The “Magnificat” of the Gospel of John, by Elizabeth A. Mitchell

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February 6, 2021
Daily Scripture Reading and Meditation: Come Away and Rest a While
February 6, 2021

*Center image: St. John Leading Home his Adopted Mother by William Dyce, c. 1842-60 [TATE, London]

By Elizabeth A. Mitchell, The Catholic Thing, Feb. 6, 2021

Dr. Elizabeth A. Mitchell, S.C.D., received her doctorate in Institutional Social Communications from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome where she worked as a translator for the Holy See Press Office and L’Osservatore Romano. …

Elizabeth A. MitchellWhat do the Prologue of John’s Gospel and Mary’s Canticle of the Magnificat have in common?  They sing a similar refrain from one united heart.

From the opening of John’s Prologue, proclaiming the “eternal generation of the Son from the Father,” to the scene of final entrustment and abandonment on the Cross, Michael Pakaluk’s new book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John: A New Translation with Commentary, leads the reader to recognize the wellsprings of Marian influence on the fourth Gospel.

Steeped in the hope of the Old Testament and in the faith-filled proclamation of the Lord’s coming in the New, the song of Mary, the great “Ode of the Theotokos” as it is known in the Eastern tradition, becomes what Pakaluk calls the “oversound” in the Gospel of John; the influence of Mary’s unique perspective echoes throughout John’s writing. …