Spiritual Hiccups - Seeing the Future

There's a car commercial running on television where the wife excitedly tells the husband that they are having a baby.  As they celebrate this announcement, a strange look comes over the husband.  He has just thought of something, and it quickly becomes apparent just what.  He has a sleek, two-door sports car, and they are about to have a baby.  (If you've not seen the ad, its for a "four-door sports car.")

There is a sense in which the father in this commercial sees the future.  Nothing particularly dramatic about it, but he knows that a baby means a different life than the one he now has.  And he must begin planning for that new day.

I think that biblical prophets are more like this father than they are psychics who promise to tell you your future.  True, they've been given a bit deeper sense of what is coming than this dad, but they are not really predicting the future in the sense most people mean by that phrase.  Rather they know God intimately enough that they know where things will end up when God acts.  They know the character of God and so they know what will happen when God shakes things up.

That's what is going on in Mary's song in today's gospel.  Mary's going to have a baby, and she knows that this baby will have a much bigger impact than the typical one.  This baby is part of God's plans, and so she can sing her prophetic song just as surely as that father can see the need for a four-door car. 
  "(God) has brought down 
         the powerful from their thrones,

     and Lifted up the lowly;  

  he has filled the hungry with good things,

     and sent the rich away empty.

  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."

God has; not God will, but God has.  This is not so much a prediction of the future as it is a realization of what God's future looks like, a realizations that is so  real for Mary that it seems already accomplished.  As many have noted, prophets' sense of what God is up to is so vivid that they often get their tense wrong.

I think that people of deep faith always have a bit of this vision of the future within them.  It is why they can actually love their enemies and work for a better world even when that work costs them dearly and does not show the sort of results our culture validates.  

We're about the celebrate the birth of Mary's baby, as we most certainly should.  But for that celebration to mean much, we also need to see a bit of the future that Mary sees.  

Can you see the future?  God's future?

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