Old, young, expecting

I am preaching this weekend.  This isn't actually the homily I will be giving tomorrow - it's a draft which I wrote out and then set aside.  So I'm offering this as an Advent reflection.  I'll post the text of the actual homily after I've put the finishing touches on it.  The Gospel for this Sunday is the story of the Visitation - the readings are here.

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This is such a remarkable scene in today’s Gospel reading: a pregnant older woman, and a pregnant young woman, drawn together in a meeting that erupts into praise and joy.

The very first episodes in Luke’s Gospel aren’t about Mary and Joseph and Jesus; they’re about Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah and their baby, who will be named John and who is known to us today as John the Baptist.  Luke tells us that Zechariah and Elizabeth were good people, but they had no children, and Luke explains that it was because Elizabeth was barren.  In biblical times, “barren” wouldn’t have been a neutral term; it was more like a term of reproach – as though Elizabeth had failed, was somehow less of a woman, for not having borne children for her husband.  Today, with our much greater medical knowledge, we may wonder whether the root cause was really Elizabeth’s biological issue, or whether it might have been Zechariah’s. 

But whatever the cause of their childlessness, it seems that Elizabeth had lived through her prime fertile years without having children.  I’m sure she watched all her contemporaries of those young adult years, all her female friends and family members, having children while she didn’t have any.  If you’ve ever known a couple that wanted to have children but didn’t or couldn’t, you might imagine the emotions and the stress that she may well have felt.  Whether her husband or relatives or neighbors said hurtful things about her, or to her, that would make her feel even worse, we don’t know, but it’s not difficult to imagine.  

As she wasn’t encumbered with any children of her own, she may have been the one who was called in by the moms of the clan and the community to tend to the ones with difficult pregnancies or deliveries, or lengthy post-birth recuperations, and keep the households running.

 

So when pregnancy did come, so unexpectedly and indeed miraculously, at a menopausal or even post-menopausal stage of life, Elizabeth was experiencing these feelings and sensations of pregnancy for the first time, but in many ways, this wasn’t her first time around the block in life.  The woman who greeted Mary in Sunday’s Gospel had a lifetime’s worth of wisdom and experience stored up; she was learning that, just when we think that we’ve come to terms with the disappointments in our lives and have “settled”, God can intrude into our plans and expectations and disrupt them, in a way that is surprising, and unsettling, and perhaps even frightening, but also in a way that fills us with hope and joy.

Luke also tells us that, when Elizabeth became pregnant, she “went into seclusion for five months” – that’s the term that Luke uses, “went into seclusion”.  Pregnancy is harder on older women than it is on younger women, so there may have been a compelling medical reason for her to stay in bed – the sort of thing that, these days, we call “going on bed rest”.  We hear this weekend that Elizabeth “cried out in a loud voice” when Mary entered; that outcry may have come from the bed to which Elizabeth was confined.  It may be that she sent for Mary to help her, just as Elizabeth herself may have been sent for by expecting moms during her own younger years.  Mary herself was also an expecting mother, but there were no email or telephones or postal service in those days, so perhaps Elizabeth wouldn’t have known about Mary’s pregnancy, and wouldn’t reasonably have suspected it, because Mary was not yet married to Joseph.

As for Mary herself: she had her own set of issues to deal with.  Being an unmarried pregnant young woman makes mother and baby vulnerable in any day and age, including our own.  Most likely she was considerably younger than Elizabeth, maybe no older than a teenager, and wouldn’t have had Elizabeth’s wisdom and perspective on these matters.  Perhaps she was looking forward to opening her heart to the older woman and seek Elizabeth’s counsel.

Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus must have been amazingly disruptive to her plans.  She had intended to marry Joseph, and perhaps would have had hopes and dreams of being a mother someday, after their wedding.  And now here she was, expecting before her wedding, and the father of her child was not her husband-to-be.  When it became known that she was expecting, as it inevitably would because it’s very difficult to hide a pregnancy, she would be at risk, her baby would be at risk, and she would have dishonored the man to whom she was betrothed. 

So that is the backstory for this meeting in this morning’s Gospel: this unexpectedly pregnant older woman, and this unexpectedly pregnant young woman.  Did they come together and say, “Why did this happen to us?  I’m scared to death!  I wish this wasn’t happening to us.”  If they did say any of those things, Luke doesn’t record it.  What he does report is that Elizabeth, prompted by the Holy Spirit, realized that Mary was pregnant and that it was the Lord’s doing.  And so she cries out in praise and thanksgiving.  That is our scene: a woman too old to have a baby yet having one, a woman having a baby too early; and finding in those surprising, risky and frightening circumstances a reason to rejoice.