GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 1:42-44
42 She cried out with a loud voice,
Was Elizabeth’s loud cry part of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon her? Let’s take the example of Saul, the first king of Israel. The first time the Holy Spirit came upon Saul, he burned with anger (1 Samuel 11:6). He was filled with two things in particular: a clear understanding of what was taking place, and a special courage to carry out the task before him. This heightened Saul’s leadership. We would call it charisma, and the word would not be out of place theologically since one Greek term for a spiritual gift is in fact charisma (χάρισμα) “gift,” or more precisely a charisma tou theo (χάρισμα ἐκ θεοῦ), “a gift from God.” This was a special gift for that moment. It didn’t mean that either Saul or Elizabeth because authors of the Bible, but they did receive a special insight, a deeper understanding of God’s plan, and the Spirit gave them encouragement to carry on with their role in his plan.
So Elizabeth’s gift here, in the Holy Spirit’s descent upon her, was a special understanding of what was taking place, both in her body and family and in Mary’s body and family. Elizabeth did not shout because that’s part of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth shouted because she was happy.
Luke has placed Elizabeth’s words, like Mary’s to follow, into a form of Hebrew poetry. All three verses are synthetic in their parallelism, which means that the first line (stich) makes a statement, and then the second line expands on it or completes it.
“Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
The word for “blessed” here is not the same as in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where the term makarioi (μακάριοι) is used. Here it is eulogomenos (εὐλογημένος), the word at the root of our term “eulogy, to eulogize.” It is a good or kind thing spoken about someone, and in that sense it means blessed. People were going say many good and kind things about Mary and about her great son, Jesus Christ. Mary was blessed because she was chosen to be his mother; he was blessed because he is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.
43 Why is this happening to me,
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
Elizabeth was asking where this blessing had come from (or why); a rhetorical way of acknowledging that it could only come from God. He is the source of grace and of every blessing. In a similar way, Elizabeth used a humble rhetorical device called meiosis (understatement). Instead of asking the direct question, “Why should my Savior appear to me?” she asked, “Why should my Savior’s mother come to me?” Elizabeth’s faith, like Mary’s, did not question whether the thing was taking place, but only whether she was worthy of such a part in God’s plan. God, of course, is the one to answer these questions, and his answer was already clear: He chose these people for his own reasons, and it isn’t for us to declare that we know exactly why. In the same way, if he should choose any of us to carry out a task, we must not become vain about God’s choice, but be humbled by it.
By calling Mary’s baby “my Lord,” Elizabeth showed that she believed that this was, in fact, the Almighty God, the Lord of the Old Testament, who had taken on human flesh to be born of a virgin. Elizabeth knew the prophecy: “The Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). This was the Messiah, the anointed Christ of God.
44 For as soon as the sound of your greeting came to my ears,
the baby leaped in my womb for joy.”
Here we must confess that it was a part of Elizabeth’s special knowledge from the Holy Spirit that produced this insight, that now extended even into the faith of her unborn son. This is not something an ordinary mother would be able to do, but Elizabeth was given a gift.
The word translated “joy” is agalliasis (ἀγαλλίασις), “extreme joy; exultation.” It is used with sad irony in the translation of Lamentations 2:19, “Cry out in the night…for the lives of your children.” The meaning is more clearly shown in the translation of Isaiah: “Gladness and (extreme) joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away” (Isaiah 51:11). Also: “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice” (Psalm 51:8) and, most famously, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation (Psalm 51:12).
This exultation was first felt by the infant John in the womb, and surely this can be seen partly as fulfillment of Psalm 8:2, “From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger” (see also Matthew 21:16). That Psalm finds still more fulfillment, sadly, in Gandhi, who patterned his non-violent and simple lifestyle on that of Jesus, but who stepped into the camp of “the foe” in the Psalm because he could not put his faith in Jesus. Gandhi said, “It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life… I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher—but not as the most perfect man ever born” (quoted in Meditations Nov. 28, 2004-Feb 26, 2005, p. 20). This was Gandhi rejecting Christ: to accept him to a limited degree, but not as his Savior. John even as an unborn infant had more faith than that, and the only faith that matters, which is to believe that Jesus is our Lord, our Savior from sin, and to trust in him for eternal life.
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