Fr Stephen De Young: We’re picking up in Luke 1, verse 39, where we left off last time, last week. Again, this will be on the Internet. So, if you want the introduction to Luke, it’s in last week’s Bible study. I won’t reiterate all that because it was probably what, about half an hour? But just to catch us up, there’s not that much catch up because we just started last week; we’re still in chapter one.

What’s happened so far, is that we had Luke’s preface where he talked about how he was writing this under the patronage of Theophilus, he was writing it for him. He was compiling all the evidence and eyewitness testimony and everything that he had available to sort of compose one thorough account of the life and death and resurrection of Christ.

We talked about how Luke is the first part of a two-volume work with the Book of Acts, that Luke and Acts are really sort of volume one and volume two. And so far in Luke, Luke has sort of established his characters.

First, we met Zacharias, the priest who was serving in the temple and had promised to him that he was going to, despite being advanced in age, both he and his wife, they were going to have a son, that that son was going to be the prophet who they believed would come before the Messiah. He asked for a sign from the angel, and so he got struck mute.

Then we moved from Jerusalem to Nazareth in Galilee and met Mary, who was a young teenage girl betrothed to Joseph, but not married yet and not necessarily planning to fully get married because she was sort of entrusted to his care.

And the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her as well to promise that she was going to have a son and that that son would be the Messiah. And we saw how Mary not only accepted that and believed it, but that she embraced it and agreed to it and wanted to be a participant in God’s plan for the salvation of the world, despite what that would cost her personally.

And then we saw at the end, even though she didn’t ask for one, the Archangel Gabriel told her that there would be a sign to her, that what he said was true, and that would be that she would go and find her cousin Elizabeth, Zacharias’s wife, who was already six months pregnant, and that would be a sign to her. So that’s right where we pick up now here tonight, Mary is about to go visit her cousin Elizabeth to see that what the Archangel Gabriel told her is true.

Did anybody have any leftover questions from last time or anything before we started tonight? Okay.

So, Luke 1:39.

Now Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste to a city of Judah and entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth. And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, that the babe leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the Babe leapt in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord.”

So, Mary comes to visit her, and when she comes in and greets Elizabeth, before she could say anything else, she just sort of says hello. And as soon as she says hello, Elizabeth sort of tells us what happened, that the six-month-old infant in her womb leapt for joy as soon as she heard Mary’s voice.

And so she says two things to her. She says, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” And then she says literally in the Greek, it’s sort of like, “What is this that’s happening to me, that the mother of my Lord should visit me?” Sort of astonishment.

So, there are two pieces there that are important, especially as we talk to our Protestant brothers and sisters about these things. Many of them are somewhat offended by referring to Mary as the “Mother of God”. The title Theotokos is not “Mother of God”. The title Theotokos is the one who gave birth to God. So it’s a little more technical than that. But they don’t like the idea of “The Mother of God”.

Well, here Elizabeth basically says it in verse 43. What is this happening to the mother of my Lord? And the word for Lord there, kyrios, is the word that’s used in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, about 90% of the time to replace the name of God.

So where in the Hebrew text you have Yahweh, when they were translating it, because of course, by that time, Jewish people would not say that name. We talked about that before. So, the best way to keep that commandment, if you never actually say the Lord’s name, you can’t ever take it in vain. So they would never say it. And so when they did that translation, about 90% of the time, rather than transliterating it or doing something else, they would just put kyrios or Lord.

So when Elizabeth says the mother of my Lord, she doesn’t just mean, wow, your baby is special, right? Or your baby is going to be important someday, she’s directly saying that Mary is the mother of God. Mary is the mother of God.

Now, you say, well, how would she know that? Well, we were just told that she said this, she makes this statement, after being filled with the Holy Spirit and again, going back to the Old Testament, who was it in the Old Testament? Because we’re before Pentecost still. So who was it before Pentecost in the Old Testament who was filled with the Spirit and spoke?

Interlocutor: Elijah?

Fr Stephen: Well, Elijah, but the prophets in general. The prophets in general. So that was a sign that you were a prophet. God would put his Spirit upon you and then you would speak God’s words.

