Elizabeth and Zechariah: A Mixed Blessing
Luke 1
The Second Sunday of Advent, Dec. 8, 2013
Dr. Stephen D. Jones, preaching
First Baptist Church, Kansas City, Missouri
Any way you call it, you’d have to admit that Gabriel messed up Mary’s tranquil
adolescent life. From everything we know, Mary had been a good girl, a faithful girl, an
observant Jew. And Gabriel, the angelic messenger from God, introduced the hint of scandal in
her life. Small towns feed on scandal and gossip. Once your reputation gets tarnished, a small
town never forgets. The story follows you to your grave.
Likely to spare her family shame, perhaps to buy herself time, certainly to understand
what was happening to her, Mary ran away. Well, the story actually says, “Mary set out and
went with haste…” (1:39) Just as soon as Gabriel left Mary, “she got up and hurried to a city in
the Judean highlands.” She ran. Why didn’t she confide first in her own mother? Sometimes
parents have more complicated relationships with their children than grandparents. I’ve noticed
down through the years that grandparents are often more accepting, more tolerant, more relaxed,
than parents. I’m not yet a grandparent so I may not fully understand this, but it kind of makes
sense because parents are typically on the front-line of setting standards, and establishing
boundaries, and reinforcing limits on adolescent behavior. And grandparents are often one step
removed – filled with all the love of a parent but perhaps not as engaged in boundaries, limits
and standards. So, they can be more tolerant, more relaxed.
I’m guessing it might have been that way between Mary and her parents. The way the
story is told in scripture, it doesn’t really leave much time for Mary to have consulted with her
mother or father – she just left town – in a hurry. Why would she have gone to Elizabeth, an
older relative?
Pious Galileans living in the North made annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship in
the Temple on special holy days. And if Galileans had relatives in Judea, around Jerusalem, they
would stay with them while traveling on foot through the Judean hills and might have stayed
with them their entire time while in the city.
Mary knew these relatives, Elizabeth and Zechariah, likely from such pilgrimages with
her family. And it makes sense that Elizabeth was the one female role model in Mary’s life with
whom she could speak most honestly. If anyone would understand, if anyone could hear her
story without rushing to judgment, if anyone could believe a story that was unbelievable – it
would be Elizabeth. And so, Mary went with haste to her priestly relatives, an older couple,
because of the lovingkindness Elizabeth had extended to her.
Gabriel practically sent Mary to Elizabeth anyway. Perhaps sensing that the girl was
overwhelmed by his news, Gabriel told Mary, “Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth
has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled ‘unable to conceive’ is now six months
pregnant. Nothing is impossible for God.” (1:36-37) If that isn’t a “Mary, get out of Dodge,”
message, I don’t know what is. Where else would Mary go if she felt that she couldn’t face
Joseph, and perhaps couldn’t even face her parents or family.
Elizabeth and Zechariah “represent Jewish piety at its best. From both sides of their
families, Elizabeth and Zechariah are from priestly lineage. Zechariah…is a member of one of
the 24 divisions of the Jewish priesthood” (P. 674, Interpreter’s One-Volume commentary)
responsible for Temple worship in Jerusalem.
Even with all their spiritual connections, though, this couple lived with a life-long
burden.
Today, many married couples agonize over whether to have children, or when to have
children. It isn’t automatic or even assumed that the purpose of their marriage is to have
children. The purpose of their marriage is to become life-long partners with one another and if
children figure into the equation, so be it. However, this way of thinking would have been
unheard of to first century Jewish couples. Their understanding of life-everlasting was to live on
through their children and grandchildren, and if a couple was barren, and unable to have
children, the parents were cut off from life-everlasting. All through Jewish scripture, there are
stories of heart-broken parents unable to bear children. One thinks of Abraham and Sarah, who
were destined to be the parents of a nation, and yet they couldn’t bear a child together.
Many years ago, I was co-officiating at my first Roman Catholic wedding. The priest
handed me the wedding book just as we were walking into the chancel and told me to read the
assigned section. I was nervous since I was out of my element and I had already read aloud the
statement that the sole purpose of their marriage was having children and raising them in the
church. I was in the middle of blessing their as-yet unconceived children, and I felt like stopping
the ceremony and saying, “Now, wait a minute. Hold on. Let’s talk about this.”
