Luke 1:39-56 – Visitation
Quite often, important events look and feel like important events. They are witnessed by a lot of people, and they make a big impact on a lot of people.
But sometimes, important events can go unnoticed by everyone except those few people who are participating in them. And maybe even those people may not fully realize how and why what they are doing is important.
The meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, and what transpired between them when they met – which today’s Gospel from St. Luke recounts – was a largely unnoticed event. As far as we can tell, it involved just four people: Mary and Elizabeth, of course; and also the two unborn children who were in their respective wombs.
By outward appearances, there was nothing happening here to make anyone think that this was important. Pregnant women often get together to talk about, well, their pregnancies.
Those who are not pregnant usually find those conversations to be uninteresting. Is that what was going on in today’s Gospel?
Mary and Elizabeth were certainly talking about their pregnancies. But in each case, there was a whole more going on than what is usually going on when a woman is expecting a baby.
Given the decadent cultural circumstances in which we live, we should also pause here to draw attention to something that in the first century would have been taken for granted, even with respect to an ordinary pregnancy: namely, that an unborn child is indeed a child – a real, living, human child – whose life is valued by God and man, and for whose life God has a plan.
A large segment of the population of our nation pretends that this is not true – despite the voice of conscience telling them that it is. But a part of why today’s story is so heart-warming, is because Mary and Elizabeth both joyfully acknowledged the beloved children who were in their wombs.
Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist, leaped in his mother’s womb when Mary spoke. He was at six months gestation, and could hear what was going on in the outside world.
Indeed, it was for joy that he leaped in the presence of Jesus. The Holy Spirit caused John to know – while he was still in the womb – who this was, and whose mother this was.
Elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel we are told that John would “be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” This was evidence of that. And as today’s text tells us, Elizabeth was also filled with the Holy Spirit, so that she, too, knew who Mary was, and who Mary’s Son was.
Mary had miraculously conceived only a short time before this. Few if any people knew about it. But Elizabeth knew, and Elizabeth described Mary as “the mother of my Lord.”
Mary was not merely going to be a mother. She was a mother already. And she was the mother of the world’s Savior.
In the blood-soaked culture of death in which we live, every attack on an unborn child is, we could say, the devil’s attempt symbolically to attack and kill John the Baptist and Jesus all over again, and to destroy everything they stood for. The devil now knows, in hindsight, how dangerous those babies were for the fulfillment of God’s plan to destroy him and his power.
In his rage, Satan is now lashing out against everything and everyone that represents those ancient babies, and what they grew up to be and to do. And all babies in the womb do vividly symbolize John and Jesus in the womb.
May we love and protect the unborn children who are among us, and may we be of help and encouragement to their mothers when such help and encouragement are needed. And if in the past we have not loved and protected the unborn as we should have, may we repent of that sin, and call out to the Lord for forgiveness and healing.
Returning to today’s text, through Elizabeth and Mary, and through the special babies who were inside of them, God was unfolding a gracious plan of redemption and deliverance for the human race. Hardly anyone was noticing, but God was at work.
Elizabeth’s pregnancy was miraculous, in that she was old, and past the time of bearing children, when she conceived. An angel had appeared to her husband Zacharias to tell him that this would happen, and to tell him that his son would be the forerunner of the Messiah, long foretold by the prophets.
Indeed, his son John would be the last of the Old Testament prophets, who would prepare the people of Israel to receive their Lord, and the new covenant that he would inaugurate, by calling them to humility before God, and by administering to them a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
John’s conception did take place through divine intervention, but Zacharias was still John’s father. The nature and character of Mary’s conception, however, was miraculous to a much greater degree than Elizabeth’s conception.
Jesus had no human father. This scientifically unexplainable mystery is the reason why Jesus was not born with a sinful nature.
The Augsburg Confession teaches “that since the fall of Adam, all who are naturally born are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with the inclination to sin.”
That includes all of us because we have all been naturally born. But Jesus was not naturally born. His conception and birth had a supernatural character about it.
Yet Jesus – who was God from all eternity – did also have a true human nature, which he received from his mother Mary. Elizabeth said to Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”
Jesus, according to his human nature, was the fruit of Mary’s womb and of her humanity. According to his human nature, he is one of us – a fellow descendant of Adam and a real human being, who came to save the human race from within the human race.