So, Luke is telling us that when Elizabeth says that she’s not just sort of expressing her own opinion or something, she’s figured out, but she is speaking God’s words because the Holy Spirit has come upon her. So, she is making a prophecy about who Mary’s son is. And so, this is yet another place, we talked about this in Mark, we talked about this in Matthew, you sometimes hear people say, “Oh, in particular, the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t identify Jesus as God.”

Well, here’s another place to take people, again for a Jewish person to say this, to use that title kyrios it’s very clear what it meant. You could debate about whether she really said that or not. But at the very least, Luke is saying that. That’s sort of incontrovertible, that Luke is saying here that Jesus is God and presenting it as Elizabeth, saying that Jesus is God.

And then the first part, of course, is part of a famous prayer, probably more famous in the West than in the East, although it is a prayer that we pray in the East. The “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Identifying first, Mary herself is blessed. Remember, blessed means what?

Blessed means on the first level, to be happy. But deeper than that, the reason a person is happy or blessed is it means it has the idea of to be envied or to be respected. This is the type of person who you should look up to, who you should pattern yourself after, not envy in a negative sense.

And we saw how in the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, remember, Jesus sort of turned a lot of those things on their head. He says blessed are those who mourn. Well, that wouldn’t be how we normally think about it. We’d think blessed are those, to be envied, we want to be like the people who are happy, not the people who are mourning or we want to be like the people who are wealthy, not the people who are poor. We want to be like the people who are bold, not the people who are meek. And Jesus sort of turned that on its head.

And so, Elizabeth is saying here about Mary is, this teenage girl, who is now pregnant, you are the kind of person who we should envy, who should look up to who we should want to be more like and the fruit of your womb and the baby who’s going to be born of you.

But notice that there are both of those. And this is, again in dialogue with our Protestant brothers and sisters. Many of them will be willing to say, well, okay, yes, Mary was privileged in that she got to be the one who was Jesus’s mother, who gave birth to Jesus. But then sort of after that, it’s like, okay, she fulfilled her purpose and now she’s done.

But notice, Elizabeth says, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. So, we’re not saying here that Elizabeth is putting Mary on the same level as Christ. But we are saying that she has a significance and a blessedness and a holiness unto herself, unto herself, that’s being reflected here.

I need to say this because of our modern culture, this also makes clear that a six-month-old baby is a human being. That at least, St. John the Forerunner here at six months of gestation, is able to hear the voice of Mary, to realize the presence of his Lord and to rejoice, because that’s what it says. It says leapt for joy. It doesn’t just say he leapt. It’s not just like, oh, you came in in the baby kicked. It specifically says left for joy, literally leapt rejoicing. He was rejoicing inside her womb and leapt because of it. So that, again, is important, unfortunately, in our modern day.

Interlocutor: Father, even aside from that it’s also validation that since John the Baptist leapt for joy, the fact that Mary was carrying the Lord, the Lord was just conceived. So this is validation that a person is totally present.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Right, she came there straight away, we were told after hearing from the Archangel Gabriel. Right.

Interlocutor: Was John filled with the Holy Spirit at the same time his mother was?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re not told, but we’re told in the prophecy that Zacharias received, remember that he would be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. Now, you can interpret that from birth. But based on this passage, I think it would be safe to say, yes, he also received the Holy Spirit at this time.

And so, the Orthodox study Bible has “and Mary said” and then proceeds to have a song. So it’d probably be better translated “and Mary sang.” And this may seem a little odd to us. Because outside of musicals, we don’t normally see people having a conversation and then they burst into song. “Ohhhh—” Just out of the blue, and if they did, you’d look at them a little oddly. Or suspect you were in a flash mob because they had a song and dance number worked out with other people. [Laughter]

But this is reflecting again, we talked a little bit last time about the way Luke sort of very subtly sets up these parallels to the Old Testament. He doesn’t just come right out the way Matthew and Mark did and say all the time “Thus was fulfilled…. Bible quote.” But he sort of sets things in parallel so that if you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you’ll sort of pick up on these things.