When Jan and I were first married here in this sanctuary in 1970, we had already decided
not to have children. We were both headed into careers working with children and that felt fine
to us. We were married 11 years before our attitude changed. So, standing there at the altar
more or less deciding for this young couple that they would be parents felt very presumptuous.
But that was not true for Roman Catholic liturgy, and also not true for first-century Jews.
The assumption of both is that the purpose of marriage is procreation.
Elizabeth was not only a descendent of the priestly clan of Aaron, but she was also given
the name of Aaron’s wife (Ex. 6:23), a woman who bore Aaron four sons. Yet, Elizabeth, like
Sarah and Hannah of old, was barren—to a Jewish woman a privation almost too great to be
endured. (Vol. 93, vol 2, Interpreters Dict)
Barrenness in biblical times was always blamed on the wife. If a couple had no children,
it was assumed that God was displeased with or found no favor with the woman.
Comparable to the idea that a disability was due to someone’s sin, so also was infertility
assumed to be a sign of God’s displeasure. Luke protects Elizabeth by describing her as “upright
in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commandments blamelessly.” (1:6) But a firstcentury skeptic might ask, “Why, then, is this supposedly good woman barren?”
We don’t know whether Elizabeth had already passed through menopause, in which case
John’s birth would also have been miraculous. We do know that she and Zechariah were “well
along in years” (1:18c) to the point that, despite their fervent prayers (1:13), they had resigned
themselves to infertility. Zechariah wasn’t even open to a surprise. It was a closed subject to
him. It introduced too much pain which they had already dwelt on far too long. It was time to
move on and forget about having children.
The story says, “When the time of Zechariah’s service at the temple was completed, he
returned home. After this, Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in
seclusion.” (1:23-24) Elizabeth said, “The Lord has done this for me.” As infertility was her
blame, having a child was her blessing.
Elizabeth said, “God has shown favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”
So, why did Elizabeth go into self-imposed seclusion for the first five months of her
pregnancy? We know of no ritual or “custom that required an expectant mother to seclude
herself.” (P. 35, Interpreter’s bible Commentary on Luke)
If God had taken away her disgrace, why go into seclusion? Why forego the pleasure of
letting others see her grow in her pregnancy? Why not enjoy the envy of others on the street,
since she had endured their scorn for so many years?
We do not know the answer, except that Elizabeth may have been waiting for a sign,
waiting to understand, waiting for something more to be revealed. As such, Elizabeth is one of
the surest signs of Advent, in her self-imposed season of silent waiting. For the opposite reason,
Zechariah is the sign of a person caught unprepared because God silenced him throughout this
same season due to his disbelief. He was unable to speak throughout Elizabeth’s pregnancy. He,
too, then, was waiting – but not of his own choice. Elizabeth was waiting in self-imposed
seclusion and Zechariah was waiting in God-imposed seclusion.
What about us? Are we waiting? Anticipating anything in this season of advent? Are
we in the middle of something, something yet to come to fruition? Something yet to be
resolved? Something yet to be understood? Something self-imposed or God-imposed whose
time has not yet come?
One man told this story: “On one of those stimulating autumn days…I stood on the front
lawn, hands folded over a rake, contemplating the leaves. I don’t know how long I stood there,
nor how long I was observed, before a young voice interrupted, ‘You’re not going to rake the
yellow ones, are you?’
A little girl, with one foot on the curb, and the other on the pedal of her bike, had asked.
I frequently saw her pumping past my house late in the afternoon. I knew she lived around the
corner, but until that day our acquaintance was limited to smiles and waves. Her name, she said,
was Alice.
It was the tallest tree in my yard, dropping its leaves in a bright yellow circle around the
trunk, that occasioned our conversation. “I don’t know, Alice. Shouldn’t I rake them?”
“I wouldn’t,” she said, “You know why those leaves are more yellow than the others,
don’t you?”
Experience taught me to approach such a question from an eight-year-old degree of
caution. While I was trying to determine whether I should include in my answer such terms as
‘chlorophyll’ or ‘photosynthesis’—or merely conclude at the outset, ‘No, why?’ – Alice
volunteered her theory.
“They’ve been on the tree all summer, see, and since this is the tallest tree, it soaked up
the most sunshine, get it?”
Alice, putting her hand on her hip, regarded me as if unable to comprehend how anyone
of my vintage could have progressed so far in life with a mind so dense. “In winter,” she
explained in the most elemental terms possible, “the sun stays behind the clouds more so where
do you think a tree gets its sunshine?”
