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December 15

Luke 1: 39 - 45

³⁹ At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, ⁴⁰ where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. ⁴² In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! ⁴³ But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? ⁴⁴ As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”

It can’t have been easy for Mary, can it?  Pregnant by the Holy Spirit?  Who was going to believe that?  Just as life seemed impossibly difficult,  she heard the news that a relative who was beyond child-bearing age was pregnant, and rejoicing in a miracle,  and so she set off into the hill country of Judaea, a journey she would repeat  a few months later with her betrothed, Joseph beside her,  to visit Elizabeth. 

These words from Luke’s gospel, describing the response of Elizabeth and her unborn child can appear puzzling.  What is the point of them?  Do they have any significance?  Is Elizabeth not just experiencing the normal movements of the child she is carrying?  Elizabeth. Ertainly didn’t think so.  For her, this meeting with her young, teenaged, unmarried yet pregnant relative, was a moment of joy – not the response Mary had  encountered so far as she told her story to those who needed to know.  This is the moment that Mary knows she is believed,  that things will be ok,  that there is hope.  That  hope comes from the response of an unborn child.

We often speak of Christmas being a time for the children, and indeed it is,  but it is a time for the child within each of us; a time for us to respond to the child of Bethlehem; to the endless possibilities of the truth that God became infant and lived with us.