 

Sure enough, this coming Sunday Mary’s fist-shaking protest song will be dispatched to lay Law rather than proclaim Gospel. Preachers will exhort their hearers to go and do likewise— scatter the proud, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the Mitt Romneys and Michael Bloombergs of the world packing. 

But, I wonder if employing Mary’s song for imperatives exhorting social justice is, in fact, to narrow (or flatten) the frame of a season where we long for the one who 

“…was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters… Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people (Hebrews 2).”

According to the Book of Hebrews, those whom Jesus is not afraid to call brothers and sisters are not those who possess an inherent righteousness but those who’ve been made righteous by his blood.

As Pope Benedict writes, to “cast Jesus merely as a reformer fails to do justice to the witness of scripture.” 

To read passages like the Magnificat merely as a prophetic utterance of social justice that compels our own similar acts misses how the New Testament, indeed all of the Bible, points to a far deeper and far graver source of human misery than injustice and oppression. Paul calls them the Powers, and the Power of Sin and Death is a Pharaoh to whom the wills of rich and poor alike are bound. 

It’s popular to the point of cliche to insist that God stands on the side of the marginalized and dispossessed and while that’s certainly true, it’s insufficient for, according to scripture, the marginalized and oppressed with whom God stands are also sinners in need of forgiveness and mercy.

To put it another way: Liberation is not Salvation.

Yes, of course, lifting up the lowly is a good gospel work for the Church to pursue. But the emphasis upon social justice in the Church, whose premise is that what defines God’s redemptive activity is liberation from oppression, displaces the centrality that belongs to Jesus Christ alone as Savior of the world. What defines God’s redemptive activity is not liberation from oppression but liberation from the Powers of Sin and Death, for the sign of God’s redemptive activity, so says Jesus, is Cross and Resurrection.

Liberation from oppression, standing up against social injustice, solidarity with the marginalized- those are all faithful frames and postures but they are not sufficient for what scripture names by “salvation” because the oppressed still require atonement for their sins.

The dispossessed do not posses an inherent righteousness.

As my teacher George Hunsinger notes, referring to Karl Barth‘s work:

“The New Testament message is that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that we are helpless to save ourselves, and that our only hope lies in God’s gracious intervention for us in Jesus Christ. There is only one work of salvation. It has been accomplished by Christ. It is identical with his person…Victim-oriented theologies, such as we find among the liberationists, fail to do justice to this central truth. The fundamental human plight is that of sinners before God not of victims before oppressors

The good and hard truth is that Mary only gets her boy’s mission half-right. Yes, he will send the rich away empty, but he’ll also demand that the poor pick up their crosses and follow him.

No matter the income bracket or socio-political status, Christ’s price, paid in his own blood, is the same: death to self.

Like all the believers of her age, Mary expected the Messiah to conform to her assumptions about justice. With the Apostle Paul, Mary did not anticipate that the form of her son’s justice would be the justification of the ungodly— the victimizer as well as the victim. I don’t know how this news strikes the poor and the oppressed. But as a member of the proud and powerful, the justification of the ungodly is such good news that I forget— I can accept— how “send the rich empty away” means my ass and, nevertheless, receive it as good news of great joy.