Zechariah: A model for Christmas preparations.

 

A Priest is a mediator between God and the people. He speaks with God and delivers the message to the people. In Biblical days, Priests were revered as privileged souls who possessed insights into the divine mysteries and communicated them to people by leading them in religious worship.

Every spiritual information that the people should know was determined by the Priests. While prophets and seers occasionally receive divine revelation, a Priest's office is permanent.  To put it simply, they were men of influence and power. 

That being said, you may begin to understand how life was for Zechariah during those three months that Mary spent with his wife Elizabeth. Can you imagine his frustration as they discussed the mysteries of salvation and the coming of the anticipated Messiah together and he was unable to contribute a word to the conversation?

Can you picture how he must have felt listening to them speak about topics that properly belonged to the ordained such as he and certainly not to women, and be unable to utter a word let alone control the narrative?

I was meditating on the Joyful Mysteries and it struck me that Zechariah losing his ability to speak wasn't so much a punishment from the Angel Gabriel, as a necessary process in preparing for the coming of the Saviour.

Zechariah needed to forget what he thought he knew and allow himself to be taught by two women. And not only that. He went from being the Head of the house to a pupil in his own home. While Mary and Elizabeth rubbed minds together on the miraculous nature of their pregnancies, all Zechariah could do was listen in silence and try to grasp as much as he possibly could. 

Dear friend, Advent is a time of anticipation and preparation, and what we can learn from Zechariah is that a great deal of this preparation involves reawakening a culture of silence, for it is thus that the Word is made Flesh.

Ironically, the weeks leading to Christmas are the noisiest of the year. Markets boom. People travel. Festivities are planned, and the general atmosphere is a beehive of activities. In the midst of all that, how do we hear the wordless Word taking shape and being birthed in us? How do we make room for the Gospel by decluttering our hearts?

Remember, Jesus was born in a manger, not necessarily because the people of Bethlehem were not hospitable, but because there was no room for Him. And i suggest that there was no room for Him because of what they already knew about the Messiah or expected Him Messiah to be.  What we know of God usually becomes the obstacle to what is yet to be revealed about Him. We have to let go of what we already know then, to make room for what is yet to be known.

It was necessary for Zechariah to be dumb in order to learn that Christ in the womb of his wife's kinswoman, was a guest in his home. 

It is necessary for us to be silent in order to receive Christ as he comes this Christmas. 

EMILIA

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