And we talked last time, for example, you have the Forerunner who we’re told is descended from Aaron. We’ve got Mary, whose name in Greek is Miriam, Moses’s sister. Moses’s sister, Aaron’s descendant. And then Jesus, the way we had Moses and Aaron and Miriam in Exodus.

So he sort of sets up these subtle parallels without directly commenting on them. Well, there are several notable times, of course, in the Old Testament where people burst into song. And so this is reflecting that parallel.

The first, and probably most famous, is in Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, where after the Israelites have passed through the Red Sea and got to the other side, the Egyptians have been wiped out in the Red Sea and it says the children of Israel sang. And then there’s a song. And that song is the first Biblical Ode. There are nine Biblical Odes in the Odes of the Canon, in our worship, in matins, we go through the Nine Odes of the Canon.

The first one of those is the Song of the Sea. That’s why usually when you hear the first Ode of the Canon, it’s something about Israel and Pharaoh and Moses. And then the ninth one is the song we’re about to read, Mary’s song.

So these kind of bookend liturgically, the Biblical Odes that we use. But it’s also sort of a callback, right? The children of Israel, led by Miriam, sang that song in the Old Testament. Why? To celebrate the fact that God had delivered his people from slavery and from the hand of Pharaoh.

So now, Mary, in anticipation and experience of now the Messiah is going to be born. The Lord is returning to his people. He’s come to deliver his people, now she bursts forth in song, in a parallel way.

Interlocutor: Are there nine odes, or eight odes?

Fr. Stephen: There are nine odes, and there’s one that we normally don’t sing. We skip the second ode in our liturgical practice, normally today. I have heard all kinds of reasons why we do that. And I am convinced that none of them are true.

Interlocutor: Was it because we don’t have a copy?

Fr. Stephen: No, because I have copies, so I can show you copies. So it’s not that we lost them. And one of the reasons I heard is, that ode is like an entire chapter in Deuteronomy. So I heard, “Oh, well, it’s too long.” When did Orthodox ever not do anything because it’s too long? [Laughter] Please. Please. Right? So we know that’s not it. Somebody once told me it’s because it’s antisemitic. I don’t know how a chapter in Deuteronomy can be antisemitic. It’s in the Torah, for Pete’s sake.

Like I said, none of the reasons I’ve heard have been convincing. So, at some point, the Church started skipping the second Ode of the Canon. I don’t think anybody knows why anymore. Frankly, I think we just continue to do it because that’s now the tradition we’ve received is to skip it. And so we skip it. But as to why exactly that transition happened, as I said, I’ve asked a lot of people, I’ve asked a lot of people from different dioceses and different archdioceses, and no one’s ever had a real solid answer for me. But yes, that is correct. We do skip we do skip the second one.

The other interesting thing about this is that most of the copies of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, that we have the nine Odes of the Canon bound into them, which means technically Mary’s song here is part of the Greek Old Testament, because it’s in there in the book. So what you do with that exactly? I don’t know. But there are in the Septuagint, a number of extra-liturgical things, like the prayer of Manasseh that we say at Compline during Lent, just a little paragraph. It’s not part of any book. It’s just sort of there in all the copies of the Septuagint we have.

Interlocutor: So that’s several centuries before the birth of Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And another example is Psalm 151, which we read, when we read Psalms. But that’s just sort of tacked in there. It’s not at the end of the Book of Psalms either. We call it Psalm 151, but it’s actually just sort of a free-floating Psalm.

So probably the way that happened is that in the early Church, the few people who could afford to have a copy of the Old Testament Scriptures in Greek, were bringing it to Church with them, were using it in Church. And so having sort of you had all your Psalms there that were sung, having some of the other hymns and that kind of thing in the Church and other things that were read in worship in it was probably just helpful.

So, it’s probably for a practical reason, sort of the same way that most of our Bibles have sort of some extra stuff in the back, like our Orthodox study Bible. We have morning and evening prayers in the back and some other things.

So, you can imagine if 2000 years from now they’re excavating the United States and find one of these, they’ll be like, oh, we found the canonical morning prayers of the Orthodox people. So, it’s also in there in the Septuagint for that reason.

