06. Luke 1:39-45: Mary and Elizabeth

Exposition

Mary receives Gabriel’s message, opens herself to it and hotfoots it 70 miles to visit Elizabeth. Their exchange illustrates Luke’s reversal theme. Mary, the younger greets her elder as is proper. Elizabeth, unknown to Mary but not the reader to be pregnant, hears Mary’s greeting and her child leaps in her womb. And she then acclaims “the fruit of Mary’s womb” and Mary herself as “blessed” and treats the young woman as her superior. The God whom Mary will shortly acclaim as one who sponsors reversals of this kind is already at work in the lives of these two women!

Garland observes: “The greeting is mentioned three times for emphasis, and it creates three effects: the child leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, and she announces twice that Mary is blessed and interprets the meaning of the child’s leap in her womb theologically” (Garland, Luke: 2389-2391).   

Filled with the Spirit at this point (v.41), Elizabeth realizes the she and Mary and their children are now tied together in this story of God with his people Israel and his world. The leaping child in her womb is evidence enough of that. The song Mary sings next is decisive for this as we will see in the next post in this series.

“Mary and Elisabeth shared a dream. It was the ancient dream of Israel: the dream that one day all that the prophets had said would come true. One day Israel’s God would do what he had said to Israel’s earliest ancestors: all nations would be blessed through Abraham’s family. But for that to happen, the powers that kept the world in slavery had to be toppled. Nobody would normally thank God for blessing if they were poor, hungry, enslaved and miserable. God would have to win a victory over the bullies, the power-brokers, the forces of evil which people like Mary and Elisabeth knew all too well, living as they did in the dark days of Herod the Great, whose casual brutality was backed up with the threat of Rome. Mary and Elisabeth, like so many Jews of their time, searched the scriptures, soaked themselves in the psalms and prophetic writings which spoke of mercy, hope, fulfilment, reversal, revolution, victory over evil, and of God coming to the rescue at last” (N T Wright, Luke for Everyone: 398-403).

For the first time in Luke Jesus is referred to as “Lord” (v.43) whereas God is referred to that way 23 times in the birth narrative. This reference establishes the continuity between God and Jesus (Garland, Luke: 2426).  And with the reference to the Holy Spirit here we have the raw materials of what later became the Christian doctrine of the trinity.

Reflection

1.       Promise and Fulfillment are the poles between which we live our lives as Christians. Like a feedback system they mutually reinforce each other and provide the fuel for faithful living. For God is known as who he is by what He promises and his fulfillment and keeping of  those promises (Moltmann).