Do We Believe The Word Of God, Or Not? Series

Pre-Christmas Novena: December 19

Our antiphon for Evening Prayer and the Gospel Introduction is "O Flower of Jesse's stem, you have been raised up a sign for all peoples; kings are silent in your presence; nations bow down in worship. O Come, let nothing prevent you from aiding us." After generations of rule by foreigners--Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome--nobody in Israel had ever experienced rule by a native king, a descendant of King David and Jesse, his father. But then we hear the stories of God's intervention, bringing life from what appears to be dead human stock.

Both of our tales of childless women today are so striking that we might tend to forget the men in the narratives. What were they thinking and how did they feel about the divine interventions they and their wives were experiencing? Psalm 71 can help us understand their frame of mind if we read it prayerfully.

Manoah was a man whose wife, as they said in those days, was barren. Three thousand years ago, nobody in the world really understood reproductive biology. We’re not much better today, because many people don’t accept that a human person is growing inside a pregnant woman. We are worse off in that we don’t understand what a miracle that really is. But back to Manoah and his nameless wife, who is really the critical person in the tale. The Lord’s angel appeared to her and told her that she would not be that way for the rest of her life. She would conceive and bear a son who would be pledged at birth as a Nazirite. Neither she nor he would drink alcoholic beverages, or consume unclean food, as specified in the Levitical writings. The prophecy came true, and she followed, we infer, the directions from the Lord. She believed what the angel had told her, and did not ask any questions. She trusted God’s word; she saw Him as her strong refuge who would protect her from the wicked. As she was born from a faithful mother’s womb, so she would do for the son, Samson, given her by the Lord.

Now jump forward in time to about 5 years before the birth of Christ, the central event in human history. There were a lot of Levitical priests in Israel, and they got to rotate ministry in the Jerusalem temple, then under construction by King Herod. Zechariah, one of these priests, drew the ticket that allowed him to offer the evening incense offering, as hundreds of the faithful prayed outside in the Temple court. An angel–probably Gabriel–appeared to him next to the altar of incense. So here is a sacred being in a sacred place during the sacred time of the evening, and he declared sacred good news. Zechariah was afraid, maybe like Isaiah generations before when he saw the Lord in the Temple. He probably realized that he was sinful, like Isaiah, and feared the Lord’s power. No matter. The angel told him not to be afraid, because his wife, Elizabeth was chosen for a sacred duty–to bear a Nazirite son, filled with the Spirit of God from even before his birth. He would be the prophet predicted by Malachi in the last words of his prophecy, who would turn Israel back to God and even go before God in the spirit and power of the greatest prophet, Elijah, to bring about reconciliation and obedience and preparation for the coming of God.

This is incredibly good news. But he didn’t get to speak that word to his wife, Elizabeth. No, instead of faith in God’s word, he threw his and Elizabeth’s advanced age back to the angel and doubted the prophecy. That was the last word he spoke for the next nine or ten months, because he was struck speechless as the logical consequence of his unfaithful response. He was liberated from his condition only at the birth of his son, John, and his acquiescence in his wife’s choice of the sacred name, John. We’ll hear about the rest of this story soon, but in the meantime we ought to reflect on the question–do I listen to the Word of God and believe it, or not? For the flower to spring forth from Jesse's stem, all that need happen is for one young woman to believe in the power of the Word of God, and act on that faith.