Text:  Luke 1:39-55                                                                                             W 4^th Sunday of Advent

A Lesson from

Three Silent Priests and Two Disgraced Women

            In the name of our coming King, dear friends in Christ: in just a few days we will, once again, celebrate the birth of our Savior. It’s an event that is, like so many other parts of the story of God’s love, one in which the normal standards of expectation and … shall we say the “natural order” of things are completely overturned.  God the Son, the eternal, infinite, omnipresent, and all-knowing Deity who created heaven and earth enters his own creation and becomes a helpless human infant suckling at the breast of a poor Jewish girl.  If we didn’t already know the story, there’s no way anyone could even have imagined such a thing taking place.  And here, though he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords whose glory fills the skies, he chooses as his palace of all places a rustic stable, and for his throne a trough for feeding livestock.  It just doesn’t seem right to us – and yet, in a way, it does make some sense.  That’s because as people shaped by the Word we’re accustomed to the fact that our God simply doesn’t do things the way we might expect.  On the contrary, we’re told that he chooses the low, the wretched, the despised things in order to bring to naught the things that are – that is, the things we esteem so highly; and further that he makes his wisdom known in foolish things precisely to confound the celebrated wisdom and knowledge of men.  It’s his way; and it’s the way he chose to save us.  Because in choosing the unexpected path to become a man and to be born in a barn, we see a foreshadow of the greatest upset of all time: when the Holy God who gave the Law and keeps it perfectly, will give himself to die for the benefit of rebellious lawbreakers who despise him.

Today’s Gospel lesson also fits the pattern of the unexpected overturning of the natural order.  It’s the well-known story that’s called the Visitation; that is when the young virgin mother Mary, who has only recently conceived the Christ Child in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, goes to visit her much elder kinswoman, Elizabeth, who is now in the sixth month of her own miraculous pregnancy.  Elizabeth is carrying the child people will come to know as John the Baptist.  Now, we just heard the story, so we know that it consists mostly of a dialogue between two people; namely Mary and Elizabeth.  But in order to fully appreciate the ironic “upset” of what’s taking place, we’ll need to see that there’re actually five people involved in the story.  And I’d like to start with those mentioned least.

The first is Zechariah the priest in whose home all the action takes place. From a human point of view, we might have expected him to play a greater part in what’s going on.  He is, after all, a highly respected member of the community – likely the most respected member of this particular community. He’s a priest of God who on a regular rotational schedule travels to Jerusalem to join his division that ministers in the Temple itself.  There he performs the sacrifices through which God declares his people forgiven, and there he has several times been selected to be the one chosen to go into the Holy Place to offer the prayers of the nation – a rare honor indeed.  The rest of the year he spends back here in his home village in the Judean hills teaching, counseling, and helping to oversee the affairs of the synagogue and community.  Oh, and he’s been at it for a long time now.  And remember this is a culture that showed immense reverence for the wisdom and experience acquired by years of faithful service.  So, when Zechariah says something, people sit up and take notice:  “Quiet now, the venerable Zechariah is speaking”.   Which is why it’s so unusual that the text only mentions him in passing. He only gets his name in the credits as being the homeowner.

Of course there’s a reason we don’t hear more from him, and that’s that he can’t speak.  He’s been struck mute by an angel on account of his doubt and unbelief.  It happened at his last rotation serving at the Temple.  Once again he’d been chosen for the rare privilege of going into the Holy Place to offer the prayers at the altar of incense.  These were the prescribed prayers that concentrated the deepest hopes and desires of the whole Jewish nation.  And chief among the longings of the Jewish heart was the prayer we sing in the Advent hymn, “O come Emmanuel, ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here”.  Really, that prayer summed up the entire work of Zechariah’s long life.  Everything he studied in Scripture, everything he taught to others, every ritual action he performed, all pointed ahead to the fulfillment of that prayer – to the day when the Messiah would appear and redeem God’s people.  And while he was praying on that fateful day about six months ago, suddenly an angel appeared beside him and announced, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.”  The angel went on to explain that Zechariah and Elizabeth would have the honor of being the parents of the Lord’s forerunner:  the promised prophet who would come in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare the way of the Lord.

It was the best possible news that Zechariah could have heard – the fulfillment not only of the nation’s hopes; but also of his and his wife’s long since abandoned hope of having a child of their own.  The angel announced all his dreams come true; but when his moment of triumph came, Zechariah choked.  His faith faltered.  So accustomed was he to practicing “waiting in disappointment” that when the time came for action and fulfillment, he was unprepared.  He didn’t believe it was going to happen.  He demanded a sign from the angel to prove what he was saying was true (as if having an angel appear and begin speaking to him were not enough). The angel said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Okay, wise guy, you want a sign?  Well here it is:  since you don’t believe what you’ve been saying as you pray, or what you’ve been studying, doing, and telling others for a lifetime, and since you don’t believe me now: your mouth is shut up.  You will not speak again until these things are fulfilled.”  And so it happens that the venerable old priest Zechariah, the one who by human standards should have had top billing in this story, is most conspicuous by his silence.

