Days 23 & 24: Luke’s Voices

Luke’s story of Jesus contains elegant prose and moving poetry. Many have noticed the parallelism between Jesus’ actions in the gospel and the apostles’ actions in Luke’s sequel, Acts. Echoes from the Hebrew scrolls reverberate around the halls and homes and paths where the stories take place. Jerusalem is both the place to “set one’s face” to visit (Luke 9:51), and the place to gather in order to spread the gospel to the very “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

But it is precisely because of his careful writing that I am challenged by a question early in Luke’s gospel. Why is it that, when Zechariah disbelieves the angel Gabriel, he is made mute for nine months? Yet when Mary asks a similar question as Gabriel tells her about her own miraculous pregnancy, she is affirmed. What is going on in these two angelic visitations?

New Testament scholar Joel B. Green (The Gospel of Luke, 1997, page 83) has noticed many parallels between the two scenes:

With all these similarities, the part that follows the “and now…” at the end of each column is startling in its contrast. Gabriel says to Zechariah: “and now, you will be silent, unable to speak, until the day these things come to be because you did not believe my words which will be fulfilled in their time” (1:20). While to Mary, Gabriel says: “and now Elizabeth, your relative, has conceived a son in her old age and this is her sixth month who was called ‘barren’ for nothing will be impossible with God” (1:36-37). Zechariah is made silent. Mary learns of yet another miracle. Why this difference? In all that is so very similar in these two announcements by Gabriel at the beginning of two birth narratives, why this stark contrast after the person hearing the announcement asked a question? Their questions sure seem similar:

And I imagine that most of us, in similar situations, would ask such a question or two (and perhaps a few more besides)!

In “Jesus and the Gospels” class one day we were wrestling with this question. We also noticed that Luke draws attention to the timing of events using Elizabeth’s pregnancy cycle. When Gabriel goes to Mary, we are told that it was “in the sixth month” (Luke 1:26). The sixth month of what? Normally books in Luke’s day told time based on the Emperor’s reign, or the local ruler’s years in power: “In the sixth year of the reign of king….” Not Luke. It’s the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy (Luke 1:36). And when Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, she stays for three months (Luke 1:56), assisting her older female relative through the birthing process. As we noticed these passages in class, one student, Anne Leah Guia, made the following observation: “Zechariah is silenced by Gabriel and the voices of women can be heard.”

It was the kind of statement that causes class conversation to pause for a moment. We checked it out and read the passages again. Sure enough, when Zechariah is made mute, we hear Elizabeth’s voice for the first time: “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people” (Luke 1:25). In the next part of the story, Mary’s voice will be heard repeatedly. Surprisingly her voice will have the last say in her exchange with Gabriel as she accepts her unique calling: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

When Mary and Elizabeth meet, the voices of two women—one elderly and one very young—exchange greetings and express their faith in the God of miraculous pregnancies. Even a song of Mary’s will be included in Luke’s narrative as she “magnifies the Lord” and “rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46-47). She praises the God who “brought down the powerful” and “lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52).

As Luke’s story continues, whose voices do we hear? When John is born, his silent father speaks again—with his own song (Luke 1:68-79). While we are told of Emperor Augustus in the set-up to Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:1), the voices we hear in the narrative are shepherds (Luke 2:15), people of very low social status in the first century world. The early days of Jesus’ life include hearing the voice of an elderly man named Simeon (Luke 2:29-32) and the description of an elderly woman, Anna, praising and preaching in the temple (Luke 2:36-38). Luke’s gospel will even include the voice of twelve-year-old Jesus (Luke 2:49), a story not included in the other three gospels.

I would encourage you to identify the people who speak in this gospel and notice what they say. There are some surprising comments made out of the mouths of people we would not expect. For example, a leper in Jesus’ day was a person we would avoid. Those of us who feel more righteous might shake his or her hand, but then quickly grab our Purell after the poor soul walked on by. That man said to Jesus: “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12). How many of us really believe that? The leper did. And it changed his life.

And then there’s the voice of John the Baptist—the guy whose elderly parents received an answered prayer delivered by the angel Gabriel himself: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” In case we missed John’s doubts here about Jesus, the question is repeated by John’s disciples to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Luke 7:19-20). John’s voice challenges me when I hear him preaching judgment by the Jordan (Luke 3:4-17). But it moves me in other ways when I also hear John’s voice quivering with doubts from his prison cell (Luke 3:19-20; 7:18f).

What other voices in this gospel do we hear? Will we need to silence some voices in order to hear others? Does my own voice need to be silent more often so that others’ voices are heard?

Kendra Haloviak Valentine is grateful to be able to study the New Testament with La Sierra University students.