19^th December

In the gospel reading there is a priest at prayer in the Temple, Zechariah, and the people outside the Temple are praying. It is in this setting of prayer that God announces unexpected good news to Zechariah through God’s messenger, Gabriel. Even though both Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth are getting on in years, Elizabeth will soon conceive and give birth to a son. He is to be named John and he will have a special mission to prepare people for the coming of the Lord. All of this was too much for Zechariah to take in. He couldn’t believe the messenger’s good news. He asked for a sign before he could begin to believe. The ways of the Lord were too wonderful for Zechariah to comprehend. We are being reminded that there is always more to God and to what God is doing that we ever realize. God’s purposes for our lives, for the world, will always leave us lost for words. Zechariah asked for a sign and he himself became the sign. His inability to speak make people realize that something extraordinary had happened in the Temple, that God had touched his life in a profound way. Saint Paul once spoke of a mystical experience he had that left him speechless. He could not speak about it to anyone. He said he ‘was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat’. We might all struggle to put into words some deeply significant experience of the Lord. In another of his letters, Paul says that God’s power at work within us can do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine. It is reassuring to know that God is always at work in ways that we cannot imagine or put into words. This awareness keeps us hopeful in difficult times, allowing us to say in the words of today’s psalm, ‘’It is you, O Lord, who are my hope’.