This is the song then that Mary begins to sing:

“My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.”

The “rejoice” there is the same verb that Elizabeth used about what her baby and her womb did. So that’s, again, rejoicing is something a person does, it’s not something an inanimate object does.

“For he has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; For, behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.

We’ll pause there again, “the lowly state of His maid servant”: the Orthodox Study Bible has maintained some of the King James English because it’s beautiful and kind of flows. But what they’re referring to with lowly estate is it doesn’t mean “oh, Mary’s broke”; she wasn’t rich, but that’s not what it’s saying.

The “lowly state” is more what we would call in more modern English, “bad situation”, right? Bad situation.

And the phrase, “For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” The “henceforth” is literally “from now”, “from now on”, essentially.

And the word “generations” there, we’ve talked about this word before. It’s in Greek, genea. It can mean a generation. It’s also the plural of genos, which means an ethnicity or race or a nation. I think a better translation here, although it doesn’t flow, we don’t use it liturgically, would be “from now on, all nations will call me blessed”.

And my specific backup for that is that that is part of the promise that was given to Abraham. Remember? When God promises to Abraham, he’s going to give him the land and that his children will be like the sands of the sea or the stars of the heavens without number. He says to him that in the future “all nations will bless themselves in you.” So, I think what Luke is doing here is picking up on that language, that all people are going to bless themselves in Abraham’s descendants. And we’re now seeing a fulfillment of that, now seeing a fulfillment of that.

Remember, Luke was a close associate of St. Paul and St. Paul makes the point in Galatians, remember, that the promise was not to Abraham seeds plural, but to his seed singular, which is Christ. So, I think this is what St. Luke is picking up on here, that this seed, the fruit of Mary’s womb that’s about to be born, is that promised seed of Abraham. It’s going to fulfill that promise of all the nations blessing, blessing themselves in Abraham and now in Mary, who’s going to be his mother.

For 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. For He has shown strength in His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

This language here about “His arm”. Remember, we saw that in Isaiah. St. Luke is picking up that language from Isaiah and his prophecies. Remember, talking about how “the arm of the Lord” was what was going to deliver Israel from our enemies. So “the arm of the Lord” is the sort of symbol of his power and his deliverance. So she’s now saying, this song is picking up prophecies from the Old Testament to say these are now going to be fulfilled in the birth of this child.

And remember, if you were paying attention this morning in the Resurrection Troparia, remember it said “the Lord has done a mighty act with His own arm”, that’s picking up on this language again.

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.

Now, there’s a danger here, some people have, to interpret this a little too literally. Mary is not saying here that she’s a Bernie Sanders voter. She’s not talking about, “God hates rich people and loves poor people.”

The “mighty” whom she’s talking about who are sitting on thrones and the rich whom she’s talking about are the people who have held power over God’s people, who the people need to be delivered from, which unfortunately, in this case includes, as we saw in Mark, a lot of the chief priests, Herod, in addition to Rome. But also, it goes beyond that to the demonic powers, to Satan, the powers of sin and death.

So this is not just at a sort of a purely physical level. She’s talking about that same dynamic as we talked about in the Beatitudes. We see Christ saying again, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

She’s a teenage girl from a podunk little village in Galilee, and she’s now going to become the mother of her Lord, whereas all these kings and the emperor and the wealthy and the powerful are missing it and prophetically are going to miss it. They’re going to miss it.

He has helped His servant, Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to His seed forever.

And I will again make the point, since St. Luke picks up on that language again: here, seed is in the singular, which is the way it is in the Septuagint. But to again make that point, it’s not just talking about, it says “His servant Israel”, lest you think it’s just talking about the nation, the physical nation of Israel. She hones it in that this is the seed, singular, promised to Abraham into his seed, which is the seed that’s about to be born. Going all the way back to Genesis 3, “the seed of the woman”.

And Mary remained with her about three months, and returned to her house.

There’s another understated thing, but if she was six months pregnant and Mary stayed there for three months, that means she stayed there until, St. John was born. And then went home.

