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What will this child become?
People often pray for God to do something – to help individuals or
nations, to sort the world out and make my life better. We want God
to act, to do things. But if that’s what we want – we need to
be careful – because God may take us seriously.
Today we think about the birth of John the Baptist, from the beginning
of Luke’s gospel. Zechariah the priest, who with his wife Elizabeth
has no child. His name and his line will die out without a son. And he
has a vision of an angel, in the context of worship. In 1 Chronicles 24
the Old Testament tells us about the divisions of priests: there were
24 groups of priests, each group having between four and nine families: each
group came up to Jerusalem to act as priests for two separate weeks each
year, and would have earned their living at home the rest of the time
– they were non-stipendiary priests!
Zechariah’s vision happens at the time of the incense offering. There
were some eighteen thousand priests, so Zechariah would only get to do
it once in his lifetime; it happened twice a day around the time of the
morning and evening sacrifices. Incense was a symbol of the prayers of
God’s people: the priest had to put incense on the coals and then
prostrate himself in prayer – and it was then that Zechariah had
his vision of an angel, which terrified him.
The angel said to him: ‘Your prayer has been heard’ – what
prayer? On one level it’s the unnamed but implied prayer for a son,
for a child, which is granted. But there’s also the prayers of the
people too, praying outside while Zechariah offers incense inside, praying
for the nation and its future, and for the coming of the Messiah, the
saviour of the nation. And so the angel tells Zechariah what his son is
going to do – and he’s overwhelmed and doesn’t see how
it can happen, so is struck dumb and deaf until it does take place. The
Greek word for dumb in story of Zechariah’s vision can mean deaf
and dumb, which is the common-sense application here. So Zechariah has
to keep quiet for nine months – although he must have communicated the
baby’s name to Elizabeth, because she knew it when the time came
for the naming.
But the word of a woman carried little weight, especially when the name
she seemed to have chosen, John, wasn’t a family name and wasn’t
expected. For some reason the neighbours didn’t seem to have thought
that Zechariah would have communicated to Elizabeth, and so were surprised
that Zechariah agreed with her! They glorified God and asked themselves:
what will this child become?
So that’s the story of the birth of John the Baptist. What’s
it got to do with us? Well, it suggests three things about the nature
of prayer:
1. Prayer is a corporate experience. Morning and evening prayers are
modelled on Temple worship. As Jesus said, when two or three gathered together,
he is there. Zechariah was praying as representative of the prayers of
all the people, of which incense was a visual symbol, as it can still
be today. Yes, Zechariah had an individual experience, a vision: but that
was in a context of corporate prayer, even though not together with others.
We need to pray linked into others – e.g. using the Cathedral corporate
prayer times (8am and 5.30pm), aware of the prayers of others; being at
worship andprayer is good for your individual spiritual life as well as
aiding the corporate prayer of the church.
2. Being in touch with God may mean that we feel we lose something rather
than gain it. Zechariah became powerless as the result of his encounter
with God. He lost the ability to speak and hear, to be part of the world
of others. It must have been rather more devastating than the slow loss
of hearing as age approaches us: it was a sudden and dramatic loss. It’s
been suggested that physically speaking Zechariah may have had a stroke.
But after this profound spiritual experience he had to remain silent.
More than that – as a big powerful male priest he now can only communicate
through a woman, and has the frustration of what he wants not being taken
account of: he has to learn to see things from another perspective, the
perspective of weakness and vulnerability rather than always being strong
and capable. So when we pray: we may have to let go of our strength, even
our hope, in order to find God in our lives and the lives of others in
different ways.
3. God’s work isn’t on our timescale. God works through people,
not generally directly and immediately: and it takes time to God to grow
the answers to our prayers. So Zechariah had to wait nine months for the
fulfilment of his prayer, and to regain his voice and hearing. ‘What
will this child become?’ say the local people. It would take thirty years
to answer that question – thirty years in which people might think that
God had forgotten about it all. We need to have a long-term view of God’s
work. God answers prayers: but it may not be by what we want or expect,
and it may take a very long time to bear fruit – but that doesn’t
mean God isn’t at work or has forgotten us.
For example Michael Mayne, former Dean of Westminster and sufferer from
ME and at the end cancer of the jaw: quote from his final book Enduring
Melody pages 221 and 245, on a dream of God answering prayers one at a
time and dealing with a large backlog, and his reflections on how he has
found God in this distressing and beautiful world, in his illness, despite
his inability to pray and struggles with faith, and has found empathy
and love through his vulnerability.
Prayer is corporate, disempowering, long-term – and prayer changes
us as it changed Zechariah and the course of history 2000 years ago. In
God’s good time – what will this child become?
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