“Oh, I see,” I responded, “from these yellow leaves? They melt away the ice and their
sunshine seeps down to the tree roots?”
Apparently, I had caught on quick enough to redeem myself. Alice laid down her bike
and we sat beside the circle of yellow radiance, she to continue my education.
“This is how I figure it must work,” she began. “I bet if you let the leaves stay, the grass
will be greener there next year.” It was an experiment I couldn’t refuse, given her eagerness and
my disdain for raking leaves.
One early evening the following May, Alice wheeled her bike onto my driveway to
inquire if I would sponsor her, at a nickel a lap, in her swim team’s charity meet. As I signed my
pledge I said, “Have you noticed? The grass where we left the sunshine piled up is not only
greener, but the blades are a half-inch taller than anywhere else on the lawn.” Alice was too
polite to mention she told me so. She just gave me a knowing shrug and off she went.
I didn’t talk with Alice for another three months until one day, when I was working in my
flower bed. A breeze persuaded the tall tree to sprinkle me with the first drops of what would
become this year’s shower of sunshine. It seemed to blow Alice along from nowhere, atop a pair
of roller blades. She regarded me from the curbside, unaccountably shy, looking somewhat older
and wiser.
After I asked about her summer, she finally blurted out, “Guess you think I’m really
dumb.” Her tone, suggesting a recent upheaval in self-confidence, signaled that the time had
come to forget the flowers and amble curbside for a heart to heart chat. Alice’s newfound
uncertainty derived in part from her experience at summer camp where she majored in science.
“Miss LaBera helped me with my project. She teaches botany, and she said I was wrong
about your tree and the grass. It isn’t sunshine. It’s only a natural cycle… Someone as old as
you probably knew all along, didn’t you? I sure was wrong.”
“Alice,” I confessed, “I knew. But you know something? In a way you were right.” I
tried to explain how sometimes poets and scientists look at the same thing and see it differently.
Alice soon skated home. And I did something really dumb for someone as old as I, something
really wonderful and poetic! I sprawled on my back in the grass and gazed up at the tall tree. A
tree, thanks to Alice, that really was full of yellow leaves, shining on my face.” (Christian
Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 1988, p. 30-31)
An old man, leaning on a rake, was waiting, waiting for something, waiting for someone,
waiting for Lord knows what.
And a little girl came to him as a sign, as a gift of wonder as she helped an old man see
God’s creation with child-like and poetic insight. She freed him to enter into God’s world with
new eyes.
Centuries before, an old woman, gone into seclusion, and her old life-partner, struck
dumb, were also waiting, waiting for something, waiting for someone, waiting for Lord knows
what.
And a young girl came to them as a sign, as a gift of wonder as she helped them see
God’s promises with poetic insight.
According to Luke, Elizabeth was the first person to recognize God’s gift in Jesus.
Rather amazing, since he was not yet born but still in Mary’s womb. Elizabeth was filled with
God’s Spirit. She knew immediately what it meant and she said to Mary, “Blessed you are
among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the
mother of my Lord comes to me. For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in
my womb leaped for joy.” (1:41f)
Elizabeth and Zechariah were expecting something, waiting for someone, sensing
through their own miracle that God was at work on something bigger, and their miracle would
somehow fit into a larger story of what God was doing in that season.
I hope you are also convinced that God is somehow working among us, in our lives, in
our stories. Your story is God’s story, just as it was with Mary, and with Elizabeth and
Zechariah. That somehow in the in-between predicaments and half-way developments of our
lives, God is at work. It hasn’t come to fruition yet – but God is working out a Holy Purpose
within and through us that cannot yet be fully discerned.
Luke says Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, her first trimester, until the time
when Elizabeth delivered her baby, and then Mary returned to Nazareth.
While together, sharing female wisdom, Mary articulates the words of what we call the
Magnificat, radical words that were based on an earlier female prophesy of Hannah. With her
role model and mentor, Mary had gained new confidence, new insight, and new courage. She
was ready to return home to Nazareth and face whatever awaited her: her parents…and Joseph.
How would this story have been different without Elizabeth and Zechariah? If Elizabeth
had not recognized God at work within Mary – could Mary have ever seen it herself?
Are we also able to see God at work within us? And are we willing to be part of God’s
unfolding story, written across the chapters of our lives? Amen.