Like Matthew, Luke tells a great story, which is why it is so well known through centuries of art and drama, and most familiarly through numberless primary school nativity plays in which many of us have played our part. ![]() His purpose is to help us understand who Jesus was, and he assembles the narrative to do just that. How much of Luke’s story is historical narrative and how much is framing the story to be like its Old Testament antecedents? Sadly, we can’t ask him, but his intention is clear. Hannah sings a song of joy, which begins ‘My heart exults in the Lord’, a model for the Magnificat. At Shiloh, Eli the priest promises that Hannah’s prayer for a son will be answered. And Mary’s Magnificat echoes the Song of Hannah, the mother of Samuel. The birth stories of both John the Baptist and Jesus pick up on miraculous birth stories in the Old Testament: unlikely mothers the appearance of angels to mothers-to-be, Hagar, Sarah, and the unnamed mother of Samson moments of trepidation and even the words ‘Behold … you are to conceive and bear a son’. He doesn’t quote prophecies like Matthew, but instead chooses to echo events that happened in Old Testament times. Luke, of course, writes in Greek, a very fluent Greek too, and he has studied the Greek version of the Old Testament. On meeting Mary, Elizabeth praised her, ‘Blessed are you among women…’, but Mary transferred the praise to God, proclaiming the hymn known by its first word in Latin, ‘Magnificat’: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord…’. As our Lucan story goes, in the days that followed, Mary went to the hill country of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who herself was six months pregnant with John the Baptist. Known as the ‘Feast of the Annunciation’, it is one of the most joyful celebrations in the Church’s calendar, with its story of the Archangel’s appearance to Mary announcing her motherhood and Mary’s ‘let it be done’ response. Exactly nine months before Christmas Day, the 25th of March marks the conception of Jesus. The day of our concert is a fitting day on which to imagine Mary’s story. So, what option are you left with? How about starting your Gospel from the point of view of Mary? Now you have stepped into the shoes of Luke. Matthew narrates from the paternal perspective of St Joseph. John goes for metaphysics, beginning his Gospel with the very opening words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning …’, linking Jesus to Creation. Mark has taken the short cut, saying nothing about Jesus before his encounter with John the Baptist at the river Jordan. ![]() You assemble a set of these stories, and given that there isn’t a recorded chronology, put them into a narrative order that leads up to the passion. ![]() You have received an account of the death and resurrection of Jesus and stories of his preaching and miracle-working. ![]() To get a sense of what the Magnificat is about, you could imagine yourself as a Gospel writer in the first century. Why put this text on the walls of a chapel? Why has Christian art, music, and devotion given it such prominence? Turn towards the old high altar, and near the front on your righthand side you can begin decoding, ‘Magnificat anima mea Dominum…’, and you can trace the whole of the Magnificat text around to the back of the Chapel and then up on your lefthand side to the concluding doxology ‘… in saecula saeculorum. Sitting in St Cuthbert’s Chapel at Ushaw, you can see, just above the stalls, a line of almost undecipherable gothic script. In the second of two blog posts about our next concert, Michael Gilmore writes about the biblical song of Mary, which forms the basis of the programme.
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