Elizabeth Before

Only Luke, of all the gospelers, tells us about Elizabeth, and he tells us a remarkably rich remarkable little. We see Elizabeth in a few brief moments at the climax of her life, the few moments when something is happening. She conceives a holy child in her old age, Mary visits her, and she names her son John. Even of Mary’s three-month visit, we’re told only about the first five or ten minutes!

But remember, Elizabeth is old. There are a lot of years we’re not told about except that she (and Zachariah) walked blameless before God.

For the very little we’re explicitly shown, we can infer a lot: the joy of the bride Elizabeth, of her hopes for her life, of the many years of quiet—and probably sometimes not so quiet—grief of infertility; the difficulty of how her neighbors looked at her, blaming her for not having a child; of the happiness of her marriage to a good man; and the trial of being married to him while he was mute and apparently deaf; of the discomfort of being pregnant when her body was old—and the difficulty of raising an unusual child when she was even older! We can imagine the monotony of all the ordinary days of ordinary work stretching over the years when nothing was happening and she must have believed nothing ever would. And yet, she was righteous and walked before God blameless.

It’s easy to be interested in the climax of her story, in the moment when something happens—especially such a momentous something as the Mother of God showing up at her door, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and knowing before anyone else does who Mary’s child is. But may Elizabeth, who walked those hidden, ordinary, often difficult days blameless before God when nothing interesting was happening, intercede for us, just as much as the Elizabeth filled by the Holy Spirit, knowing Jesus.