Vigils Reading – Memorial of BVM

MARY’S POETIC SENSIBILITY

By Émile Mersch1

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The Magnificat is Mary’s own song, and when she composed it, Jesus

was not even born. Yet he made his presence felt to John the Baptist, and more

so to her. In Mary’s song, his thoughts are uttered: the greatness of the humble,

the blessings promised to the lowly, the reversal of values effected by the Lord

in exalting the poor and rejecting the proud, the joy of those whom the world

ignores and who have the Lord with them; everything that the song proclaims

is the same as the teaching promulgated in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on

the Mount. The very prelude expresses the tone and accent characteristic of the

preaching of Jesus; the mother’s song foreshadows the hymn of thanksgiving

uttered by the Son in the presence of God who showers the lowly and humble

with favors. At that time Jesus answered and said: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord

of heaven and earth, because you have hid these things from the wise and

prudent and have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, for so it has seemed

good in your sight’.

As we hear Christ in his mother, we also hear in her the entire Old

Testament, which is a prefigure of Christ. The Magnificat is almost wholly made

up of biblical quotations. The mother of the Savior, of the Desired One of Israel,

speaks as the daughter, or rather the queen, of the patriarchs and prophets. And

this double relation with her Son, who is everything for humanity, depicts her

so well that the Magnificat, echo of the Old Testament and prelude to the New

Testament, is a very personal, unified and spontaneous composition, as well as

a prayer that was to become familiar to the Christian people.

Mary must have possessed a flair for poetry, just as Jesus did. Jesus had

this gift of universal sympathy, this promptness of responding to a contact with15

anything, this facility and sincerity of wonder. We have but to recall, for

example, his reverential and moving words about the flowers of the fields. I tell

you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these. And if

God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the

oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

‘God so clothes’: we can see our Lord bending over these humble marvels,

joyful and proud to be a man in the human universe of his Father’s creation. We

may well believe that Jesus wished to receive this very human gift from his

mother, just as he received his human nature from her. She must have

possessed it before him. The proofs that she did are, among others, the special

turn of poetry, delicacy and taste found in the first chapters of St. Luke, in which

her influence stands out so clearly… The abundance of poetic bits occurring in

these chapters, and only in them, all have to do with her. But the Magnificat

remains the clearest proof.