When they came on the eighth day to circumcise the child,
they were going to call him Zechariah after his father
The name Zechariah means "God remembers", and indeed in the canticle he would soon sing Zechariah thanked God for remembering his holy covenant. The child to be born was very much born because God did in fact remember his promise to Zechariah, and was truly mindful of all the promises of his covenant. In that sense Zechariah might have seemed like a good name to use again.
but his mother said in reply,
“No. He will be called John.”
The people preferred a name with which they were familiar, the meaning of which they understood. Perhaps they by it they intended to honor the fact that God would continue to be faithful before as he had been in the past. He would continue to remember. But the name conveyed by the angel Gabriel indicated that God was going to be limited by anything he had previously done. He was doing something new and wonderful, indicated by the name John, which means "the grace of God".
Zechariah was able to believe the message of the angel instead of simply acting based on habit, tradition, or precedent. He was able to speak his agreement with the new thing God was doing, and in so doing his own voice was freed.
Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed,
and he spoke blessing God.
The message of Zechariah's faith is a message for all of us. We believe that God remembers, and that he continues to be faithful to his promises. But we have a more difficult time when what he wants to bring to birth is a new grace for which we have no precedent, for which no past experience has prepared us. We need to learn to agree with God when he desires to bring new graces into the world because this is meant to be a normal part of our walk of faith. Walking in faith means being ready to trust God for the new and, to us, yet unknown things he is doing in the world. God is not limited by what he remembers doing so far in our lives. We should not let ourselves be limited by those memories either.
When we do agree with God, when we speak words of faith, we do not lose ourselves in the unknown. Paradoxically, we become more fully ourselves the more we walk in faith, because when we do we are becoming more fully what God desires us to be.
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (see John 1:17). This is the grace to which John's entire life was a pointer. It was grace for which the world hungered, for which it in fact still hungers. We ourselves have not yet had our fill of the desire that is within all of us for that grace. But by faith we can help one another to see it. We can help one another to prepare for it. We can in fact have our hearts made ready to welcome our King this Christmas.
Lo, I will send you
Elijah, the prophet,
Before the day of the LORD comes,
the great and terrible day,
To turn the hearts of the fathers to their children,
and the hearts of the children to their fathers
John's very name was already accomplishing this turning of hearts to one another before he was even born. Speaking the word of God's grace can accomplish it for us and in our own time as well.
Lift up your heads and see; your redemption is near at hand.
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