they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,
but his mother said in reply,
"No. He will be called John."
There are times when God does in a new thing in the lives of his followers. At such times it is insufficient to merely repeat litanies about how things are now as though there is nothing new under the sun. Yet in order to maintain our sense of control over our lives we try to understand the future in light of the past. There is a certain way in which this can be helpful if we realize that past prepares prophetically for the future. But we tend to assume the future can never really go beyond what we have already seen and known and that the way things are now is more or less how they will always be. Such attitudes impose limits on what we imagine God can do in the world. They make us cheapen our interpretation of prophecies as purely spiritual, unable to impact concrete history. Even when we suggest that perhaps, maybe, God is doing something new by his grace as Elizabeth suggested in giving her son the name John, there will probably be a chorus who responds by telling us we have no right to name a name that hasn't already been named. They tell us to constrain our expectations to be based only on what has already been clearly seen and known.
But they answered her,
"There is no one among your relatives who has this name."
So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called.
He asked for a tablet and wrote, "John is his name,"
and all were amazed.
Zechariah might have been persuaded to remain tethered to the past insofar as it honored him by giving him a child of his namesake. But he had been prepared by the message of Gabriel and by a period of silent reflection which helped him to realize that God was indeed doing something new and to welcome it.
When God does something new in the world it is not typically only out there and apart from us that he does so. He is usually looking to his people for cooperation. But the first step in cooperating with his plan is what Zechariah demonstrated in today's Gospel. We must be willing to acquiesce to the plan and in fact to speak in agreement with the plan. This is how Zechariah's tongue was freed. It is the difference between Christians who can only say the same old and dreary things that the secular world says and Christians who genuinely have something new and hopeful to contribute. The power of Christians to make a difference in the world comes with their being aligned to the plan of God. And this begins in choosing to think the way God would have us think and to express this thinking in what we say. The world is right to be excited about such language even as the people of Judea asked, "What, then, will this child be? For surely the hand of the Lord was with him".
We've celebrated a number of Christmases in our lives. Probably for some we weren't even focused on the possibility that God might want to begin something new, to be born in us in a new way. Then, perhaps in other years, after gaining some maturity as disciples, we have looked for this new reality but met with disappointment. Today we can remember that God is not limited by our past. To ourselves we speak the words of the psalm response: "Lift up your heads and see; your redemption is near at hand".
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