Hark! My lover here he comes
Mary set out in those days and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb.
Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
– From Luke 1
Zechariah looks out their window and sees Mary walking up the path to the home he shares with Elizabeth. He’s seen very little traffic on their path since the moment of the angel’s visitation, that moment in the Holy of Holies when he stirred the incense and offered the sacrifice. On that strange amazing day he staggered out of the temple, looked more than a little wildly around him, opened his mouth, and could not speak. His priesthood has never been the same.
Now, he hasn’t spoken for months. Zechariah is learning both the skills of silence and the art of listening, now that his words must be written and therefore few. Perhaps Elizabeth is grateful, too, for the silence. On the other hand, she may just have more words to say than Zechariah, and who better to speak with than her sweet cousin Mary, walking up the path.
But Elizabeth is interrupted. Of course she has stories to tell, but the baby within her is kicking, or rather leaping and laughing and praising God. And when her baby speaks, Elizabeth listens.
(Who is the first person to celebrate Christmas, the birth of Jesus? I think that must be the baby dancing in Elizabeth’s womb, the boy soon to be named John.)
Stories in the Song of Solomon (part of today’s texts and source of the devotion title) are all about the mysterious, palpable loving Touch between God and us. Elizabeth felt that Touch when Mary came in to her home. Zechariah, who of course does not speak, may well have felt it too.
I sometime call that Touch “safety.” The calm that comes to me sometimes as I settle into sleep, it radiates all through me, and I feel the Touch. God’s love is close, and protective, and offers me rest. But Mary, recognized by Elizabeth to be carrying in her womb a spiritual revolution, knows so much more than safety.
C.S. Lewis described his lion Aslan: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
Something bigger, newer, stronger and much more than “safety” rises up in these women and between them. Call it love, call it goodness. Not safety, but God’s goodness. As a white male professor who speaks wisely about these women said, “call it neighborliness,” the strength of mothers to walk in God’s plan for the rich to be brought down and the poor to rise up, his unimpeachable plan for us to simply see each other as brothers and sisters, as family finally and forever.
Again, I imagine Zechariah watching, like I might be watching if I couldn’t speak and had been communing in silence with God for months. He’s in no hurry. Zechariah smiles and loves his wife, as he watches those two amazing women come out of their isolation and storm the gates of heaven. Except they don’t need to storm. God has opened wide the gates.
Both these mothers take after your own heart, Lord, and their children will change the world and bring Kingdom, bring neighborliness, bring freedom, bring family. They beckon us to follow them, serve God as they do, care for those God has blessed unto us as they will care for Jesus and John.
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a volume of The Chronicles of Narnia, p. 73
Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity,” from The Christian Century, March 24, 1999
https://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2019/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archive.php?year=2019
