’How can this be?‘
Zechariah
Luke 1:8-20, 2:62-79
By Rebecca Osborn
CAN YOU IMAGINE being unable to speak for a year? Would it be a relief to have a break from speaking, or would it be stifling? Would it hinder your work or your relationships?
Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, had to grapple with this unexpected disability. The angel Gabriel appeared to him, while he was serving in the Temple, to announce that he and his wife would have a son in their old age. Zechariah doubted. As a consequence of his disbelief, he was unable to speak until after his son’s naming ceremony.
Zechariah was a priest of his people, a spiritual leader, and he received this angelic apparition in the Temple, the centre of the Jewish religion. It had been four hundred years since God had sent a prophet to Israel, and Zechariah’s role could have been to joyfully break this silence. Instead he asked, “How can this be?” After a lifetime of exposure to Old Testament stories, and his eyes’ evidence of the supernatural before him, his knee-jerk reaction was to believe it impossible.
Still, it would be a mistake to think of this as strictly a punishment. After all, Mary also said to Gabriel, “How can this be?” God struck Zechariah dumb not only to teach Zechariah, but to speak through Zechariah’s silence.
I suspect Zechariah struggled during that year. How he must have wished he could tell others about his vision! To say nothing of the myriad small ways that his daily human intercourse was disrupted. The fact that his friends made signs to him (Luke 2:62) suggests that he was either also deaf, or that his handicap was generally misunderstood.
What did he think about, during that year? How many times must he have told the story in his head? What was he constantly wishing to say? How did his thinking change now that he was unable to express himself? How many indignities, large and small, did he suffer from being unable to communicate?
After his son was born, when he had written “His name is John,” Zechariah’s tongue was loosed and “he began to speak, praising God” (2:64). Perhaps he had long planned what he would say, but at that moment he was filled with the Holy Spirit. His first words spoke for God, not himself, ending the four hundred years of divine silence with a song of praise and prophecy.
And what was this prophecy? It did not centre on Zechariah’s experiences, or even this miraculous event of his own special child’s birth, which isn’t mentioned until past the halfway point of his song. It pointed to the big picture of God’s work of redemption, the coming of the Messiah. God had not forgotten his people. A season of silence for a man and a people had ended with the word of a coming Word, a prophecy of light shining in darkness, of mercy and memory.
The parallels to our present age may have struck you already. This year sees our normal merry-making completely disrupted, and perhaps you feel trapped in the confinement of lockdown or other limitations. Many of us are facing anxiety and grief.
Perhaps, like Zechariah, your knee-jerk reaction to this pandemic is incredulity and spiritual confusion. For Zechariah, silence must have seemed like a punishment, but it prepared him to speak for God to his people, ending a much greater silence. What will God say through us, during and after this strange time? I pray that this temporal disruption is preparing our hearts to value those relationships more deeply. I am tempted to focus on the loss of convenience, but this is also a revelation of my idolatry of convenience. With the help of the Holy Spirit, may we can regain God’s priorities, and when we speak, may we point to God’s big picture.
As we wait to resume our normal “incarnate” relationships, in a pause that is full of doubt, let us remember that we serve the Word who broke the silence when he came incarnate. His coming is the light to guide those in darkness into the path of peace, and we need him more than ever. May God transform us to incarnate or embody his love, to speak his truth, to be guided into peace, and to wait in joyful hope to see him face to face. TAP
Rebecca Osborn is the Assistant Priest at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. Her husband Jared is the Rector, and together they have three daughters.
Mary
Luke 1:26-38
BY Catherine Sider Hamilton
O Lord, make haste to help us.
I HAVE SAID it every morning for years; it is the opening of Morning Prayer. This year, though, this Advent in the time of the virus, I am hearing it with new ears – for I feel now with every bone in my body our need for help. How fragile it is, after all, this life of ours, our cities with their teeming streets, the mighty engine of the world stuttering in the face of a bug too small to see. The tent cities on my walk to work are growing; it is going to be cold, I think, when winter comes in earnest. A parishioner who makes meals at Sanctuary, a local outreach centre for street people, tells me they are making 700 meals a day. They have lost 26 people this fall, not to COVID but to its social and economic fall-out. In our neighbour to the south, the numbers of sick and dying are staggering.
O God, make speed to save us.
Into this time of my need, Mary comes. She says, to the angel who hails her suddenly, out of nowhere, on (we must assume) a day like any other; to the angel of the Lord she says, “How can this be?”
The angel brings good news. “Hail, blessed one, the Lord is with you!” You will bear a son, and he will be great. He will be king, in fact, and of his kingdom there will be no end.
That is quite a promise. A king in Israel, a Jewish king, a son of David to sit on David’s throne, in the time of Caesar’s rule. A son for the young woman who does not know a man.
It all seems impossible.
Mary is direct: “How can this be?” How can there be a kingdom for God’s people Israel when Roman standards rise in the holy city? How can there be a son for the virgin?
The difficulties are real. Mary does not gloss over everything that lies in the way of the angel’s dazzling word.
But note this: Mary asks. In the face of the impossible hope, she turns to the angel and asks. She does not laugh as Sarah did; she does not like Zechariah request a sign. She turns to the One who speaks God’s promise and she asks. “How shall this be?”
“How will I know this?” Zechariah says. Prove it to me. I will decide what is possible and what is not.
But Mary says, “How can this be?” Show me the way.
And Gabriel replies,
The Holy Spirit will come upon you
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you
and the child you bear will be called holy, the Son of God.
The Holy Spirit will come upon you. This is not about Mary on her own, getting a child without a man. It is not about Israel on her own, claiming a throne in the time of Caesar. This is the world where the Holy Spirit blows, over Augustus’ empire, even over cities made silent by the virus. This is the world where the Holy Spirit blows and it will not be impossible for God. Everything, every promise, every word of blessing, every word of the prophets: it will not be impossible for God. This is the world where the Holy Spirit blows.
Mary sees in real time the obstacles to hope. And she turns to God. She turns to God as we do, in every word of the church’s worship, in every candle we light on the Advent wreath.
O God, make speed to save us. Those are not empty words. They are the Church’s words of faith, her long turning to God.
We turn because Mary turned. We turn as she turned; we lift up the difficult time and place it in God’s hands.
“How can this be?” Mary said. Show me the way. And the angel said, “Blessed one, the Lord is with you.” It is the angel’s first word to Mary. This is where it begins and ends, the whole story, in those few words. Blessed one, the Lord is with you.
And Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” TAP
Dr. Catherine Sider Hamilton is Priest-in-Charge at St Matthew’s Riverdale and Assistant Professor at Wycliffe College, Toronto.
