57-66
Baby John’s birth
57-63
God Meets Us in the Comedic Push and Pull of Real Family Life
Here we see Gabriel’s promise fulfilled!
Compare v. 58 with v. 25. Her family and community know the score and share her joy in God’s kindness (note ‘mercy’ in vv. 50 and 58).
I love the comedy of the familial push and pull here! (Compare Ruth 4:17.)
John = ‘Yahweh has shown favour’
Notice we have here a picture of husband and wife in obedience to God together.
So much of the action so far has been so homely and familial, involving everyday real people. We see God’s hand reaching into these daily realities, the supernatural meeting the natural, especially in settings of home and family life: ‘Repeatedly, this scene is bathed in the light of the miraculous’ (Green, 108).
The ‘Magic’ of Christmas Time Tells Us Something Real About the Gospel
This miracle-in-the-mess quality we find in Luke’s opening chapters is so like the homely and harassed yet ‘magical’ feel of Christmas time! This wonderful feeling we get during even the strains of this season (or perhaps ‘used to get’ for some of us!) is actually telling us something real and true about the gospel and about life under God.
Remember that the body of Christ is a family too. To be a Christian is to be a part of God’s family. We are brothers and sisters:
Children of the Father
One with the Son by faith
Bound together in the love and truth of the Spirit
This is the consistent picture of Trinitarian community in the New Testament.
And to be in this family is full of mutual sympathy and irritation and push and pull just like we see here!
God Can’t Bless Just One of Us at a Time
And really, the whole human race is a family under God (Acts 17:26, 29) and God intends to graciously bless all the families of the earth through the graciously chosen Abrahamic-Messianic family (Gen. 12:3).
Because he has made us a family of communal creatures in his image, God can’t bless just one of us at a time. His merciful joy is infectious. He’s actually designed it to work that way—he works his blessing through us to each other. (That’s also why Mary’s song shifted halfway through from what God was doing for her personally to what God was doing for all his humble people.)
Who is around us experiencing God’s compassionate blessing that we can rejoice with? And have we shared with others what God has done for us so that they can participate in our rejoicing?
One Person’s Obedience Helps the Entire Community to Know and Obey God
I love the present tense finality of Zechariah’s written sentence! (I wish I could write punchy and perspicuously like that!) (And you can just hear the maternal-paternal-sibling murmur in the background as they ‘wondered’!)
It is very important to see here that the rest of them don’t have the revelation he has—it takes Zechariah’s obedience to communicate this to the rest and pass obedience on to the community. We’re each responsible for passing on whatever ‘word’ God has given us to the rest of the community through our obedience to it.
64
Zechariah’s mute period has obviously been well spent for it is only blessing of God that comes quickly out of his restored voice. We will hear these praises in his prophetic song/poem.
65-66
Note again the holy ‘fear’ we discussed at 1:50.
They both ‘gossip the gospel’ as well as ‘lay it up in their hearts’.
The heart is the creative centre of a person and includes the mind and emotions – so they are letting all this alleged divine activity have some space in the will, reason, imagination, and feelings.
A community asking, questioning, pondering, wondering: ‘What then will this child be?’
‘In this way, Luke teases his audience, raises curiosity, and promises a return to the story of John’ (Green, 106).
The God With Hands
They recognise the hand of the Lord in all this (the ‘hand’ being a recurring biblical term for God’s activity in the world—we believe in a God with hands!).
Luke’s comment as narrator about the ‘hand of the Lord’ here then ‘underscores the sense that God is at work behind and in these seemingly ordinary practices… and suggests to us that we should join the people of the Judean hill country in pondering the future role of this baby’ (Green, 108).
67
Bendictus – From Mute Sign to Prophetic Mouthpiece in an Instant!
By including Zechariah’s song (known as the ‘Benedictus’ from the first word in the Latin version) Luke here foreshadows an answer to the question raised about this child. Like the Magnificat we are invited to ‘magnify’ God as we see his character in this poem-prophecy, but also to ponder what this God is up to in the world.
Picture this as we read it.
We can see what Zechariah’s been doing with his time of imposed silence! God graciously and comically moves him in an instant from a mute sign that the promised birth will be fulfilled to his mouthpiece proclaiming what’s to come!