Now Elizabeth’s full time came for her to be delivered,

Because it’s been three more months.

And she brought forth a son. When her neighbors and relatives heard how the Lord had shown great mercy to her, they rejoiced with her. So it was, on the eighth day, that they came to circumcise the child; and they would have called him by the name of his father, Zacharias.

His mother answered and said, “No; he shall be called John.”

So, the baby is born. Everyone’s happy, right? Kind of amazed because of her age. But remember, we talked about this as a good thing that people generally considered it shameful if for some reason you weren’t able to have children. They thought it was a punishment for something you had done. So the fact that, especially in her old age, she was able to have this child shows just the opposite. That is just the opposite. “Wow, God’s given you this incredible blessing,” now speaks incredibly positive things about her.

So, on the 8th day, they’re going to circumcise the baby boy. And that was the time when the baby was named. And so they say, “Okay, well, we’ll call him Zacharias, like his father,” because that would be normal for the firstborn son to be named after his father and be junior.

But the mother says, “No, he shall be called John,” because, of course, that’s what Gabriel told Zacharias, that the boy was to be named.

But they said to her, “There is no one among your relatives who is called by this name.” So they made signs to his father—what he would have him called

Because Zacharias still can’t talk. So, they say, “What’s this woman thinking? There’s nobody named John in her family. What are you just pulling this name out of a hat?” They didn’t have baby name books back then. They didn’t just pick something that sounded good. You pass down family names. So they go over and start, “Hey, your wife’s crazy, wants to name the kid John. We should name him Zacharias, right?”

And he asked for a writing tablet, and wrote, saying, “His name is John.” So they all marveled.

They weren’t, like, astonished. The point being, they didn’t understand what was going on. That’s what’s meant by the word marveled there. “He wants to name it John? Why? Why?”

Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he spoke, praising God. Then fear came on all who dwelt around them; and all these sayings were discussed throughout all the hill country of Judea.

So he immediately, as soon as he’s obedient to what Gabriel told him, says, “Name him John.” Boom! He can talk again. Now, they’re astonished. Now, all of a sudden, you can talk again after not being able to speak for nine months.

And all those who heard them kept them in their hearts, saying, “What kind of child will this be?” And the hand of the Lord was with him.

Now, notice something, Zacharias doesn’t explain this to them. When he can speak, he praises the Lord, but he doesn’t say, “Oh, wow, finally I can talk! Guys, guys, come here, I saw this angel. And he told me that the baby and et cetera, et cetera.” He doesn’t tell them that. He doesn’t give them all that information. But everybody sort of takes note of it. Everybody takes note of it.

Why would St. Luke point that out? That people remembered it? He’s tipping his hat again that he talked to some of these people. He talked to some of these people. That’s how he knows about it, right? Again, this isn’t a story he’s making up to say how great St. John the Forerunner was. He’s saying there were a whole bunch of people who were there who saw this happen. And they remembered it, because they thought it was odd. They thought it was odd, so they remembered it. And then Luke was able to talk to them later and find out that this is what happened. He talked to them and they said, “Yeah, strange, this is what happened. We were all wondering, what kind of kid is this going to turn out to be? It turned out it was St. John the Forerunner.”

Now we see his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied

Now you see, those are connected again. Holy Spirit comes upon you, you prophesy, you speak God’s words,

saying, “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, for He has visited and redeemed His people.

We’ll stop right there. Remember what we were talking about last time, when Zacharias was serving in the temple, when the temple was rebuilt, there hadn’t been that sort of great moment when the presence of God came back into it, right? God was sort of still absent. And so, for a lot of the Jewish people at that time, they felt they were still partially in exile. They’re still being ruled over by the Romans, they weren’t independent, God’s presence hadn’t returned to them in the temple.

And so, these were all things that they believed were going to happen when the Messiah came, when the Messiah came. And so, when He says He has visited and redeemed His people, Zacharias is saying this has already begun, because both of those are in the past tense. He doesn’t say He’s about to visit and redeem his people. This means this is about to happen. He says He has visited and redeemed his people.

