A blessed holiday season to you! If you’re a longtime listener, you might hear echoes of an earlier episode, “19. Filling the Hungry with Good Things.”
Transcript
I walked up to the microphone at the front of the church and turned to face the crowd. Three hundred pairs of eyes stared back. So many eyes! I swallowed hard.
“And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.”
My voice boomed out through the microphone, unnatural to my ears. And so loud.
“And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David. . . . To be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, who was great with child.”
It was the Sunday school Christmas program, and I was maybe eight or nine years old. I’d been given the job of reciting the Christmas story: Luke 2:1–20, King James Version, all twenty verses of it. And I was sweating. Down at my sides, my nervous fingers found the edges of my dress and began twiddling.
I kept on reciting. Did I imagine all those scenes in detail in my head at that time, or did that come later? How this pregnant girl—likely a teenager only a few years older than I—was forced to go on a several days’ journey on foot, and right when her baby was due. How she walked or bumped on the back of a donkey for those long and agonizing days and of course went into labor. And how, through all those long hours of pain, she was isolated from her family, far away from the women who would have tended her at home and known what to do. And at the end of her journey not even a bed to lie in, for none could be found in this city crammed with travelers. How desperately she must have wished for even a cot, but the only roof they could find happened to shelter the animals in the stable out back, where the ground was running with donkey urine and horse dung. How could she possibly give birth in all this filth? But they were desperate. Her fiance pulled together hay and covered it with a robe, and she squatted on that hay and pushed out the baby with only the weary animals for company. And then she laid her new son tenderly between the muzzles of those animals while they nibbled in the manger.
“And there were shepherds in the field, watching over their flocks by night.”
I stood stiff as a board, but my voice was going on almost by itself now. I loved this next part of the story, the bright light that terrified the shepherds and then the angels and the singing. But my favorite verse of all came near the very end.
“But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
It was just a simple sentence, so easy to remember! Plus it was about what someone was thinking and feeling, and even at the age of eight or nine I could tell that this was an anomaly in the scriptures—especially for a woman.
I finished the last verse and walked away, triumphant. I was done! And I hadn’t forgotten a single line.
Today, a lifetime later, I can still draw up almost every word of those verses from memory.
And today, a lifetime later, Mary is still my favorite character in the story. It's not only because she thought about things, turning them over and over within herself—something I can relate to. It's also because she took what she pondered and turned it into poetry and song, and we have that poetry and song, and it appears in the first chapter of Luke, right before her birth story.1
Mary's Song is the part of the Christmas story that almost no one talks about at Christmastime, but it's crucial to the story.
You can't understand the babe in a manger without it.
There's a lot to say about Mary's Song—how it flows in the manner of Jewish prophecies of old. We'll come back to that later, but the thing I notice first is that Mary introduces herself as a lowly servant. She's letting us know right away that she's poor. She's probably dirt poor, from a humble family with little means and even less power.
But she sings of a God, and a reality, where things are very different. Where the social order is upside down. Where God respects poor people and lifts them up.
Here are a few lines of her song:
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty. (NIV)
She’s singing a freedom song! Celebrating social revolution. Her God frees people from poverty and fills them with food while sending the rich empty away.
It’s worth reviewing Mary’s social world for a moment here. The Roman Empire she lived in had just become an empire around the time she was born, when Octavian seized power and made himself Augustus, the emperor. This was the Augustus whose executive order would force her to take a long hard journey and would send her into labor. Once Octavian was in power, the days of representative democracy in Rome were over. The emperor held the reins.
As far as the rest of the people in the empire, most of them were desperately poor. Millions of them worked the land—land that was owned and managed by a few wealthy families who lived in fabulous luxury on their hillside estates.
The workers were basically serfs, barely able to feed their families on the tiny shares allotted them and perpetually drowning in debts they couldn't work their way out of.2
If this all sounds uncomfortably familiar, it's because American society right now has a similar degree of extreme inequality. Millions of working people scrape for a living while owners and investors rake in billions. By some economists’ figures, we are even more unequal today than the Roman Empire was then.
So when Mary sings a freedom song, she’s giving voice to the masses of people in her time who didn’t have access to the resources that a few families at the top kept for themselves. And she says this is not the way things are supposed to be.
This is not God’s way. Those are human customs, and they contradict the law of reality.
Poverty is a choice. It's a choice that a society makes and then forces onto a segment of its people. Inequality doesn’t just happen. It takes some intention.
To create poverty, you can start with an economic system based on property—on the idea that parts of the Earth, such as land, can be bought and sold and that whoever owns those parts is entitled to keep all their benefits to themselves.