Yet again, Luke features the activity of the Holy Spirit – filling Zechariah (as often in the Old Testament, for ‘heroic’ purposes, and then more frequently and in the life of every believer in the NT, also for service and praise to the Lord).
Here the Spirit fills to enable prophecy. So this poem/song, the Benedictus, is prophetic whereas Mary’s was more contemplative (though with a definite element of the prophetic).
It’s really awe-inspiring (and theo-comic!) when you think that God communicates to us verbally, in human languages, and mostly through human messengers (as opposed to, say, angels).
68
The one, long sentence of verses 68-75 forms the first half of the poem/song.
Blessing the God Who Blesses Us First
What does it mean for humans to ‘bless’ God? We usually think of God blessing us, don’t we? Well, we can bless or curse with our mouths can’t we (James 3:8-10)? And we can speak in a good-heaping or evil-heaping way toward God. (And we can bless or curse God silently in our hearts too.)
The idea of blessing and cursing is a huge theme throughout the Bible that we won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that when we ‘bless God’ we are with our hearts and mouths enlarging the praise of God in response to his blessing (enlarging) of our lives and world.
God Comes for a Visit
Here we see again a ‘visiting’ God who comes to us, involves himself with us (similar to ‘looked on’ in v. 48 and an important term throughout Luke).
‘Visiting’ might sound as if God’s not always there, always near, which of course he is always fully present everywhere. His creation, depending on him completely for its moment by moment existence as it does, can never be any ‘where’ but right in the dynamic, sustaining, creative presence of God. God upholds us and gives us breath in every moment of time and in every dimension of space. God is ‘actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:27-28).
But the nature of his presence with us depends on our heart relation to him – and he hopes we will reach out to him as he reaches out to us. He sovereignly creates and situates all people in such a way ‘that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him’ (Acts 17:27) just as he is reaching out to us: ‘all day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people’ (Romans 10:21; Isaiah 65:2).
Even God’s People Can Lack a Sense of His Presence for a Time
Sin is what’s creating this tension of darkly feeling toward God whilst also rejecting his guiding and welcoming hands.
This describes lostness but it can also somewhat picture times in the lives of believers, both individually and communally. Even as his people, we may not consciously and meaningfully and joyfully experience his presence for periods of time. This is for all sorts of reasons in a fallen world – sin in our own individual lives as well as sin in our community, be that the church or the society or both.
By this I do not mean that it’s always some secret, unconfessed sin in your life. That’s the mistaken diagnosis that Job’s ‘comforters’ made. It’s just an unfortunate reality in a sinful, broken, fallen world and won’t be fully remedied until the Eschaton (the Last Day) when ‘the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ (Habakkuk 2:14). Until the time of that theo-epistemic flooding, we take what trickles, puddles, brooks, rivers, and streams we can graciously get.
A Myriad Ways to Experience God’s Presence
We may also have a limited sense of what experiencing God’s presence means and looks like. And since we don’t ‘feel’ him in one narrow way out of a myriad of ways that he makes himself known to us, we think we are missing him. The church sometimes teaches us only one or two ways to ‘feel’ God, but the Bible shows us that we can encounter him in absolutely any and every detail of life for it all belongs to him and is sustained by him and points to and glorifies him always.
For just one example, I myself may not always feel God during a time of worship in song, but I regularly find myself exclaiming his praises with warmth of heart as I feel his presence in good literature. We each will find him graciously present with us in glory and truth and love in a myriad of ways from family to work to leisure, indoors and outdoors, days and nights, in all seasons. (It should go without saying that knowing him through his voice in Scripture and Christ, through the Holy Spirit and prayer and praise, is the ground and crown of all these other experiences.)
When we do, when we are renewed in awareness of him, especially by his clear activity in our lives, we call it a ‘visit’ from God!
God is Ever Inviting Us In
And of course the initiative is always God’s: he first ‘visits’ us in our waywardness and insensitivity and thereby enables us to respond to his visit with joy and love and faith and obedience. But we must respond or the visit will eventually turn into one of judgment instead of blessing (as the rest of the Gospel plays out in various individuals and communities). When we throw God’s grace back into his face, then we place ourselves outside the circle of his blessing. But he ever longs to bring us in, as Luke will show in Jesus’ parable of the father who pleads with the elder, prideful son to come in to the party for the homecoming of the younger, prodigal son.
