Psalm 146:5-10 Commentary

However it was that the Virgin Mary composed her Magnificat song as recorded in Luke 1, one thing that is certain is that she had a lot of Old Testament material at her disposal to work from.  Particularly she had many apt psalms to draw upon, and Psalm 146 is surely one of them.  No doubt that is why for this Third Sunday in Advent in Year A the alternate Psalm reading is Mary’s song.  These two songs are clearly connected thematically.

[A commentary on the Luke passage for advent 3A can be found here: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2022-12-05/luke-146b-55-3/]

As Mary reflected on the shocking turn of events following the surprise visit by the Archangel Gabriel, she realized that now she herself was an emblem of God’s penchant to elevate the humble and the lowly.  All throughout Scripture God made it clear that his heart goes out to the poor and the oppressed.  We have often had occasion here on the CEP website to note the frequently invoked triplet in the Bible of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.  The so-called anawim was comprised of people who had multiple vulnerabilities and liabilities stacked against them.  Without the extra help and protection that God’s Law mandated for such marginalized people, they would surely fall through societal and economic cracks.  Worse, they might be actively exploited by the unscrupulous.

Having had her fortunes reversed upon being told she would be the mother of the Messiah, Mary felt that this was exactly the kind of thing God is always doing.  So she sang about how God lifts up the lowly but scatters the high-falootin’ folks.  She sang of how God will provide richly for the poor but send the wealthy away empty handed.  She sang about how God essentially sees those who are too often invisible to most people.  Years later when her son spoke in a synagogue as he launched his ministry, he echoed his mother’s song through his reading from Isaiah 61 and appropriating those words for himself.  But Jesus on that occasion could have made the exact same point by reading parts of Psalm 146.

It’s unclear why the RCL would have us skip the first 4 verses of the psalm.  Those verses nicely set up the balance of this short song by pointing out the futility of putting all your hopes in earthly rulers.  No matter how powerful they are or how much swaggering they do, in the end they will come to nothing.  Such leaders may or may not help the poor and the oppressed but for those leaders who do provide such assistance, even that good thing is temporary.  If it’s lasting help you are looking for, then only the God of Israel will do.

Because this God is all-powerful but also all-good.  And this God is utterly faithful.  True (and as any number of other psalms in the Hebrew Psalter will lament) in the short run wicked rulers seem to get away with murder and their exploiting of the oppressed and their ignoring of their cries for help seem to go on and on without justice ever coming down upon such arrogant leaders.  But since God takes the long view, God knows even those things that seem to go on for far too long are also temporary.  Verse 9 assures us that God will frustrate the ways of the wicked and though that is surely ultimately true, we know only too well that for now the wicked do not look even mildly frustrated!  (And that is something the rest of us do find frustrating!)  But as the ending of Psalm 146 reminds us, God reigns forever and ever and because this God is always faithful to his promises, we know the day will come when all this world’s wrongs will be made right.

Mary’s Magnificat and something like Psalm 146 are properly bracing to read during Advent.  As we have noted before in past sermon commentaries, of all the things even churchgoing folks think about during the Advent and Christmas season, justice is not high on the list.  In the most popular of Christmas carols, hints at how God’s Christ will reverse the fortunes of the marginalized and oppressed are at best mentioned faintly in the background.  But if the coming of the Messiah brings joy to the world, then it is the joy of shalom, of making straight what for too long has been crooked in this world.  If we want to harken to the herald angel, what we need to hear from that angel is the heralding of the Good News that Christ is not just Lord of all but of most especially those whose lives are for now so difficult.

Note: In addition to our weekly sermon commentaries each Monday, check out our special Advent and Christmas Resource page for more sermon ideas and other Advent/Christmas resources. 

Illustration Idea

We are often captivated by stories that in the end show a transformational reversal of fortune for a character.  Think of Cinderella and how she magically transformed from a lonely and despised person to the beautiful princess who captures the heart of a prince.  Or maybe it’s the ugly duckling that in the end becomes the most elegant of swans.  Or the pauper who goes from rags to riches.  Or the warty frog who upon receiving a kiss turns into a prince.  Even some of Jesus’s parables pointed to this kind of change of fortune, most memorably perhaps in the Luke 18 parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Deep down we yearn to see things made right for those whose lives are for now so filled with various wrongs and injustices.  Could it be the spark of the divine in us, the fact that we have been made in God’s own image, that accounts for this desire?  Because as Psalm 146 and so much of the Bible make clear (in both the Old and the New Testaments) a desire to transform the lives of the oppressed is very much at the core of also Almighty God.  It should be so for us too and perhaps never more so than during the Advent and Christmas season.