An economic system built on ownership needs a system of law to protect it, for otherwise property dissipates and people share. We know this intuitively from watching the natural world. When nature has its way, the gifts of the Earth flow here and there like water, redistributing themselves among the whole community. Every creature simply uses what they need. Excess is not possible, for the pull toward balance in the whole soon calls out a correction. If there is an especially good spring for rabbits, and they reproduce like crazy, the numbers of predator foxes will rise soon after. Predator and prey remain in balance.
When nature has its way, the gifts of the Earth flow here and there like water, redistributing themselves among the whole community.
This balance extends even to the skies. Meteorologists tell us that when clouds proliferate like rabbits, the rains come like foxes and “eat” the clouds; the same mathematical formulas describe the relationship between clouds and rain as between rabbits and foxes.
In the circle of life that is this Earth, what one member of the circle discards, another picks up. The extra from one is the windfall of another. The waste from one feeds another’s well-being. There is no hoarding, and there can be no hoarding, for it would tip the whole community out of balance.
This is the “law of the ground,” as Aboriginal people in Australia call it. For thousands of years they have structured their societies to follow this law as closely as possible.
But around the world from Australia, in the region of Earth that gave birth to my ancestors, and especially the region of Earth that Mary was born into, the Near East, people chose a different route. They chose property, and very early in human history they made laws to protect property.
They even developed writing in order to keep track of property. Yes, of all the reasons one could think of for developing writing—like telling stories or recording poetry or following the heavenly bodies—the people in the Near East developed writing for the purpose of accounting. They wanted to track possessions.
Property causes inequality. When a few control the gifts of Earth, inequality grows. And in the ancient Near East the levels of inequality grew extreme, helped along by a new thing they developed in Babylon called “debt with interest.”
As economist Michael Hudson shows, a system of debt is merely a way of transferring property from people at the bottom of society, who have little, to people at the top, who have much. When people go into debt, what little they have becomes the property of their creditor. Inequality increases.
And inequality ruins community. It's inherently destabilizing to a society. It creates frictions and violence that do not appear among more egalitarian peoples. Inequality destroys the peace.
Extreme poverty also weakens a ruler's power, and those ancient rulers in Babylon understood this. Poor starving men can't be tapped to build the emperor's cities or fight his wars. So those Mesopotamian rulers periodically forgave everyone's debt. They instituted what they called Clean Slate Laws, or a Jubilee. It was a time when all the clay slates that recorded loans and debts were wetted and wiped clean. Land was returned to its original occupants. People enslaved because of debt were freed to return home to their families. Loans were cancelled.
New Mesopotamian rulers often instituted a Jubilee at the beginning of their reign, to win the people's loyalty and solidify their own power.
And here we come back to Mary and the song that she sings at the beginning of her pregnancy. For her song took its inspiration from hundreds of years of Jewish history, from a long and deep commitment to social justice and the Jewish practice of the Jubilee.
Because six hundred years before Mary was born, her ancestors the Israelites were captured and carted off to Babylon to be enslaved in the Mesopotamian fields, and when they were finally freed to return to their homeland, they brought back with them such a zeal for fairness and justice that it remained central to Jewish life and thought afterward.
They also brought back the practice of forgiving debts, and they set it up as a whole year, a Jubilee Year to be practiced about every fifty years. And they carried it out too, forgiving debts regularly for hundreds of years, right up into Mary's lifetime. So when Mary praises God for upending an unfair social order, she is echoing hundreds of years of ancestral teachings on social justice.
Luke the storyteller knows this. By placing her song right here, right before the birth story, he is giving his listeners clues for what to look for in the following scene.
Watch closely, he says. This is what it will be about. The story of Mary giving birth will be a story about justice. Divine justice. Where the poorest of the poor become the most honored characters.
And it is hard to imagine a more desperate circumstance than a poor first-time mother giving birth alone far away from home—except now Luke adds in the filthy stable and the lowly animals. The animals! Who occupied the very bottom of Roman society, lower than the lowest, below even enslaved women. This young girl brings her baby into the world among the animals and their waste, and her only cradle for him is the animals’ feed trough.
The message could not be clearer: this story is about the poorest of the world.
And when the sheep enter the scene a few verses later, along with their rough and uncultured shepherds, the storyteller is hammering home the point: this story is not about a royal baby and a queen mother. It is not about powers and thrones.
This story is about turning the rules of rich and poor upside down. Not just upsetting expectations of social propriety but actually running society on different rules—with greater fairness and justice.
Luke the storyteller is letting his listeners know: this baby stands for a new order, a new way of peace. The kind of peace that comes to society when equity is restored and the hungry are filled with good things.
