Luke 1:46-55

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Pray Without Asking

Text: Luke 1:46-55

Pray without asking?! What sort of statement is
that? Isn’t that precisely what prayer is—asking? Why would anybody
pray without asking God for something? Not surprising, those questions. They
are very revealing. We assume that people pray in order to get something or
perhaps to escape something, which is the other side of the same coin. In
either case we are enlisting God on our side to do something for us—we are
asking God for something.

But our text shows Mary offering a prayer in
which she never asks for any help, any strength, any guidance, any stuff,
either for herself or for anybody else. She prays without asking. In fact,
after her opening statement of praise and thanksgiving, she never refers to
herself again. As Martin Luther suggested(1) we can learn a lot about prayer
from Mary.

We can learn from her example. Her opening
statement is pure praise: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit
rejoices in God my Savior.” Here Mary refers herself to God and her
attention never wavers from God again throughout the prayer. What worship we
see here! What total absorption in God!

Her attitude seems to come not so much from
humility as from surprise. “For he has looked with favor on the lowliness
of his servant…the Mighty One has done great things for me.” Luther
wrote, “No one knows less about humility than he who is truly
humble.”(2) Mary was impressed with two aspects of her reality: her own
commonness and God’s shocking choice to bring the Messiah through her.
What we see as humility in Mary is actually realism. She was just a common
woman; and God in grace chose her to bear the Messiah. That kind of humility
results from adoration of God.

Mary’s surprise is almost palpable when
she says, “From now on all generations will call me blessed.” Her
relative Elizabeth had just greeted her with that word. “Blessed are you
among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” she cried out. And
Elizabeth finished her greeting with, “And blessed is she who believed
that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
One can almost see young Mary, amazed already by the message from the angel,
now trying to get her mind around her older relative’s calling her
blessed,

What can she say but, “holy is his
name.”? I teach courses in worship to seminary students. Those men and
women have been trained in the rigors of academic research and writing. They
are accustomed to spending long hours reading books, translating Greek and
Hebrew texts, contemplating deep theological and philosophical issues. But when
I give them a class assignment to spend five minutes a day in prayers of
adoration and worship, with no mixture of thanksgiving, petition, or
intercession, they discover that they are not prepared for that. They come back
talking about how hard adoration is. I send them to the Psalms and to the
Magnificat, where they can learn about how to talk with God unselfishly. They
learn to say, “Holy is your name,” in many different ways. They
discipline themselves to concentrate on the reality of God instead of on God as
a resource for their own needs and desires, This is a real discipline—one
that Mary displays vividly for us in the Magnificat.

What follows in the prayer is what Luther
enumerates as the six works of God.(3) The first of these is mercy: “His
mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.” I wonder
sometimes why we who lead others in prayer so often begin by concentrating on
the great power and wisdom of God. Usually our prayers (and here I am preaching
to myself) reveal how impressed we are with the beauty and grandeur of
God’s creation. We seem at times to be complimenting God on his wisdom in
creating us human beings. Is it perhaps because power and knowledge have become
such important commodities in our own lives that we recognize them as something
deserving praise, even in God? Might it also reveal our devaluing of those
“M” words, meekness and mercy? All Mary could see at first was the
mercy of God, and that came first even before the strong arm of God, which is
next.

That “strength with his arm,” of
course, is shown in the mercy of his scattering “the proud in the thoughts
of their hearts.” This is Luther’s second work of God. Might
“the proud in the thoughts of their hearts” not be a good description
of us who are much more impressed with power and wisdom than with mercy? This
scattering Mary refers to is a very thorough job. It describes something
happening that causes the individual parts to go in all different directions at
once. We say, “every which-way.” That sounds frighteningly like a
good description of our societies right now. They are going “every
which-way at once.” They have no discernable direction. Maybe Mary knew
more theology than we give her credit for.

The third work of God listed here is “He
has brought down the powerful from their thrones.” Luther addressed his
little book on the Magnificat to Prince John Frederick, Duke of Saxony,
Landgrave of Thuringia, and Margrave of Meissen. The prince happened to be
Luther’s patron, but that didn’t deter Luther from warning him that
the God who had given him great authority could also take it away. Mary knew
not only her theology, but also her history. The stories of her ancestors
included many tales about haughty kings who had been brought down. The power of
God and the power of humans are often in conflict; and when they conflict God
is not going to be brought down. Mary knew it, and we had better know it, too.

Work number four is the corollary of
three—God has “lifted up the lowly.” Mary could see in her own
experience how God upsets the normal human patterns. The lift God gives to the
lowly is rarely as obvious as the lift Mary got, but God’s revelation is
consistent in this, that fortunes will be reversed sooner or later. When
God’s will is “done on earth as it is in heaven,” the lowly will
be lifted up, and we believers had better be involved in the process if we hope
to be part of the heavenly work.

The fifth and sixth works of God are similar to
three and four, with a different emphasis: “God has filled the hungry with
good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Again what appears to us as
the natural order of society God turns on its head. The rich are hungry and the
poor are satisfied. The poor wipe the extra food off their lips while the rich
go away as beggars. Can’t you see the line at the rescue mission? The best
dressed are asking for food, and the people in rags are dishing it out. Talk
about justice!

Mary concludes her prayer by rooting her
worship of God firmly in the history of God’s dealings with people. This
is not wishful thinking. This is not human projection. This is faith based on
experience. “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his
mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his
descendants forever.” She knew the kind of God she was dealing with; and
she knew not only from her personal experience but also from the experience of
her people through their history. That means she knew her Bible as the record
of that experience. The testimony of faithful men and women over two millennia
lay behind Mary’s trust in the God who had chosen her for a special
mission.

Thus the end of Mary’s prayer is actually
its beginning. God has been the Lord of Mary’s people for generations and
that God has also been Mary’s Lord, whom she now magnifies both by her
prayer and by her submission to the divine mission to which she has been
called—a mission that will offer salvation from sin to the whole human
race.

And for this reason Mary has become a link in
the chain of witnesses who bring us the truth about God—the truth on which
we can base our own prayers that begin, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” That should be our prayer without
asking.

(1) See Luther’s little book The
Magnificat in Luther’s Works Volume 21, Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. (St.
Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956) 295-358.

(2) Ibid., 313.

(3) Ibid., 332-349.

Bruce E. Shields
Emmanuel School of
Religion
Johnson City, Tennessee, USA
E-Mail: ShieldsB@esr.edu