Luke 1:68-79 Commentary

We could call it Psalm 151.  Because that is what Zechariah’s song sounds like.  Not only does it sound like some of the actual 150 psalms in the Hebrew Psalter, it sounds very much like an Old Testament passage even though it is of course in the New Testament (which may be why the Year C Lectionary has this passage in Luke in place of the usual Psalm selection).  But that makes this a very curious part of the New Testament as we find this song at the very end of Luke’s very long first chapter.

Because one thing we know about the life and ministry of Jesus is that there was widespread misunderstanding as to Jesus’s nature and role as Israel’s long-awaited Messiah or Christ.  As most of us know, that misunderstanding applied as much to Jesus’s closest disciples as to anyone else.  After hundreds of years of being under one foreign occupation after the next—and after a failed political revolt or two that sought to liberate Israel from its oppressors—the Jewish people in Jesus’s day were hungry for the founding of an independent Israelite nation.  What the people needed from the Messiah in the line of King David was a new King David to chase out the current occupiers in the form of the Romans.

As we also know, this was one of the reasons behind what is often called The Messianic Secret.  This is on most obvious display in Mark’s Gospel but really you can see it in all of the four Gospels.  Jesus was hesitant to own up to the title of King or Christ in public.  He even took steps to hide it, to hush those (often the demon-possessed) who knew who he was and started to loudly proclaim it.

Even after some of the most stunning things that happened surrounding Jesus (think of the Transfiguration or those times when Peter or someone correctly identified Jesus as the Son of the Living God) Jesus ordered the disciples not to share that information with anyone.  It’s also why the celebration surrounding what we often call The Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem was such a mixed bag.  The people properly hailed Jesus as King but they had the wrong definition of that in their minds.  In Luke’s Gospel at least that disconnect was enough to make Jesus weep buckets of tears and utter a lament for the soon-to-be-sacked city that was not properly recognizing what God was up to through his incarnate Son.

The reason for all this secrecy?  Jesus did not want the people to move too quickly toward him and then try to install him as an earthly political king who would displace the Caesar, chase out the Romans troops, and form a new nation independent of all occupation or foreign influence.  If we doubt that this was a hope firmly lodged into the hearts of also the disciples, we need look no farther than Acts 1 when, forty full days after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on what we call Easter, the disciples still asked Jesus just before he ascended away from them, “Are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They couldn’t quite see what Jesus was waiting for anymore.

All of which brings us back to Zechariah’s song.  Because this song very much smacks of exactly that kind of expectation.  Several times Zechariah claims that through the Coming One for whom his son, John, would prepare the way God was going to give Israel rest from its foes and enemies.  And you do not get the sense from Zechariah that he is spiritualizing those enemies to be sin and death.  Like many of the psalms to which Zechariah’s song is an heir, enemies seem to be exactly that: anyone who was not a member of the nation of Israel that could pose an external threat to Israel’s sovereignty.  If this song does, then, reflect some of the same wrong-headed expectations with which Jesus would later have to contend among his own disciples, then that is rather startling.

But let’s say that something exactly like that was in Zechariah’s mind.  Luke’s inclusion of the song is not meant to give any kind of seal of approval to that.  Instead Zechariah may stand for the first of many people who will have to come to a new understanding of the very salvation he also sings about.  He too will need to understand who are the real enemies that threaten our relationship with our great Creator God and the surprising path God’s Son takes to accomplish all that.

Yes, Zechariah was right: a rising star from heaven was coming upon all people to deliver them from the darkness of sin and death.  The forgiveness of sins that came through the Son’s sacrificial death is the real path to redemption and it would indeed happen because of the tender mercy of our God—what the Apostle Paul will label salvation by grace alone through faith alone.  So yes, Zechariah may have had some incorrect political thoughts where the Coming One was concerned.

His own son, John the Baptist, will later have cause to wonder about all this too.  After John had been sitting in prison for a while, he kept waiting for the kind of Messianic razzle-dazzle from his cousin Jesus that John had preached out there in the wilderness by the Jordan River.  When it didn’t seem to be panning out quite as he expected, he dispatched a cadre of his own disciples to go ask Jesus, “Are you the Coming One or should we be looking for someone else?”  Subtext: for someone better? 

God did have a surprising and, to riff on a Barbara Brown Taylor sermon, a most daring plan.  It took the world by surprise and few were more shocked than the very chosen people of God who had had a Messianic expectation the longest.  But because God did know what he was up to, the bottom line of Zechariah’s song was more deeply correct than he himself could have guessed the day he first sang these words.  Those living in the land of the shadow of death would see a great Light.  The Light of the World, the Light that shines in the darkness but that the darkness will never be able to snuff out.

Illustration Idea

Recently I re-watched a favorite movie from the 1960s starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.  The movie Charade is a real cloak-and-dagger murder mystery involving a small cast of shady characters all of whom believe that Hepburn’s character of Regina Lampert is (unwittingly) in possession of a huge sum of money left to her by her recently murdered husband.  But Regina has only a few items from her husband including an unused plane ticket, a diary, and a stamped envelope with a letter to Regina that her husband never managed to mail before being killed.  She surely did not have the $250,000 everyone was after.

But the center of all the action in the film involves Cary Grant’s character.  Regina is deeply attracted to this handsome man but throughout the film has no clear idea who he is or why he had come into her life.  In fact, he ends up claiming multiple names and identities for himself.  First he claims his name is Peter Joshua.  Later he admits that’s not really his name. It’s really Carson Dyle.  Well, not really.  Carson Dyle is dead but he is Carson Dyle’s brother.  But then Regina discovers Dyle had no brother.  So then Peter/Carson/Dyle says his name is actually Adam Canfield, a self-proclaimed thief who also wants the money Regina unknowingly has in the form of what turns out to be 3 exceedingly rare stamps on that envelope left to her by her husband.  The stamps were worth the full $250,000 everyone was after but that no one could locate.

Once the various nefarious characters are all eliminated, Regina tells Adam the money belongs to the U.S. government from which it had been stolen years earlier during World War II and if he loves her, Adam has to support her returning the money to the U.S.  He reluctantly agrees and accompanies her to the U.S. consulate in Paris the next morning to turn over the valuable stamps and get the money back to its proper owner.  The next morning Adam does accompany Regina to the embassy but declines to meet with the Treasury official to whom Regina needs to give the stamps.  So Regina is directed to the office of a Mr. Cruikshank and when she enters his office, seated behind the desk is . . .  Peter or Carson or Adam.  Brian Cruikshank did work for the U.S. government and had all along been protecting Regina’s life even as he oversaw the recovery of the stolen money.

“I love you whoever you are” Regina then tells Brian and then suggests that after they get married they have lots of sons and they can name each one after their father!  The whole story is one of mistaken identity, wrong ideas about who a certain person is or what he was really up to before the final reveal is made.  This may all be way to complicated to use in a sermon but somehow it did remind me of Jesus who also seemed to get misidentified a lot as Elijah or a John the Baptist doppelganger or one of the prophets or as the next political king of new nation of Israel or as someone associated with Beelzebub or as . . . .