Her name meant, Worshiper of God. She was of Aaron's lineage and had grown up in a priest's home. She married a man who was also a priest. Her name was Elizabeth.
As a couple, they were devoted to God. Scripture describes the couple as "Righteous" and "blameless" and "walking in the commandments of God", Oddly enough the words used all mean the exact same thing: they walked in faith with God.
They had a good life together.
But there was one heartache, one thing missing in their life and that was a child. Elizabeth, wife of Zacharias was beyond child bearing years. Though she had yearned for a child, she and Zacharias had not conceived a child in all their years of marriage.
All that I have read says that she was so good, so devout. And I've no doubt that she was, but can I say that I think it's unfair to make her too holy? Despite what the scholars would have us believe, God often chose people who were broken and wounded and hurting to carry out His plans. Elizabeth was human with human emotions. In her time, a woman without a child was not whole nor had she fulfilled her duties. People believed that some secret sin had been committed. Socially, she would have felt the pain of her childlessness in a culture that valued and lived to fulfill the command from God to "Go forth and multiply." Faithful as she might be in her walk with God this knowledge of her failure was part of walk through life every day, too.
What does one gain in the face of unfulfilled hope? Grief that threatens to bubble over at times and is swallowed back after so many years. A handful of might have been. There's more than a barren womb. There's an empty place in the heart that won't quite heal despite all your prayers to be accepting of facts. Acceptance. If ever a thing was hard to bear, acceptance is it. If a woman has gone beyond the child bearing years there is no hope, just acceptance.
As a woman who has had to take acceptance in place of hope, it does strengthen you but it hardens you a little, as well. Even though you pray, plead, beg, not to be bitter, not to grow cold, you do. Something that burned bright like hope leaves a burned out empty place when it's gone. It just does.
One day her husband Zacharias went to the Temple to fulfill his time of duty. Most likely he would have been gone for two weeks. Did Elizabeth know what took place on this occasion when Zacharias went into one of the inner sanctuaries to burn incense before the altar? There was a five mile distance between the Temple and their home. Would Elizabeth have gone? We don't know.
But I can imagine how it might have been. I picture Elizabeth sewing and setting it aside with a sigh. I see a woman who takes her heartache in hand and gets up to clean, the sort of deep cleaning that brings comfort and soothes the mind. The sort of cleaning a woman does when her husband is going to be gone for two weeks. The sort she saves for those days when the thoughts swirl about inside her head, despite her best efforts to quiet them. Perhaps as she worked, she prayed the hardest prayer of all: "Help me to accept Your will God. Help me to see that Your way has been best."
But something momentous was happening. Something within her body and spirit was changing. She wasn't even aware of this as she worked. She thought she was the woman she'd been all along. The woman who had known disappointment. The woman who followed God, a woman loved by a good man. "And that should be enough," she'd say as she came to the end of the hard task of spirit and hands. "So let me surrender this Lord and accept that Your will has been done."
song: I Am Not Alone
Zacharias came home a changed man. He couldn't speak. He couldn't share with Elizabeth what had taken place except through writing. We don't know if Elizabeth could read. We don't know if Zacharias even attempted to share. How do you explain an angel? How do you explain a message that on the surface sounds completely foolish and far fetched? How do you say God spoke through an angel to you when God hasn't spoken to anyone in 400 years? How do you hand out hope to a woman who has spent her life reconciling herself to the fact that her hopes have not come true, month after painful month?
We've imagined Elizabeth as she was.
Imagine Elizabeth now as she realizes that something is different. Assuming pregnancy hasn't changed much in 2020 years, perhaps she felt a little tired. Perhaps something she usually enjoyed eating made her feel ill just catching the aroma of it. Perhaps her breasts became tender. She might have doubted that what she thought was true. Surely it was something else... But then the first movements came. Imagine her surprise. Imagine keeping quiet about your hope for five months. Imagine going to the midwife and having her confirm what she'd dared not believe. Imagine Elizabeth going to her husband and telling him, the man stricken into silence by an angel, that she was with child.
Imagine the rejoicing and tears. And let us imagine, too, how joy and awe filled that hope barren spot in her soul.
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