A Royal Visitor

It had been just another Sabbath, so to speak, when it all began. Zechariah the priest had been doing it all his life, coming up to the temple in Jerusalem, just like his father and grandfather before him, all the way back to when Haggai and Zerubbabel had finally gotten the people to rebuild the temple five hundred years before. That’s not to say there hadn’t been ups and downs, far from it. There was the time when the Greeks had desecrated the temple and the Lord had miraculously kept the lamps burning until clean oil could be obtained, but that was almost two hundred years ago now. And of course the temple was a whole lot fancier than it used to be, since Herod had taken into his head to outdo Solomon and impress his Roman allies.

Some people had thought for a while that Herod’s building project was a signal that the prophecies were about to come true, but how could that be? Herod wasn’t even really a Jew, he was an Idumean, and everybody knew they only paid lip service at best to Jewish traditions. And besides, hadn’t they promised a just and righteous king? Jeremiah had said,

“'Behold, the days are coming,' says YHWH, 'when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: `YHWH is our righteousness.'” [23:5-6]

Some people called Herod “The Great,” but using slave labor to build palaces and so on, not to mention murdering your sons during fits of paranoia, was hardly what Zechariah thought the prophet had in mind. And besides, he really only ruled because it was convenient for Rome to let him.

So Zechariah came up to Jerusalem when it was his turn to serve, twice a year, and of course it was a tremendous privilege to be a priest of Abijah’s line, and of course it was especially meaningful this time when the lot fell on him to actually perform the sacrifice and put the incense on the altar, and of course YHWH God was real and present and holy and it was important to do everything right. But it wasn’t like he actually expected anything. I mean, after all, what could happen?

So when the angel appeared he was terrified. But the angel said, “Don’t be afraid, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John....” Zechariah could still remember it, as clear as if it was yesterday. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t been so quick to speak; it’s not as if he didn’t know his Bible, and the stories of Sarah and Hannah. But no. He had to blurt out, “How do I know you’re telling me the truth? My wife and I are pretty old.” Because the angel, who turned out to Gabriel, took away his power to speak at all until the baby was born. To teach him not to talk back, I guess, or not to be so quick to doubt,

Zechariah had had a good nine months to think about what it all meant.

One of the things the angel had said was that their child, this unexpected and wonderful child of their old age, “would have the spirit and power of Elijah, and would turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” That was from Malachi, Zechariah knew, the last prophet God had sent before inexplicably going silent some four hundred years before. So Zechariah had been thinking about what that meant. What Malachi had said, exactly, was that God’s messenger “would turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that God would not come and strike the land with a curse.” [Mal 4:6]

Well, that particular change was sorely needed, Zechariah had no doubt about that! The younger generation was getting more rebellious and disobedient all the time, he and his friends had often remarked upon it. But after the angel rebuked him, Zechariah began to realize that their disrespect for the old ways was at least partly the fault of the elders themselves. Had they realized before he did that his faith in God was more a habit than a hope? Watching his wife Elizabeth accepting with such serenity and trust the astonishing prediction he had scribbled down for her after coming back home after his temple service made him even more acutely aware of how far away he had drifted from believing that God’s promises of redemption were ever really going to come true.