Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Parents of John the Baptist
November 5
also known as Zacharias and Elizabeth, John the Baptist's parents, The parents of the Forerunner
Elizabeth and Zechariah were the parents of John the Baptist, an aged and childless couple of the priestly line to whom, late in life, God gave the son who would prepare the way of the Lord. Zechariah was a priest of the division of Abijah, and Elizabeth a daughter of Aaron; their whole story is told in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel, where the angel Gabriel announces John's birth, Zechariah is struck silent for his doubt, and his speech returns at the naming of the child in the song the church has sung every morning since. Their feast is November 5.
Elizabeth and Zechariah were an old man and an old woman who had wanted a child all their lives and never had one. Zechariah was a priest, one of the many who served the Temple in Jerusalem by turns, and Elizabeth too came of the priestly line of Aaron. Luke, who tells their story, says that both of them were righteous before God, walking blamelessly in his commandments; and he says, in the same breath, that they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and that the two of them were now well along in years. They had prayed, and the years had gone by, and they had grown old. In the Scriptures of their people this was an old and familiar grief. Abraham and Sarah had carried it, and Hannah, and the mother of Samson; and each time, when hope was gone, God had opened the barren womb and given a child who belonged to him. Elizabeth and Zechariah did not know that they stood in that line. They knew only that they were old, and faithful, and without a son.
It fell to Zechariah, once, to go into the Temple and burn incense at the hour of prayer. His division, the division of Abijah, was on duty, and the lot had fallen to him to enter the holy place while the whole assembly prayed outside. He was alone at the altar of incense when an angel appeared to him, standing at its right side. Zechariah was troubled, and afraid. But the angel told him not to be afraid, and gave him news he had long since stopped expecting: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John." The child would be great before the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb, and would go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to make ready a people prepared for him.
It was more than Zechariah could believe. He was an old man and his wife was old, and the years for such things were behind them. So he asked the angel for a sign, in the words the ESV gives him: "How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years." The angel answered that he was Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, sent to bring this good news; and because Zechariah had not believed, his sign would be worked in his own body: "And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time." Zechariah came out to the waiting people unable to say a word, making signs to them, and they understood that he had seen a vision in the holy place. His week of service ended, and he went home silent.
And Elizabeth conceived. For five months she kept herself hidden, and what she said in those months Luke preserves: "Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people." The reproach of her childlessness, borne all those years, was lifted. The Lord had looked on her at last.
In the sixth month the same angel, Gabriel, was sent to a young woman named Mary, in Nazareth of Galilee, to tell her that she would bear the Son of God, and that her kinswoman Elizabeth, the one they called barren, was already six months with child, for nothing would be impossible with God. Mary went with haste into the hill country of Judea, to the house of Zechariah, and greeted Elizabeth. At the sound of the greeting the child leaped in Elizabeth's womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out with a loud voice: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!" She asked how it should be that the mother of her Lord had come to her, and she told Mary what her own body had just told her: "For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy." The unborn John had greeted the unborn Christ. Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months, and then went home.
When Elizabeth's time came she gave birth to a son, and her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they rejoiced with her. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they meant to name him Zechariah, after his father. But Elizabeth said no; he was to be called John. They objected that no one in her family had that name, and they made signs to the father to learn what he wished the boy to be called. Zechariah asked for a writing tablet, and wrote four words that astonished them all: "His name is John." It was the name the angel had given, the name Zechariah had carried through nine months of silence. And in that moment the silence ended. "Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he spoke, blessing God."
Fear came on all the neighbors, and through the hill country of Judea people spoke of these things and wondered what this child would be. And Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke the words the church has never since let fall silent. He blessed the God of Israel who had come to redeem his people, and then he turned to the infant and named what he would be: a prophet of the Most High, going before the Lord to prepare his ways. He ended on the mercy that had visited them all, the dawn breaking on a people who had waited in the dark, "to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." The old priest who had doubted a promise now sang one, and his song became the church's own. Every morning, in the daily prayer of Christians across the world, the words Zechariah spoke over his newborn son are spoken again, and the light he blessed is asked for once more.
How we know Elizabeth and Zechariah is a single source: the first chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. No other book of the New Testament names them, and no record outside the Gospel preserves them. What sets Luke apart is that he alone among the evangelists opens his work by describing his method. Writing to a man he calls Theophilus, he explains that many had undertaken to compile a narrative of what had been accomplished, and that he too, having followed all things closely for some time past, had decided to write an orderly account, in the ESV, "that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." Luke presents himself, that is, as a careful inquirer working from what eyewitnesses and ministers of the word had handed down; and the infancy narrative in which Elizabeth and Zechariah appear is the most Semitic and archaic-sounding material in his Gospel, thick with the idiom of the Old Testament.
Luke tells their story in a shape his first readers would have known at once. The childless couple grown old, the promise from God, the birth of a son set apart for him: this is the pattern of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, of Hannah and Elkanah at Shiloh, of the parents of Samson. The song Luke gives to Zechariah, the Benedictus, is woven almost entirely from the Psalms and the Prophets. Modern readers understand the chapter as Luke's deliberate joining of the story of Jesus to the story of Israel, and the believing tradition has read it the same way, as the hinge on which the Old Covenant turns toward the New.