So again, this is a pointer to what? If God has already visited them, they didn’t read anything about God coming into the temple. So where is God now if He’s visiting His people? Inside Mary’s womb, inside Mary’s womb, and by virtue of Him having become incarnate, He has already redeemed His people.

Our humanity has already been united to God in Mary’s womb. So, salvation has already started while Mary’s three months pregnant. This is an important verse.

“And has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David.

Notice it’s in the house of His servant David, just in case there’s any confusion that you think he’s talking about his own son, St. John.

Remember, they’re not descended from David. They’re Levites. And he’s descended from Aaron. So, he’s specifically talking about Mary’s child, who’s descended from David.

“As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets, who have been since the world began.”

I’ll stop again there. I’m stopping a lot, I know. But notice, he doesn’t just say in fulfillment of prophets and prophecy. He says, “the prophets who have been since the world began.” So he’s saying, going all the way back to Genesis. Going all the way back to Genesis, this was the plan.

So, it goes beyond just the idea of God’s now, finally bringing us back from the exile, right. As we’ve seen, a lot of the people think the Messiah is just going to be sort of like David. He’s going to overthrow the Romans, set up a kingdom, we’ll all worship God in the Temple and everything will be great, right? Zacharias is already tipping his hat here. This goes way beyond that.

It’s not just redemption from the Romans or just the validation of the Temple somehow. This is going all the way back to Genesis and Genesis 3 in particular, and the curse. We’re being redeemed from that, going all the way back.

“That we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to perform the mercy promise to our forefathers and to remember His holy covenant, the oath which he swore to our father Abraham: to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.”

So again, he goes all the way back to Abraham. Now, you notice something here in St. Luke’s Gospel, remember when we’re reading St. Matthew’s Gospel, who is the figure who got talked about most of the time when the Pharisees were coming up and disputing with Jesus? Moses, right? It was all about Moses. It was all about the Law. Right? Why do you follow it? Why don’t you follow it? We received this from Moses.

And as we’re going to see, when we get into St. Paul’s epistles, and you may know, when we get into St. Paul’s epistles, because he’s talking about Jews and Gentiles, he’s talking about faith. He’s talking about a group of Jews who are trying to force the new Gentile Christians to follow all the details of the Old Testament Law. Right? What he does is he leap frogs back past Moses.

He says, look, Abraham wasn’t righteous because he kept the law, because the law hadn’t been given yet, right? Torah wasn’t there yet when Abraham was alive. And yet Abraham was righteous because he believed God. So, he kind of takes the promises back a step, back a step.

St. Luke, again, an associate of St. Paul, is sort of doing that same move here.  These promises go back farther than that. This isn’t just a question of the nation of Israel. This goes back further than that, back to Genesis, back to Adam and Eve, back to Abraham. The salvation that’s coming here is bigger.

And remember, part of that is we talked about last time what his audience is. He’s writing this, first of all, to Theophilus, but also to what? Sort of the Church at large, which at this point is predominantly Gentiles who have been converted by St. Paul.

And so, he’s making clear that the promises in Christ are addressing things that afflict us, not as Israelites. It’s not, he’s the answer to the nation of Israel’s problems. He’s the answer to the problem faced by all of humanity, by every human being on this Earth. Every human being on this Earth.

That’s what we’re being delivered from. Not just Israel’s enemies in Rome. But the enemies of all humanity, that Christ is going to deliver us from. And now he turns and talks about St. John. “And you, child”, talking to his eight day old baby.

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest; for you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people by the remission of their sins.

Notice there we’ve seen this language before, picked up from Isaiah. That this is the messenger who’s going to prepare the way of the Lord. Remember, both Mark and Matthew quoted “…voice crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord”.

And in Isaiah, the imagery that was being used there was that the Lord was going to lead his people back from Babylon, through the wilderness, back into Judea, and that Matthew and Mark picked up on that to set up St. John as the one who’s sort of preparing that way. It’s sort of the end of the exile imagery.

