The Song Mary Learned From Hannah

Hannah's song in 1 Samuel 2 is the first great hymn of the books of Samuel, and it is remarkable for how little of it is about Hannah. She mentions her own joy in the opening line and the barren woman bearing seven children a few verses in, but the song quickly widens. The bows of warriors are broken. The full hire themselves out for bread. The Lord brings death and makes alive, sends poverty and wealth, humbles and exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and seats them with princes. He will guard his faithful ones and judge the ends of the earth, and give strength to his king, his anointed.

That last word is striking, because Israel had no king when Hannah sang. She is looking past her own answered prayer to a pattern in the way God works and to a future she cannot see. The God who reversed her fortunes is the God who reverses fortunes, who overturns the arrogant and lifts the lowly, and who will one day do it through an anointed king.

A thousand years later, a young woman from Nazareth sang a song that echoes Hannah's almost line for line. Mary's Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 rejoices in God her Saviour, speaks of the proud scattered and the humble lifted, the hungry filled and the rich sent away empty. Mary had learned her theology from Hannah. She saw her own unexpected pregnancy as another instance of the same God doing the same thing, and this time the anointed king was the child she carried.

This is what praise does when it is healthy. It starts with a personal mercy and lets that mercy open a window onto the whole character of God. Hannah did not just thank God for Samuel. She understood, through Samuel, who God is and what he is doing in the world, and she sang about that.

You can do the same with your own answered prayers. Take the one specific thing God has done, and ask what it shows about how he always works. Then sing about that. You will find yourself in a long line of singers, from a woman at Shiloh to a girl in Nazareth, all of them praising the God who lifts the poor from the dust.