A Christmas Countdown – Day 8

Behind Day 8 of my Advent Calendar is:

A MAGNIFICENT DOG

I know what you’re thinking, ‘What has a magnificent dog got to do with Christmas?’.

Well I’ll tell you. Not a lot.

It’s true that a magnificent cat would have been a marginally more appropriate illustration to head up a few words on ‘The Magnificat’ but, as well as being something of a dog person, a picture of a regal looking canine is, for reasons that may be well known to you, a lot easier for me to lay my hands on.

And yes I know that I’m pushing things a bit here, but we are now on Day 8 of this advent calendar malarkey and if you think that by the time we’re done things won’t have taken a precipitous downturn, then I’m afraid that you’re going to find that you are sorely mistaken.

But I digress. ‘The Magnificat’ is the name given to the song that Mary sang after being told that she would be the mother of the Son of God. It begins with the words ‘My soul does magnify the Lord’ and takes its name from the word for ‘magnifies’ with which the Latin translation begins.

But for those of you who haven’t been distracted by a little Latin, and therefore haven’t forgotten my crass inclusion of a picture of Hector, here is where I try to redeem myself, something which, ironically, a Christian should never attempt to do!

But here’s the thing – just as a magnificent dog is not what you’d expect to see at the beginning of a discussion about ‘The Magnificat’, so too the words of Mary’s song are not the ones that we might expect to read, coming as we do from a culture that is so in love with itself.

As a result, therefore, Mary’s song is one that ought to reverse our expectations. We live in a world where the strong lord it over the weak, the rich oppress the pour and we, having been told to always think of ourselves as awesome, are encouraged to spend our days going about the exhausting business of boasting about our own achievements.

And yet Mary sings of the one who has saved her, the one who scatters the proud, and who brings down the mighty. And whist singing of the one who sends the rich empty away, she simultaneously sings if the one who raises up the humble and fills the hungry with good things [Luke 1:51-53].

Isn’t that the kind of world in which you would want to live – one in which the arrogant are brought low, and the humble are lifted up? Well if it is, know this – it’s the kind of world that God wants too. For

‘God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble’ [James 4:6)

And so he is prepared to humble, not just the proud, but the only one who is truly awesome – that is to say, himself. And he does this, not only by becoming, in the person of Jesus Christ, a man, and then living a life of poverty, but also by subsequently going to the cross, and dying there the most appalling of deaths.

And he did all this to ensure that those who acknowledge their weakness, those who recognise their need of rescue, far from being dismissed as an irrelevance, can know the love of the eternal and almighty God who will not only one day raise them back to life but also adopt them into his own family and number them among his own dearly beloved children.

No wonder Mary wanted to magnify the Lord.

But note this – she doesn’t magnify him the way a microscope magnifies something, making something very small look bigger than it really is. Not at all. Mary magnifies the Lord in a way a telescope magnifies something, making something that’s really very big look more like the size it really is.

God is big – but to some people he doesn’t appear to be all that important. But if we turn our eyes away from ourselves for a moment, and fix them instead on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, the one who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, then, not only will we not grow weary or fainthearted, but we will find that God really is every bit as big as we need him to be. [Hebrews 12:2-3]

And perhaps we will find ourselves magnifying the Lord as well.

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Finally then, a song. Or rather two. First it’s ’Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord. This hymn, one we had at our wedding, isn’t really a Christmas song – but perhaps it should be, given how it is based on ‘The Magnificat’.

And then as a special treat, a second bonus song. Why? Because it’s a song about a magnificent dog of course!. Not only that it’s one my grandson likes it too!

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Previously from ‘A Christmas Countdown’:

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Part 7’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 6’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 5’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 4’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 3’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 2’, click here

To read ‘A Christmas Countdown – Day 1’, click here