A Visitation of Redemption
Depending on the circumstances and the person, we may like or dislike, look forward to with joy or dread, a ‘visit’ from someone. Everyone here in these passages is just thrilled about God’s visitation (e.g. Elizabeth’s attitude of joyful wonder in v. 43). Of course, as faithful Israelites they’ve been expecting (hoping against hope) this visit. God promised he would come to his people to rescue them and now he’s coming through on that promise which is occasion for nothing short of joy!
What is the nature of this ‘visit’ from God? It is for the purpose of ‘redemption’, to ‘buy back’ his sinfully erring people out of their slavery/captivity to their enemies. We can only visit people in prison (my Dad used to do this) to comfort and aid them through their imprisonment. God visits those in (a much greater and more permanent) prison to open the jail doors and set them free! He’s got the means and resources and connections to pull this off!
69
The Horned King
God raises up a ‘horn’! This wonderful, terrible animal appendage is a symbol of royal and warrior-like strength or power—power to save.
A Messianic horn that gores the monstrously powerful enemies of God and his people is ‘a picture of strength… The horns of an ox are used for protection and for defeating opponents (Deut 33:17). The same image is used for a warrior (2 Sam 22:3; Ps 75:4-5, 10; 148:14) or a king who saves (1 Sam 2:10; Ps 132:17). Luke’s starting point for thinking about Jesus is that he is a king’ (Bock, 51).
70
Old Testament Continuity with the New Testament
Luke and his characters never tire of sounding the note that God is true to his word – this was always planned in the Old Testament.
So again we see that the New Testament is in continuity with the Old Testament. We emphatically do not have an ‘Old Testament God’ and a ‘New Testament God’. The NT embraces and fulfils OT history rather than discarding it and starting over.
71
God’s Hand Always Trumps the Paw of the Enemy
Being rescued out of the paw of the bear as it were—God’s hand can trump any other hand! God is always the greater Wrestler!
We have REAL enemies: this is very serious. We are in terrible, existential danger! There are forces both within us and without us that are against us, that will kill us unless someone can save us.
Sometimes we realise this with sobriety and urgency and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we feel it and sometimes we don’t. It’s in the moments that this is real and urgent for us that the gospel makes sense as the unspeakably Good News that it is.
And again, in response to such mortal enemies, we see the repeated motif of God as Merciful Divine Warrior who comes to wage war on all that opposes his love and justice, to deliver the oppressed from the oppressor.
(Interesting that we’re studying this on Remembrance Sunday!)
‘We can feel the long years of pain and sorrow, of darkness and death, overshadowing his mind. Nameless enemies are lurking round the corner in his imagination and experience… But we can also feel the long years of quiet prayer and trust’ (Wright, 18).
72-73
Again, The God Who Remembers
This mighty saving hand of God comes from his character: he is faithful and merciful. His promised compassion to Israel is ‘remembered’ because of the sacred-sombre promise-contract (‘holy covenant’) he entered into with them, signed and sealed by God as the main party, to their benefit (and ours).
Like ‘visit’, ‘remember’ is an anthropomorphism like we said at v. 54: God doesn’t forget us! (As I sometimes do with my kids! E.g. collecting them from school!)
This holy covenant was sworn by God’s own verbal testimony and vow to Abraham the father of the faith.
A Gift-Giving God
A promise to ‘grant’ (ESV), to give, to provide—highlighting yet again the grace and generosity and kindness of God (a consistent Lucan theme, especially as people herald and preach the gospel throughout Acts: they herald a gift-giving God who comes to humanity bearing gifts of salvation, forgiveness, new life—cf. Romans 6:23).
74-75
What Are We Saved For?
We are saved from what would destroy us not to be set up again on our own, but to be restored to God’s household in happy, secure, perpetual ‘service’ to him—that is, serving our God-given purpose, running according to divine design. That design is that we live to the full as creative, communal image-bearers who know and glorify God in every area of life, loving God with our whole being and loving each other as ourselves. God delivers us from our enemies so that we can live in his fully human way in the holy fear of God, but without fear of harm from any enemy of God and of his world and his people.
So God saves us to share in his holiness! Instead of building a wall around his unique holy character to keep us out, he invites us in (Leviticus; 1 Peter 1:13-25: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’).
