He has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Luke 1: 48

If it's pouring with rain in Norwich, it is highly likely that the same is happening in Cape Town this morning. This is the time of year when the mid-winter rain and cold affect the shanty towns of Southern Africa. Fifteen years ago, I was there. It was nine months before the first democratic elections of South Africa. With an atmosphere of tense apprehension everyone wondered if the election would go ahead without bloodshed. But there was also hope and expectation at the birth and emergence of a new nation. One evening I was taken by a Roman Catholic priest to Mass in someone's house in the so-called illegal settlements. We bumped our way slowly along the streets of the shanty town, splashing through deep puddles and churning through floods. Outside the doors, the braziers burned brightly as evening meals were being prepared. We arrived at our destination: a little house, made out of corrugated iron sheets and lined, I remember, with fruit juice cartons. Inside were gathered about 15 people around the small table which was to be our altar. The Catholic wife was married to an Anglican husband. Their friends and neighbours were gathered around them in the light of the paraffin lamps. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of damp, sweat and paraffin oil; for only that morning the flood water had finally soaked down through the earth floor. We celebrated the Mass and, just before the blessing, the priest asked me to say a few words. Instead, I asked them what they hoped for most in the new South Africa. The response came straight away from a young mother with a baby on her hip. She said, "What I want first of all is for them to lay a pipe down this street to carry away the flood water so that my home will not fill up with water and my child can be healthy."

That reply stayed with me. It was so very modest an aspiration for nation-building; it came straight from her heart out of love for her child and her household; and it was a statement of great humility. The Gospel reading set for today is possibly the finest statement in words of humility that the world has ever known. It includes the Song of Mary, known as the Magnificat, 'My soul magnifies the Lord'. The Magnificat is said or sung each day as the climax to the service of Evensong. Its theological profundity is only exceeded by its spiritual depths and its usefulness to us as a tool of Christian faithfulness. We should never tire of returning again and again to the Magnificat, to explore its significance for Mary, for the Church, and for each of us at every stage of our spiritual journey.

There is a moment during the public ministry of Jesus when a woman in the crowd shouted out a traditional Jewish blessing to Jesus: 'Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked'. (Luke 11:27). When Mary enters Elizabeth's house, Elizabeth greets her with a similar greeting 'Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb'. Elizabeth rejoices not only at the fact that Mary is to give birth and to a son; but also (like the woman in the crowd) at the singular honour of being the mother of the Messiah. Jesus went on to correct the woman in the crowd, 'Blessed rather are those that hear the word of God and obey it'. Similarly, in Elizabeth's house, Elizabeth continues in the same vein: 'Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.'

Mary's song is a blessing not of Elizabeth by way of response, but a blessing of the Lord himself. It meditates on the word of God and the fulfilment of that word. It's not some theoretical, creedal statement about God, a theological formula or mere poetic construct. It addresses the dilemmas and situations in which many people (then and now) find themselves, what the Germans call "setze im leben".

The Magnificat celebrates what God has done, exalting the cast-down and the hungry; reducing the proud, the mighty and the rich, and all within the compass of God's love and compassion. In human terms, this is where the heart of God is to be found as the ministry of Jesus will show. The Magnificat makes a clear and radical statement of the Gospel - the Good News - and about discipleship; for Mary is the first disciple and indeed the first Christian. But in the Magnificat we also have her interpretation of the gospel. Its impact is powerful because its message is unexpected. Instead of confining herself to a paean of praise to God for sending the Messiah, Mary's rejoicing interprets the Messiah's presence in the lives of people who most long for the gift of God himself, the hungry and the lowly.

How are we to read these familiar words day by day? How do we reach beyond the beauty of the words, and the musical settings which we so much enjoy in Cathedral worship? Does their very familiarity dull the content?

There is a sequence which leads Mary to utter these words. From the Angel she hears the word of God; with Elizabeth she shares the word of God; and now she proclaims her interpretation of the word of God. So when the Church says or sings or listens to the Magnificat day by day, we not only repeat the words but we do what Mary herself was doing: the Church interprets the word of God in order that others might receive it as essentially good news. We do so within a liturgical framework, a spirit of discipline and order: something that we learn from Mary herself.

As you will have gathered from my account of that memorable house Mass in a shanty town all those years ago, there is a line in the Magnificat which, for me, is the key to interpreting Mary's discipleship. 'He has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant'.

The word "lowliness", or "low estate", we understand in relational terms. In our class-bound society, someone of low estate is at the bottom of the social scale, lacking the advantages and privileges that most of us have. Lowly people are often despised or ignored, or at least regarded with some detachment. Much of the gospel of Jesus is addressed to such people; to the lepers, the outcasts, the poor and rejected. And yet the Magnificat points to the state of mind of these people as something to which we should all aspire. Can it really be the case that we will only get to heaven, that we will only do God's will, if we ourselves become poor and despised, marginalised in society? Would that make for a better world? Would the common good be served if we all became modern lepers?

What the hymn of Mary conveys is something rather different. Lowliness (you might use the word "humility") is the ability to see things as they really are, and to discern the things that really matter. That, so it seemed to me, was the state of mind and heart of the young woman in the shanty town who simply wanted a clean, dry home in which her child might grow up. Lowliness is a relational word; but for Christians the relationship is not so much between one another as between ourselves as individuals and our Father in Heaven. Mary was the lowly servant of the Lord, the first disciple; Jesus followed the will of his Father, and was the servant of others.

This helps us to express more clearly our spiritual goal, what we are seeking to achieve through religious observance, through our attempts to live as moral beings and be faithful to the ways of God. For rather than try to acquire a religious framework, a religious aura about ourselves by learning the rules and saying the words, our state of lowliness opens us to the flow of God's love. By God's grace we long for him, and our hearts soften to the movement of his love. We call this 'lowliness'.

In a moment we shall sing a favourite hymn which speaks of 'the yearning strong with which the soul will long'. It cries out for God, who is always faithful, to visit us and for the Holy Spirit to 'seek this soul of mine'. For our purposes today, however, the hymn serves as a further commentary on Mary's awareness of her lowliness, and it is rather subtle. It expresses our desire, not merely to be lowly or humble people, but that 'lowliness become mine inner clothing'. The work of the Spirit is to recreate or, in the words of the hymn, "reclothe" our inner being, fashioning us after the image of God himself. The character of God is being formed within us, if we will permit it. As St Paul writes so beautifully in that fine eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, we are to understand God as inhabiting our souls: gently and lovingly transforming us from within so that lowliness becomes imperceptibly part of our spiritual DNA.

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