GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 1:24-26
24 After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived. She kept herself in seclusion for five months, saying, 25 “The Lord has done this for me. He has looked with favor on me in these days and has taken away my disgrace among the people.”
How long after Zechariah returned home before Elizabeth conceived? Days? Weeks? It’s a question the text doesn’t answer. We don’t have any idea except it’s clear that not much time passed. Notice that Luke uses expressions like “those days” and Elizabeth’s “these days.”
Elizabeth’s prayer is one of faith, delight, joy, and anticipation. She would have been content with her honorable role as the wife of a priest in God’s service, she was thrilled that the Lord was now going to let her become a mother.
Why didn’t she comment about any nervousness or apprehension about her son’s future place in God’s kingdom? Probably because, due to Zechariah’s muteness, she didn’t yet know. All she knew what that she was pregnant, and that things were proceeding as well as could be expected. Four weeks, eight weeks, and she was sure a baby was coming. Sometime between the twelfth and sixteenth week, she would have developed a definite bump (first-time moms take longer for this to happen since things have not yet been stretched by any earlier pregnancies). By the twentieth week (the fifth month), word would have gotten to her relatives. Luke uses this moment to introduce another woman in Elizabeth’s twenty-fourth week (sixth month): Mary of Nazareth.
The Angel Gabriel Appears to the Virgin Mary
26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town of Galilee,
There is a fourth-century manuscript (Codex Aleph, discovered at Mount Sinai in 1761) in which the original copyist wrote “a town of Judea” rather than “a town of Galilee.” I’ve included a picture of the manuscript below. An ancient corrector’s hand has written the missing letters of “Galilee” above the line in a small crowded cluster. An untrained eye can clearly read the word “Nazareth” (Greek NAZAPET) in the third line.
Codex Aleph Luke 1:26
Hand copied around 350 AD
By the “sixth month,” Luke doesn’t mean our sixth month (June) nor the Jews’ religious sixth month (August) or even their civil sixth month (February). He means Elizabeth’s sixth month of pregnancy, since the nearest time reference (verse 24) is “five months.” An ancient Christian tradition celebrates this event, called the Annunciation, on March 25th, but we don’t need to insist that this date is precisely correct.
In 1849 (the year after gold was discovered in California), the United States Navy sent a small expedition to Palestine to survey the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea for its naval records. The officer in charge of the expedition, Lt. William Lynch, later served as a captain in the Confederate Navy during the Civil War. Lt. Lynch’s Christian faith shows through in his report on every page. He writes about Nazareth, “We thought it the prettiest place we had seen in Palestine. The streets were perfectly quiet; there was an air of comfort about the houses, and the people were better dressed, and far more civil, than any we had encountered” (entry for Sunday, June 11, 1847). After visiting the shop where (Lynch was told) Joseph worked as a carpenter, they also saw the precipice to which Jesus was led by the Jews (a far more certain location than Joseph’s workshop, Luke 4:29). Lynch writes, “The feelings are inexpressible which overpower one in passing to and fro amid scenes which, for the greater portion of his mortal existence, were frequented by our Savior. In Jerusalem, the theater of his humiliations, his sufferings, and his death, the heart is oppressed with awe and anguish; but in Nazareth, where he spent his infancy, his youth, and his early manhood, we yearn towards him unchilled by awe, and unstricken by horror.” (Narrative of the U.S. Expedition to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, 1849)
As our narrative zooms down to Nazareth and as the approach of our Savior draws ever closer, we consider that Jesus Christ was given the opportunity to do something no one else in history can ever do: He chose who his mother would be. Her fiancé Joseph would be a good father to him. And as for Nazareth, our rebel sailor has called it “the prettiest place in Palestine.” But it’s clear that Mary was the crucial choice. God chose her for reasons all his own. She wasn’t just in the right place at the right time. God didn’t choose her because she was the prettiest girl in town. He had already chosen to give her faith. He had already chosen to make her part of his kingdom. So if we can understand this correctly, we can say: God had chosen Mary to be his daughter in the faith, but now he chose her to be his mother in the flesh. We will see the reasons why more clearly as her faith shows itself in her response. Although she was a sinful woman who needed a Savior (Luke 1:47; Mark 3:21 and 3:31), she was God’s special choice to raise that Savior, teach him, and love him—so that we could all love him.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota