December 21

Met with a Shout

Mary gets up and goes. The verse carries the speed and the direction, quickly, into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and then it puts her inside a house with a woman named Elizabeth. Luke gives no reason for the journey beyond what the angel has just told her, that Elizabeth is six months along. There is the going, and there is a greeting at the end of it.

Then the house gets loud. Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, and at the top of her voice she blesses Mary and the child Mary is carrying, then puts a question to her with a title inside it: the mother of my Lord. Luke does not leave the shout unaccounted for. He names the cause in the very sentence that reports the baby leaping, and the cause is the Spirit of God.

In those days Mary got up and went quickly into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She called out with a loud voice, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! Why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For when the voice of your greeting came into my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy! Blessed is she who believed, for what has been spoken to her from the Lord will be fulfilled!" Mary said:

My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Luke 1:39-47

Elizabeth's last sentence reaches back to Nazareth. She blesses Mary for believing what was spoken to her from the Lord, and she was a journey away when it was spoken. Nobody on this page has briefed her. God had given Mary his word through an angel. He confirmed it through Elizabeth.

The title she uses is a claim about the child. Before anyone has seen him, Elizabeth calls him her Lord. She reports the movement in the room herself, and she calls it joy: the baby leaped in my womb for joy.

Mary answers all of it by talking about God. She begins by setting her soul beside her spirit, and both are turned outward, at the Lord and at God her Saviour. She has been blessed twice over under somebody else's roof, and what she does with it is magnify the Lord.

That is worth taking into the week. God fills people with his Spirit and speaks through them. When someone says a true thing about him to you, over a table or in a car or in the minutes after a service, weigh it against what he has already said, and if it holds, take it as more than kindness. It may be what Mary got in the hill country: the word God had already given her, said again in an ordinary voice.

Lord, make me glad at what you are doing in someone else. Where you have said something to me through a person, help me to receive it as yours. Keep me holding to your promises.