Two Days Before Christmas Series

Homily for Two Days before Christmas

December 23

Today our Evening Prayer antiphon recognizes Jesus as "Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, desire of the nations, Savior of all people," and begs Him to come set us free from our sins. So we return to the story we began a few days ago, in anticipation of the arrival of the One called "God with Us."

Poor Zechariah. For over nine months he had been completely speechless, robbed of the power of verbal communication by his doubt of God’s promise. Surely this priest had heard the stories of Abraham and Sarah, of the mothers of Samuel and Samson. Surely he had heard many times the psalm whose last verse said “he makes the barren wife the mother of children.” But his response to the divine message was very much like “you’ve got to be kidding–Elizabeth and I at our age? Have a child?” Wrong answer. He got to spend nine months hearing his neighbors talk about how clumsy and stupid was his response to God’s gift. He longed to tell them “Look, I’m not deaf. I can hear you gossiping about me. I know I messed up.”

His neighbors were so used to not hearing him speak that they thought he was hearing-impaired. It must have been humiliating for this revered priest to be treated as if he were deaf, tied to a writing pad, unable to minister in the Temple, living on the charity of relatives.

So when he has an opportunity to perform restitution to God for his lack of faith, he writes boldly on his tablet the words of the angel, “his name shall be John.” And his tongue is loosened and he is able to sing praise to God once more. But why, you may ask, was it so important that the prophet announcing Jesus should be named John, in Hebrew, Yohanan?

Recent Biblical scholarship has revealed a marvelous secret hidden in Zechariah’s prayer, which follows in tomorrow’s Gospel. In English, the phrases of this prayer are “God shows mercy to our fathers,” “He remembers His covenant” and “the oath he swore to our father Abraham.” The secret doesn’t appear in English, nor in the Latin, nor in the Greek. But when we translate the Greek back into Hebrew, the precious word-play is revealed: “show mercy” is the verb hânan, which is the root of the name Yohanan, or John. “He remembers” translates the verb zâkar, which is the root of the name Zechariah, and “to take an oath” is the verb shâba, which gives us the name Elishabet. So the family of Zechariah is in themselves a kind of parable: from God’s remembrance of His oath has come His display of mercy. Out of Zechariah and Elizabeth has come John, who announces Jeshua, the salvation of our God.

So Zechariah’s doubt and Elizabeth’s faith brought forth John the Baptist, who was called by Jesus, essentially, the greatest male who ever lived. Literally, Jesus said: “among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” That’s from Zechariah, one of the Bible’s best examples of a good man doing a stupid thing. But nine months of repentant prayer changed Zechariah, and nine months of Mary’s faithful response gave us the God-man who changed the world. Imagine what will happen if all of us poor clumsy Christians, in repentance, prayed and fasted so that God’s grace would change the world we live in today. We would have millions more awaiting Emmanuel's final appearance in glory, God with us.