But here again, Luke takes it a little differently because again, he’s not writing primarily to Jewish Christians, right? Who is the Lord in this case? Notice it’s prepare his ways, plural. So it’s not prepare a road for him. He’s going to go before the face of the Lord and prepare his ways. He’s going to be preparatory to Christ, to Jesus, to Mary’s baby.

Mary, who’s pregnant, had just spent three months living with him and Elizabeth, and helping take care of her while she was pregnant. So the Lord, here again, is the son of the mother of Elizabeth’s Lord. We’re talking about Christ. So, the way St. Luke is using this language is more directly why we call him St. John the Forerunner, that he’s specifically there to prepare the way for Christ. By doing what? “To give knowledge of salvation to His people by the remission of their sins.”

Remember, as we saw in the other Gospels, when St. John comes, he comes baptizing for the remission of sins. St. Luke is here not only saying that that’s what he’s doing, but saying that it worked, it worked, that the people baptized by John had their sins, forgiven them by God.

This is fairly theologically important, because this is before Christ has died. This is before Christ has died. And there are certain theological interpretations that some of our brothers and sisters have that, for example, there was no forgiveness of sins before Christ died, or often with our Western Christian brothers and sisters, that the only way a sin could be forgiven was for Christ to be punished for that sin, that God has to punish someone. God has to punish every sin. He can’t show mercy because He has to be just. And so, if He’s not going to punish the person who committed the sin, he has to punish Jesus for it. Jesus on the cross takes the punishment for sins.

But, St. Luke is very clearly saying here that when John baptized people, their sins were forgiven, their sins were forgiven. And lest you think that St. John’s baptism was Christian baptism and say, “Oh, well, see, they’re being baptized into Christ,” in the Book of Acts, written by the same author, some of the apostles are going to find some people who had been baptized by John but who had never heard of Christ. So they must have been traveling in Judea. They went and heard the preaching of St. John. They were baptized by him, but then they left because they didn’t know anything about Jesus.

And when that happens, the apostles baptize them into Christ, and then lay hands upon them and they received the Holy Spirit. So according to St. Luke, St. John was not baptizing people into Christ. That is something that happened after Christ’s death and resurrection. And yet there is real forgiveness of sins here in John’s baptism.

So, this is a big tip off to us, when we get further in St. Luke’s gospel, when we get to the crucifixion, we’ll talk more about Christ’s death. We’ll talk a lot more about it when we get into St. Paul’s Epistles. But what this is showing us is that God is able to forgive sins. He’s able to forgive sins. Something doesn’t have to be killed in order for God to forgive sins. He can forgive them at will because he’s merciful and he’s God. He has that authority to forgive sins. And so here, he has chosen to do that through John’s baptism.

Why? In order to give knowledge of salvation to His people. In order that the people would know that their salvation is coming, He is going to forgive sins.

Now, God can forgive sins however He sees fit, meaning, before the Torah,

He could forgive people’s sins. When He gives the Torah to Moses and says, “This is what a sin offering is and here’s how to do it.” He can forgive sins through the sin offerings in the Tabernacle and the Temple. When He chooses to do it through John’s baptism, He can do it through John’s baptism.

And in the New Covenant, as we saw in Matthew 18 and 19, when God chooses to forgive sins through the Church, through the Sacrament of Confession of the Church, He could do it that way. He could do it that way, because He’s God and He has the authority to remit sins.

Interlocutor: The various methods God has to forgive sin may not necessarily be part of any organized religion, if we read Psalm 50 where David says ” A sacrifice to God is a contrite heart and a broken spirit,” and he says “He will sprinkle me with hyssop and I’ll be forgiven.”  I think what I’m trying to say, when we personally come to God with repentance as best we can, a contrite heart and a broken spirit, that God forgives us there, maybe in a private setting between the individual and God.

Fr. Stephen:

Well, God can do whatever He wants. He’s God. But you’ve got to remember where Psalm 50 ends also, right? Because where it ends is “Then shall I offer bullocks upon thine altar.” He’s not saying I’m not going to offer sacrifices because you don’t really want them. He’s saying that what’s important to God is not the mechanical operation of the ritual.