A Pregnant Silence

As you read Luke 1, you get the idea on one hand that Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, is not only faithful, he is a man of keen spiritual insight. On the other hand, we see a Zechariah gripped with fear and doubt.

The fear shows itself when the Angel Gabriel appears to him while he is serving in the temple as a priest. I don’t hold this fear against Zechariah too much. It seems to be a typical reaction to angel sightings. Even in the Bible, they weren’t your everyday occurrences. And when they happened, they meant something very significant, life-changing even. Nowhere do we get the impression Zechariah was the kind of guy who was looking for a life change.

It was his second reaction that got him in trouble: “How can I be sure of this?” (v18) He expresses doubt about the angel’s promise that he and Elizabeth will bear a son in their old age.

The promise to Zechariah is not rescinded because he is filled with doubt. God’s purpose in this world is much too great to be overcome by our human insecurities. But because of the doubt, Zechariah will lose his ability to speak until the baby is born. He will not be able express that doubt, nor will he be able to put his own spin on this whole matter until the day the child is named.

This is no virgin birth. Zechariah and Elizabeth have to do it the ordinary human way. Zechariah’s making love to his wife is not necessarily a sign of faith, but it also does not show a lack of faith either. He is just doing what he knows to do, though that has never produced the desired result before. Doubt and unbelief are not the same thing, though even unbelief is forgivable. Faith is walking toward something when you don’t have all necessary assurances – it is does not mean being void of questions or wonderings – or doubt.

Zechariah was not muted to punish him any more than Elizabeth was barren because she was being punished. The inability to speak gave Zechariah time to reflect before he had to explain the significance of what was happening in their lives. Because of the appearance of Gabriel, he’d already overstayed his time in the temple. He needed those nine months to have his thoughts to himself instead of having to answer questions before he’d pondered the answers.

When Zechariah finally spoke, he spoke profoundly. Like a pump that gushes forth after being primed or a trickle of water that fills in behind an earthen dam only to burst forth with a torrent. When he prophesied over his newborn son, he had been saving up all that insight for a long time.

I’ve been thinking about how Jesus held back until he was 30. We are so pushed to produce as ministers, so much so that the temptation is to see our validation in our ministry productivity. Jesus was active, productive even in those years before age 30, presumably in his carpentry shop. But he wasn’t preaching, though not for lack of opportunity in the local synagogue. And he wasn’t healing any sick people, though there was no shortage of sick to heal. It just wasn’t his time.

Such is the lesson of Zechariah – there are seasons of silence, of what Alicia Chole refers to as anonymous times in our lives. These seasons are not to punish us, but to birth through us truth as tangible as the child Elizabeth bore at the end of her husband’s nine months of silence.