Two happy women

 At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, ⁴⁰ where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. ⁴² In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! ⁴³ But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? ⁴⁴ As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her!” Luke 1:39-45

I find it hard to read this little passage without smiling. It’s just such a happy episode, and if sheer happiness doesn’t make us smile, well, something is wrong indeed.

Mary, young and fit, and no doubt flushed from her walk, comes bustling into the home of Elizabeth and gives her a loud greeting. Elizabeth - not so young and not so fit! – perhaps hoists herself out of her chair to return the greeting, and as she does so she feels the child in her womb, John the Baptist-to-be, give a lively kick. She interprets this sudden movement as her baby greeting Mary’s, womb to womb.

John is to be the forerunner and herald of Jesus the Messiah in thirty years’ time, and here they are, depicted as starting to get to know one another, so to speak. Wonderful! Are you smiling too?

Various great truths emerge…

First, we never know when God is going to do something new.

The people of Israel had long been promised a Messiah, a King - indeed, the King of kings. But why precisely now? And why precisely here, in “the hill country of Judea” - as we might put it, “out in the sticks”? It’s been a long, hard wait, centuries long, in fact. But now it’s coming to an end.

From which the simple lesson is: never give up on God. We never know when he will spring a surprise; it may be in bleak and unpromising times. He is always there, even if sometimes he seems to be hiding behind the scenes.

Second, God has a wonderful habit of using very ordinary people.

The fact that Elizabeth was a priest’s wife didn’t make her particularly special – the priesthood was something a man was born into, not something he “qualified” for. And as for Mary herself, we know next to nothing about her except that she had “found favour with God” (Luke 1:30).

Yes, God can take the most ordinary human material and do the most extraordinary things with it: think David the shepherd boy (1 Samuel 16); or Hannah, the barren wife (1 Samuel 1-2); or Amos the shepherd and mere “tender of sycamore-fig trees” (Amos 7:14); or Simon Peter, whose only talent was for pulling fish out of the sea.

God loves to take and use the “humble and lowly”. So why not you, or me? Lord, help me to be of use to you this very day, even if it is cold and wet and grey!

Third, it’s a story about humility.

We don’t know how old Elizabeth was, or how exactly she was related to Mary, but Luke 1:36 describes her as “in her old age”, so she was certainly far senior to Mary. Yet instead of feeling in any way jealous or put out by what God was choosing to do through the younger woman, she delights to rejoice with her, and humbles herself with the question, “Why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” As if to say, I don’t deserve this!

The fact that Mary is putting her in the shade – taking centre-stage in God’s great drama – is neither here nor there.

This poses a challenge: How good am I at delighting in the success or blessings of others? Somone outshines me, perhaps somebody far younger: do I feel stirrings of jealousy deep down inside? A well-known novelist once said, “Every time a friend succeeds, something in me dies”. Oh, you poor, cramped, bitter little man! (Or could that be me…?)

Fourth, the euphoria of that special day was not a permanent state.

As we read on in the Gospels we find that for both Elizabeth and Mary there would be tears aplenty ahead.

We aren’t told how long Elizabeth had to live; it seems unlikely that she would have survived long enough to see John launched on his strange career, with his camel-hair robe and weird diet and his habit of disappearing off into desert places (Matthew 3). But it seems unlikely that as he grew up he wouldn’t have exhibited signs of what may have seemed quite troubling eccentricity.

And as for Mary… What pain and frantic anxiety she must have felt that time when, as a 12-year-old boy, Jesus went missing in Jerusalem for three days (Luke 2:41-52). (One of our sons, when he was little, did a runner on us in a garden centre which may have lasted ten minutes, if that; it still brings me out in a sweat.)

Then that time when word was going round that Jesus had gone crazy, and Mary had to send other sons to fetch him home - only to hear him almost seem to disown them (Mark 4:20-34).

Not to mention the cross… “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother…” (John 19:25). Just imagine that for a few seconds.

All a long, long way from that glorious encounter between Mary and Elizabeth that we started with.

Faith in Christ crucified and risen promises joys without limit and without end. But the experience of these two women makes very clear that there may be many tears along the way. May God help us to bear them with faith and glad endurance!

Dear Father in heaven, thank you for the beautiful encounter between Mary and Elizabeth on that memorable day. Thank you too for the times I have known highs in my spiritual life. Help me to remember them, to cherish them, and to build upon them – but also to know that, wonderful though they were, they are nothing compared with the eternal glories to come. Amen.