And his Messiah makes us righteous as well, sharing in God’s total moral purity and goodness and justice, all freely gifted to us in the Messiah’s person and work of redemption.
The Coming Purpose and Work of Baby John
The next section of Zechariah’s poem/song shifts from praising God to prophesying about the coming role of the newborn child.
76-77
Note again that John is not ‘Son of the Most High’ but ‘prophet of the Most High’, the forerunner to the Lord’s coming among his people.
Again, we see the preparatory nature of John’s calling and work. This preparation is one of giving knowledge of God’s salvation: it is epistemic-heraldic or epistemic-salvific. The knowledge he will spread is here specifically about the forgiveness of sins.
The Merciful Divine Warrior Will Take Down Another Deadly Enemy: Sin
This divinely granted forgiveness is crucial to salvation because sin is the central human problem. Like the forces of evil that the Divine Warrior comes to bring down, sin (the heart-rebellion of creatures against their Creator and all the vice and destruction this breeds) is a diabolically deadly enemy to our world and us.
So this enemy too God comes to engage in battle with very strange but powerful engines of war that we will not see in full effect until the scenes of the crucifixion and resurrection.
78-79
What is it about God that he would ‘visit’ and ‘redeem’ his people in this way? He is a God of ‘tender mercy’ (like we talked about last time).
The Sun Rises in the Land of the Darkness of Death (The Last Enemy is Conquered)
Here is evocative imagery about God’s gracious salvation-scattering visitation: a ‘sunrise’ from ‘on high’.
We’ve seen that God is coming to rescue us from the forces of evil and from our own sin, and here we see him do battle with ‘the last enemy’ (1 Corinthians 15:26): death.
Can you imagine this? Is this true? ‘If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied’ (1Corinthians 15:19). But this is the promise that is held out to us in the birth narratives of Jesus Christ and his forerunner John.
We are in darkness and ‘God is light’ (1 John 1:6) as we said last time when we talked about God’s holiness. But the shockingly good news is that God doesn’t leave us there in the pitch-black consequences of a sinful world but instead brings his ‘unapproachable light’ into the midst of our darkness somehow, miraculously!
God descends into the dark regions of death to personally guide his people out into the land of light again. This is the life and path of his divine shalom, where ‘all is right with the world’ again first by peace between God and us and then between us and one another and our world. This outrageous promise too is held out to us in these weird and wonderful births.
The God Who Saves Us from All Our Enemies
So we see God come to save us from our worst enemies, who ‘hate’ us, who will do us in without a rescuer (v. 71):
Evil forces, both human and demonic (v. 74)
Our own sin (v. 77)
And death itself (v. 79)
These are consistently shown to be the enemies of the human race and the world we live in throughout Scripture. God is consistently seen as their ultimate conqueror by his mighty grace.
‘God’s mercy, the forgiveness of our sins, the rescue from death itself; all of this points to a deeper and wider meaning of “salvation”. Luke is preparing us to see that God, in fulfilling the great promises of the Old Testament, is going beyond a merely this-worldly salvation and opening the door to a whole new world in which sin and death themselves will be dealt with. This, of course, is the message that will occupy the rest of the book’ (Wright, 19).
80
John’s intervening years—paralleled to a similar but lengthier description of Jesus’ intervening years next chapter.
Note the ‘wilderness’ training for John, like the prophet Elijah in whose steps he follows.
Summary of Luke Chapter 1:
‘Luke’s long first chapter holds together what we often find easier to keep separate. At point after point he has linked his story to the ancient biblical record of Israel, to the patriarchs, kings, prophets and psalms. He is writing of the moment when the centuries-old story was going to come round a corner at last, out of darkness into sudden light. He never forgets this larger perspective; everything that he will tell us about Jesus makes sense as the fulfilment of God’s ancient promises, the hope of Israel come to fruition at last.
‘But Luke’s story vibrates equally with the personal hopes and fears of ordinary people. Zechariah, Elisabeth and Mary stand out as real people, hesitating between faith and doubt, called to trust God at a new moment in history. It’s a mark not only of Luke’s skill as a writer but also of the nature of the God he is writing about that both the big picture and the smaller human stories matter totally. This is, after all, as Zechariah had glimpsed, the story of how the creator God came to rescue his people. It is the story, as Luke will now tell, of how God himself was born as a baby’ (Wright, 19-20).
Works Cited:
Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
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