It is important to emphasize this because some American evangelicals teach that God created a new and separate human nature for Jesus, which had no genetic connection to Mary or to the rest of humanity. Mary was, in effect, a surrogate mother for Jesus, but was not his actual biological mother.
In their minds, this is the proper way to explain how it is that Jesus does not have a sinful human nature. But in truth, this heretical teaching would mean that Jesus doesn’t have a human nature at all, but only a copy of human nature. And it would also mean that real human beings like us have no real human Savior from sin and death.
What transpired when Mary and Elizabeth met, and what they said to each other on that occasion, was about the wonderful truth that we really do have a Savior from sin and death. While still in his mother’s womb, the divine Savior of mankind was already among us, and was already being praised and worshiped.
Jesus was coming to overturn every idol that the world, the flesh, and the devil promote as truly important. He was coming to show his saving power through what the world considers to be insignificant and weak.
Mary poetically expressed this hope and expectation in the song that she was inspired to sing when she met Elizabeth. And what God would someday do in his Son was so sure and certain, that it was confessed by her in the past tense.
Indeed, all the saving deeds that Jesus would accomplish in the years to come, were but an unfolding of who Jesus already was, when he was the size of a grain of rice. And so Mary sang:
“He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name. And His mercy is on those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.”
God had promised to Abraham that through his Seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. As the details of this promise were brought into sharper focus throughout the history of Israel – in the writings and sermons of the prophets – it became ever more clear that this divine blessing would reach beyond the realm of earth, and beyond the needs of the body.
God would bless Israel, and all nations, with the gifts of the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, and eternal life. And God would bring these blessings to us himself, by becoming one of us, and in our place dying and rising again.
In the person of his Son, God would also distribute his saving gifts to each of us personally, in words of human speech that are filled with divine power, and in sacraments that use elements of the earth that are filled with heavenly grace.
As we consider the wonder of the divine Christ being hidden in the womb of the virgin Mary when she visited Elizabeth, so too do we marvel at the mystery of the Spirit of Christ bringing regeneration and the bestowal of faith, under the humble form of water; and so too do we marvel at the mystery of the body and blood of Christ bringing remission of sins and the strengthening of faith, under the humble forms of bread and wine.
It was not by natural means that Elizabeth knew who was inside her young relative’s womb. The Holy Spirit had revealed this to her.
And it is also not by natural means that we know who has come among us, and who abides with us in hidden yet real ways, in and through the designated earthly elements of the sacraments. God has revealed this to us, in the words of Holy Scripture, and in the Words of Institution for those sacraments.
The world does not notice these things – just as the world did not notice what was going on when Mary and Elizabeth met and greeted one another. Back then, even religious people did not know what was happening in that sacred moment of greeting and embracing. But Mary and Elizabeth knew.
Today, the world does not notice or understand what transpires here, when we gather in the name of Christ around his means of grace. Unbelievers don’t know what any of this means, and they don’t care that they don’t know.
Please don’t allow the spirit of this world to allure you into joining them in their unbelief and indifference. Instead, as the Holy Spirit leads you and gives you words to say, invite them to join you in faith: in the faith of Elizabeth, and in your own faith, which with the heart – as the heart is shaped by God’s Word – sees a lot more than what can be seen with the eye.
Also today, even religious people – professing Christians – who have absorbed too much of the rationalism and empiricism of the world, often do not know what is actually going on in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
But all who humbly listen to God – as Elizabeth did – can and will know. And like Elizabeth, they can and will be blessed by what they know, and by what God gives and does.
For the salvation of an entire world of sinners, and for your salvation, what was said and done when Mary visited Elizabeth was deeply and profoundly important. The fact that hardly anyone knew about it or noticed it, does not change this.
And, for the salvation of an entire world of sinners, and for your salvation, what is said and done in the communion of Christ’s church is likewise profoundly important – as long as the church in any given time and place is faithful to his words, and humble before his will, in its administration of the means of grace.
The same Christ who was present in Mary’s womb to be a blessing to her and to Elizabeth, is invisibly present among us, to be a blessing to us. The same Christ who was praised by Mary and Elizabeth is praised by us:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” Amen.