Which brings us to another person only briefly mentioned by the text.  This one is at least part of the action, but like his father, has nothing to say.  I mean the yet-to-be-born infant John, of course.  From a long line of Levites, this son of a priest is destined to become a priest himself – though his priesthood will be very different than those who came before him.  Where the others performed rituals, and prayed prayers, and spoke words that pointed ahead to “the day when Messiah would come”, John is the one chosen to point to the Messiah and say, “There he is.  Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  As a result, in a very real sense John will be the last of his priestly order.  When the highpoint of his ministry comes, there will be no more waiting, no more looking ahead, no more animal sacrifices that point toward what Messiah will do when he comes; these will be replaced by rejoicing in the presence of the Messiah and celebrating what God has already done and continues to do through him. And that’s what we find John doing in the story.  At the sound of Mary’s voice, he begins leaping for joy.  That’s because in her the Word is made flesh – and by the illumination of the Spirit through her greeting, in a way I don’t pretend to understand, John senses that his Lord is near.  And as he will do some thirty years in the future, with every fiber of his being he announces the fulfillment of the promise.  Like his father, he can’t speak – but he can show his faith, and he does.  So there’s contrast here:  Zechariah, for lack of faith, turned out to be all talk and no action; the result was that God took away his capacity to speak.  John believes; and at this point anyway, he’s all action and no talk.  In the end, he will be granted the honor of delivering the best news of all to God’s people:  that the Messiah has come.

And that brings us to yet another priest of God who has no lines to speak in this story.  In fact, other than Elizabeth referring to the embryonic Jesus as “my Lord”, nothing is said about him at all – and yet, the whole story revolves around him.  He is the central figure.  He’s the reason these people have come together in the first place.  He’s the reason we’ve gathered here.  And though in neither place does speak himself, his Word is being heard coming from the mouths of others – but even then, in this story, not from the people you’d expect.

What I want you to see is that part of the theme of overturning the natural order that’s unfolding in this text is that we have three priests whose job it is to declare the wonders of God’s Word; but they are all silent.  Instead, through their conversation, the ones doing the proclamation of the Gospel by inspiration of the Holy Spirit are two women who, on account of their normal roles in society, ordinarily wouldn’t be given that task.  (Now, there may be a few cynical fellows out there thinking, “C’mon:  the women do all the talking while the men are quiet … what’s so unusual about that?”  Trust me, whatever your day-to-day experiences might be, for the Bible this is a very rare thing.)  And something to remember is that these are not just ordinary women; but two women that would have been held in fairly low esteem in this society – no, that’s too soft a term:  they would have been thought of as disgraced women.

Consider Elizabeth: in a society that placed such a high value on family, and in which a woman’s highest honor lay in bearing children, she would have been held in disgrace on account of her barrenness.  While both she and her husband would have shared the aching pain of wanting children and not being able to have them, they would not have shared it equally.  It would have particularly grievous for Elizabeth.  Besides, Zechariah could occupy himself and find respect in the conduct of his highly honored duties.  Elizabeth would have been left empty and unfulfilled; and on top of her private misery, she would have borne the disgrace of a cursed woman … the village folk talking behind her back in hushed tones:  “Poor Elizabeth, that barren tree, that fruitless vine; who knows what secret sin she owns that the Lord in his justice has seen fit to punish her so?”  But now in the realization of God’s promise, her previous misfortune and sadness have been overturned.  While her contemporaries are beginning to experience the sadness of “empty nest syndrome”, she’s preparing her home for the new arrival.  And I can’t help but think that her elation rises to heights never known to the others precisely because she first experienced so many long years of grief and disappointment.  Now the Lord has taken away her emptiness and disgrace, and will soon fill her arms with the deepest desire of her heart – and doubly so, for this she knows will not be just any child, but one who will be great in the sight of God and his people.  He will do the work of preparing the way of the Lord, and she is honored by God in sharing in this work by preparing the way for his prophet.

And then there’s Mary, who is another disgraced woman – or at least she will be soon.  When she returns to Nazareth in a few months, society’s judgments will fall hard on her: an engaged woman who goes away for a while, without her fiancé, and comes back home in a delicate condition is going to be the talk of the town.  She will bring shame to her family, and heartbreak to Joseph, her betrothed.  He will make plans to dissolve their union believing that she has been unfaithful to him. All the while, she will know the truth, and later he will too; but in the eyes of others she will have to bear the disgrace all her life.  Even in Jesus’ adulthood, his enemies will consistently make the accusation that his was an illegitimate birth.  In this (in a small way) she foreshadows the mission of the holy child she bears, for he too will be condemned by the world though he is innocent.  But the shame and disgrace Mary will soon face doesn’t seem to bother her too much.  Instead, by faith she looks ahead to a day when “all generations will call [her] blessed”. And as Elizabeth says, she is blessed now by believing that what God has promised her will be fulfilled.

Mary’s words of praise to God for the great things he has done for her are recorded for us in the hymn we call the Magnificat – the whole theme of which, as you’ve probably noticed, is this whole idea of how the Lord overturns the standard state of affairs to do the unexpected.  He puts down the proud and raises up the humble.  He gives to those who are hungry and in need, and he sends the rich away empty handed.  He condemns the self-righteous who sit in judgment of others while thinking they are saving themselves, and he gives mercy and his righteousness to those with broken hearts, who confess their sins, and look to his promises in the Savior for hope and life.

All of which should inform our understanding and change our vision as we view the world around us and the way God works in it to accomplish his purposes even now.  We tend to be drawn to success, to accomplishment, to things that appear great and glorious.  That is where we look for the evidence of God’s presence and blessing among us. But what Scripture teaches, and what we see again clearly laid out for us in today’s lesson from three silent priests and two disgraced women is how the opposite is usually true.  And there’s a reason for that:  these examples of the upset of the natural order we looked at this morning are foreshadows of the cross, where the Lord’s presence and blessing were revealed in their fullest form when God the Son was disgraced, humiliated, and put to death for us.  Now, in a similar way, we should be sensitized to expect God’s greatest work in us not necessarily in the happy, easy, and prosperous moments; but rather in the echoes and aftershocks of the cross of Jesus in our lives.  Those are the times that test and stretch faith and call us to humility and dependence on God, and so they best prepare us to receive him and his gifts of grace, because as we’ve seen, God gives grace to the humble.  This Christmas and in all our days to come, may he keep us so prepared to receive him.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!