In Luke's story, Jesus grows up to become a man who calls for justice. Mary's Song foretells it all, and turning the social rules on their head becomes the centerpiece of his life and work.
At the very beginning of his work, Jesus stands up in the synagogue to read the sabbath text, and he chooses these words from the prophet Isaiah: “The Lord has called me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” As economist Michael Hudson emphasizes, this is a text about the Jubilee Year—about forgiving the weight of debt that crushed poor people.
Jesus closes the scroll and begins his sermon with these shocking words: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.”
He intends to follow the vision that his mother sang into being before his birth. His work will be about upending the system of rich and poor.
Today we may have trouble hearing those radical overtones in words that have become so familiar and hackneyed. But Jesus's listeners had no such trouble. They heard the echoes of revolution. They heard that he was setting himself up as a prophet of justice, maybe even the messiah himself. The story says that they were filled with such anger at his words that they kicked him out of the city and led him to a high cliff, where they intended to throw him over the edge. But he slipped through their grasp and walked away.
I have always loved the stories in Luke—their human details, like Mary pondering in her heart. How the stories focus again and again on rich and poor, and how wrong this system is—how it goes against the intended order of things.
So listen to a few lines from the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus preached, as Luke records it:
Blessed are you who are poor
for yours is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you who hunger now
for you will be satisfied.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But woe to you who are rich
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry. . . .
In Luke his sermon is all about economics! It is easy to hear in it the song that his mother sang while she carried him in her womb.
I love that the Jesus in Luke's gospel reminds people over and over again without mercy that “the way things are” are out of whack. That severe inequality is not a fact of life that you better get used to. That it is in fact immoral and must be changed.
For the Great Heart beating throughout this Earth supports peace—a way of living where food flows to those who need it and no one takes more than their share.
I also love that the stories in Luke come from the early decades of the Christian movement, long before “becoming a Christian” turned into an act of believing certain things, as would happen in later centuries. For the audience that Luke was speaking to, the Jesus stories are meant to startle and inspire, to spur people into action. They come from the years of the movement when it was more important to follow Jesus in his very Jewish commitment to justice than it was to hold certain beliefs about who he was.
And I love, maybe most of all, that the animals get such honor in the Christmas story. It's a revealing detail that emphasizes Luke's larger message—that the truest reality is one where peace reigns because everyone has enough. That the poorest of people, including the animals, are precious to the life of this world. That they are in fact the ones in whom the light of a new world begins to shine.
For the Great Heart beating throughout this Earth supports peace—a way of living where food flows to those who need it and no one takes more than their share. Where power is distributed so that a few do not rule the many. Where all the laws that human beings write to separate people into those who deserve and those who don’t are shown to be utterly ridiculous.
In Luke’s story, to be on the right side of history is to give up wealth and power in order to find a greater peace.
So at this holiday season, I’m wishing for you a clarity of vision like Mary’s, to see the coming of a different world and to sing it into being.
May the hungry be filled with good things. May justice become real in our time. And may each of us find our own ways to help bring about that greater peace.
For digging deeper
For income inequality in the early Roman Empire, see Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friesen, “The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 61–91. Their findings got discussed in Business Insider, Dec. 17, 2011, in an article by Gus Lubin, “Even the Ancient Roman Empire Wasn’t as Unequal as America Today.” Current statistics on income inequality in the United States can be found at Inequality.org.
James Kay called Mary's poem a freedom song in "Mary's Song—And Ours," Christian Century, Dec. 10, 1997.
For a parallel take on Mary’s Song, check out this Washington Post op-ed by L. Mayfield, “Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in the Bible Is Revolutionary. Some Evangelicals Silence Her,” Dec. 20, 2018.
Poverty is a social choice is the thesis of Matthew Desmond's compassionate book Poverty in America (Random House, 2023).
On the clouds and rain as predator and prey, see “Eat, Prey, Rain: New Model of Dynamics of Clouds and Rain Is Based on a Predator-Prey Population Model,” ScienceDaily, July 25, 2011.
Michael Hudson, ...And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Islet-Verlag, 2018).
For animals in the Roman Empire, see “6 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Animals in Ancient Rome,” by Iain Ferris at HistoryExtra.
For a sublime musical setting of the nativity story, check out Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium,” sung by the Nordic Chamber Choir.
Mary may not have authored this poem, according to textual historical criticism, but we're not being textual scholars here. We’re just listening to the story.
Some historians say that when Rome eventually fell, people’s daily material lives hardly changed at all. Millions of people had already lived like serfs in the empire.
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