He Fills the Hungry

He Fills the Hungry

Mary's Magnificat was sung before Jesus was born — a declaration of what God was doing and had always done: lifting the lowly, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty. It was not a new policy. It was the unchanging character of the God who had always sided with the empty over the full, with the dependent over the self-sufficient. Liberation theologians read it as a social manifesto. Pietists read it as a spiritual declaration. It is both. The same God who fills the spiritually hungry fills the materially hungry — and Mary, an ordinary girl in a minor province, understood this better than the philosophers of Rome.

Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) is one of the most radical declarations in the New Testament — and it is sung by a teenager. The reversals she describes are consistent with the whole of Scripture: the proud scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted, the hungry filled, the rich sent empty. The theological core is the nature of God as the One who fills those who come empty and has no use for those who arrive full of themselves. The spiritual hunger Jesus blessed in the Beatitudes ('blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness') is the same hunger Mary describes. Come empty. He fills the hungry with good things.