Elizabeth recalls.
I had almost finished my weeping, through all the years of waiting. I held my sisters’ babes in my arms and nursed the little ones through restless nights, always ready to take my turn with the children. But month by month, year by year, I came to expect only disappointment, as the Good Lord did not give us a child of our own. We lived by the law, Zechariah and me. We never cried out against the Lord, though the years brought us no sons or daughters.
I accepted it at last, my sorry condition as a ‘childless wife,’ I was a daughter of Aaron, my husband a priest and we trusted the Lord. Then, when all the years of hope had passed, I trusted the Lord even when my husband could not.
The Message
Zechariah could not believe what he heard that day, when he went into the sanctuary to make the offering. The message he repeated to me went too far beyond his understanding. But I believed and I knew immediately when I was fruitful, and I knew the Lord God had given us a son.
I recall all the words that the angel Gabriel spoke, and one part of that revelation sang in my heart as I prepared for the coming of the son who would be ‘great in the sight of the Lord.’ The messenger had said, ’even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ I understood that I must cherish the child in my womb, who was God’s prophet, the one who would prepare his people for the Lord’s coming and so I went up into the hill country, seeking seclusion, in order to pray for the One who was to come. The one my son would know.
Mary
It was my kinswoman who came. Even before she came, I heard her voice in my dreams, the potent dreams of a mother to be. I saw her from a distance, hurrying towards me. I cried out in the night:
‘Mary!
I hear the voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.’
The next day brought her to me. I knew that the sound of her greeting reached my child even before it reached me because his response rose up through my body. Up he leaped, as one whose whole being is filled with joy, like King David dancing before the Lord!
And then that joy, that Holy Spirit of the Lord, filled me too, and I heard, as though it were from a distance, the sound of my own voice crying out in a proclamation that would echo down the generations because it was inspired by the Spirit of the Lord:
“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her!”