Beyond Luke, one early text carried the couple, and Zechariah in particular, into further story. The Protoevangelium of James, a Greek narrative of the infancy composed perhaps in the middle of the second century, tells that when Herod ordered the slaughter of the infants, Elizabeth fled into the hill country with the child John, and finding no place to hide cried out, in Alexander Walker's translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, "O mountain of God, receive mother and child"; and the mountain was cleft to receive her, and a light shone about them. It tells further that Herod's officers came to Zechariah in the Temple demanding his son, and that when he would not give the boy up they killed him at the altar. The church discerned early that this was not apostolic Scripture: it was never received into the canon, and a later Latin decree numbered it among the writings not read publicly. But the story was told and loved for centuries, most of all in the East, and it shaped how Christians pictured the family of the Forerunner. Whether or not it happened as told, the picture it left, of a mother hidden in the hills and a father dying rather than surrender the child of promise, is part of how the church has remembered Elizabeth and Zechariah.
Elizabeth and Zechariah are kept together on November 5. The Christian East commemorates them on September 5, as the Holy Prophet Zechariah and the Righteous Elizabeth, and remembers Elizabeth again in the flight to the mountain; the West has honored them at various days, and most often through their son, whose nativity on June 24 and beheading on August 29 are among the oldest feasts of the calendar.
Zechariah's song, the Benedictus, is the couple's largest and most living memorial. From the early centuries the Latin church appointed it as the Gospel canticle of Lauds, the office of daybreak, and the reformed English office kept it there: in the Book of Common Prayer the Benedictus stands among the canticles of Morning Prayer, and it is sung at Morning Prayer in these offices still. The words an old priest spoke over his infant son are, at every dawn, on the lips of the whole church.
In Christian art Zechariah is shown as a priest at the altar of incense, often with the angel beside him, or holding the writing tablet on which he named the child; Elizabeth appears most often at the Visitation, greeting Mary, the two mothers and their unborn sons meeting on the threshold. The pair are remembered as a type of faithful Israel at the edge of the gospel: Zechariah the priest in whom the old worship gives way to the new, Elizabeth the kinswoman of Mary and the mother of the Forerunner, the first woman to call Mary the mother of her Lord.
The Gospel according to Luke, chapter 1(Greek, 1st century)
The sole and complete canonical source for Elizabeth and Zechariah: Gabriel's annunciation at the altar of incense, Zechariah's silence, the Visitation, the birth and naming of John, and the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79).
Other translations: ESV, Bible Gateway
Public domain: King James Version, Wikisource
The Protoevangelium of James (Infancy Gospel of James)(Greek, mid-2nd century)
The mid-second-century infancy narrative that carried Elizabeth's flight to the mountain and Zechariah's martyrdom in the Temple; never received into the canon, but formative for Eastern devotion to the parents of the Forerunner.
Public domain: tr. Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 8, New Advent
Luke for Everyone(English, 2004)
The accessible believing guide to Luke, warm and plain on the infancy chapter; the volume for a parishioner who wants to sit with Luke 1.
Public domain: Westminster John Knox (publisher page)
The Gospel of Luke (New International Commentary on the New Testament)(English, 1997)
The fuller believing-scholarly commentary on Luke, strong on the Old Testament pattern behind Luke 1 and on the Benedictus; the way in for a reader who wants to go deeper.
Public domain: Eerdmans (publisher page)
Primary sources. Everything of substance about Elizabeth and Zechariah is in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, which carries the annunciation to Zechariah, the silence, the Visitation, the birth and naming of John, and the Benedictus. It is free in the ESV at Bible Gateway and in the public-domain King James Version at Wikisource. The one early text to extend their story is the Protoevangelium of James (mid-second century), which tells of Elizabeth's flight to the mountain and Zechariah's death in the Temple; it is free in Alexander Walker's translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers at New Advent, and in M. R. James's rendering in his Apocryphal New Testament online.
Recommended modern biography. Because the couple lives entirely inside Luke 1, the book to put in a reader's hand is a good commentary on Luke. N. T. Wright's Luke for Everyone (Westminster John Knox, 2004) reads the infancy chapter warmly and plainly, a believing guide a parishioner can pray with. For going deeper, Joel B. Green's The Gospel of Luke in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1997) is the fuller believing-scholarly treatment, strong on Luke's Old Testament pattern-making and on the Benedictus.
Further reading. Raymond E. Brown's The Birth of the Messiah (updated edition, Doubleday, 1993) is the standard critical study of the infancy narratives, exhaustive on Zechariah and Elizabeth and the shape of Luke 1, for the reader who wants the scholarship in full.
Online resources. Luke 1 in parallel translations is at Bible Gateway; the Protoevangelium of James is at New Advent and at earlychristianwritings.com. The Orthodox Church in America's calendar carries a short life of the two under September 5.
From that account grew a settled tradition in the Christian East that Zechariah died a martyr in the Temple, killed between the sanctuary and the altar. Eastern calendars keep him as prophet and martyr, and some who held the tradition identified him with the Zechariah son of Barachiah whom Jesus names in Matthew's Gospel as murdered between the sanctuary and the altar, though most scholarship distinguishes the two, since that Zechariah belongs to an earlier age. The Western church has not generally counted him among the martyrs. What East and West have held in common is the honor owed to the two who raised the Baptist: parents of the last and greatest of the prophets, and the first, in Luke's telling, to know who was coming.
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servants Elizabeth and Zechariah, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with them, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.