Luke 1:57-66
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The
time came for Elizabeth to have her child, and she gave birth to a son; and
when
her
neighbours and relations heard that the Lord had shown her so great a kindness,
they shared her joy.
Now on the eighth day they
came to circumcise the child; they were going to call him Zechariah after his
father, but his mother spoke up. ‘No,’ she said ‘he is to be called John.’ They
said to her, ‘But no one in your family has that name’, and made signs to his
father to find out what he wanted him called. The father asked for a
writing-tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’ And they were all astonished. At
that instant his power of speech returned and he spoke and praised God. All
their neighbours were filled with awe and the whole affair was talked about
throughout the hill country of Judaea. All those who heard of it treasured it
in their hearts. ‘What will this child turn out to be?’ they wondered. And
indeed the hand of the Lord was with him.
Today’s reading
concludes the strange story of the birth of John the Baptist. Zechariah, his
father, had entered into the Holy of Holies and been struck dumb. Surely he
must have been a talkative man (even when he cannot speak he needs to write
things out), and yet his speech falls silent in the presence of the Holy One. As
we heard in the O Antiphon a few days ago: ‘kings fall silent before you’.
Periods of silence punctuate the scriptures at regular intervals (we can think
of Elijah at the cave of the heart and the moment in the tumult of the Book of
Revelation when ‘all is silent for half an hour’). Now we have the pregnant
silence out of which the Eternal Word will be spoken. ‘In the beginning was the
conversation’ so translated Erasmus the beginning of John’s Gospel, and we are
brought on the threshold of Christmas to the choreography between silence and
speech, saying and showing. Like his son, Zechariah points the way to the
source of Being, who must lie in silence.
As we enter into the
birth of the Conversation in the soul tomorrow let us remember to keep a little
silence today to allow the words to say by their showing.
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