Some time ago I listened to a series of lectures that N. T. Wright gave on the gospel according to St Luke in a series called “The Big Read.” In his introductory lecture on St Luke’s gospel, he said that each of the four evangelists writes, in his own way, the climax of Israel’s story; accordingly, they all start their work to connect it with what had gone before.
So the first characters to appear in Luke’s gospel are Zechariah and Elizabeth; Bishop Wright says of them that “they walk right out of the pages of the Old Testament.” Which is true. They are Abraham and Sarah, Elkanah and Hannah, all over again. They are a couple counted righteous — “walking blamelessly” is how Luke describes their life. They keep and are kept by their covenants with one another and with their faithful God. They are in every way good and admirable. But “they had no child . . . and both were advanced in years.”
Luke proceeds to tell the story of the appearance of the angel to Zechariah in the Temple, of the angel’s good news — “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John” — of Zechariah’s disbelief and his being stricken dumb until John’s birth. Significant as that story is, I’ll pass over it to get to Elizabeth’s response to the fulfillment of the angel’s word:
After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, “Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.”
The gritty wisdom of Elizabeth’s response stirs me to consider — among other things — the habits of mind, and the theology, that would produce the kind of character from which such a response would issue: no denial of long suffering and reproach, no “it’s about time” bitterness; no pride, and no showboating before neighbors who’d undoubtedly been wagging their tongues about “poor, barren Elizabeth” for years.
From just this brief bit of her story, you can safely deduce a few things about Elizabeth.
First, she took her community seriously, though doing so required that she endure its ugly side (is there any other way to take your community seriously?). Well she knew “her reproach among people.” And she did not chalk it up to their sheer foolishness. Had she long been saying to herself, “Whatever; Zechariah and I have more wisdom in our baby fingers than all our tongue-wagging friends have,” she would never have responded to her vindication as she did. Even though she knew many things her people did not — long suffering is an effective teacher — she respected her people enough to care about their collective judgment.
Second, she took the real world seriously, though doing so required that she endure its pains (is there any other way to take the real world seriously?). Psychological comfort, isolated from the real world of time and dust and water and wind and bread and wine and other people, wasn’t going to cut it for Elizabeth. Last year on Facebook there was a sad outbreak of the following status: “God sees you’ve been struggling with something. God says that’s over.” A glib saying, and about a thousand miles short of a real Christian response to suffering. Zechariah and Elizabeth struggled with barrenness for years; they prayed long and fervently, with hearts clean as you’ll find anywhere, and yet they still struggled. Had someone told them in the midst of their long suffering, “God says that’s over,” I imagine their response would have been an uncomprehending stare. And they would have been right. If we are pleased with introspective psychological comfort, which we can magically pull out of a hat, we are too easily pleased. If we are pleased with private psychological comfort, and do not cry out for public vindication — vindication of the name of God, vindication of our neighbors and, yes, vindication for ourselves — we reveal that our spirituality is more Buddhist than Christian, that we have cultivated an unhealthy detachment from the good world that God made, the redemptive history He has written and is writing. Elizabeth cared about the real world, even when reality bit and repeatedly aggravated the sore spot in her life. She did not lap up psychological bromides, but held on to her holy discontent until the day good news arrived and its fulfillment was made manifest in her womb.
Finally — and in tension with her holy discontent — Elizabeth took the faithfulness of her God seriously. The chief thing we spot in this text to distinguish Elizabeth and Zechariah from Abraham and Sarah, and from Elkanah*, is that Elizabeth and Zechariah never relied upon their own devices to produce children. They did not hedge their bets. They didn’t try jury-rigging anything in the created order. In the best sense, they were simple. They walked faithfully and humbly before God, and pleaded for a child. If that plea went forever rejected — and at the point St Luke picks up the story, it looked virtually certain it would go forever rejected — they would go on walking humbly before God as they always had, trusting that even his perpetual “no” was a faithful and just decree.
These things are not easy to hold together: on the one hand, rest in the faithfulness and justice of God; on the other, righteous unrest in the hard realities of the real world, realities which, for a time, that same faithful God has decreed. Elizabeth — may her tribe ever increase — held them together. And so when the long-in-coming vindication did come in the form of her son John, she understood its meaning: the vindication came not from the world, but it was publicly manifest in the world, to be a blessing and sign of the glory of God for the world.
* Elkanah had two wives. From three facts — his evident affection for Hannah, Hannah’s barrenness, and the fruitfulness of his other wife — I propose the following as probably sound deductions: (1) Hannah was Elkanah’s first wife, and (2) Elkanah took his second wife chiefly, perhaps solely, to produce children and heirs.
** All quotations from Luke 1-2 are from the English Standard Version.
Morning at the Brown Brink 