When they came on the eighth day to circumcise the child,
they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,
but his mother said in reply,
“No. He will be called John.”
The neighbors and relatives wanted the child to be born into a world of the familiar. But God had gone to great lengths to ensure that he was born into an environment of faith. Faith often requires a break from the familiar, as it did for Zechariah, who received an angelic messenger and was asked to take him at his word. It often requires a temporary privation so that we can receive something better in the long run, as it did for Elizabeth, who was thought to be barren but then was miraculously able to conceive in old age.
Zechariah hadn't responded to the angel with a full maturity of faith immediately. But God was patient, since he not desire for this child to be raised in an environment in which he would only hear the same old things that had been said so many times before. God desired an environment in which the parents knew how to listen to him, so that they could guide the child to do the same. He wanted them to know how trust in his plan rather than their own so that they could raise a child trained to seek out the plan himself.
He asked for a tablet and wrote, “John is his name,”
and all were amazed.
John had an unprecedented birth and was given an unprecedented name. This was all to ensure that his career too would be without precedent. He would be called to do what no one had ever been asked to do in his mission to prepare the way for the messiah. The way he dressed, ate, lived, and enacted his mission was unique. He had a powerful prophetic voice and radical obedience that made it evident that he was following in the footsteps of Elijah and walking in his spirit and power. He was not afraid to preach his message of repentance to all, no matter their status. Such was his greatness that he might have been someone who would succumb to pride and become infatuated with his own self-image. And yet and continued to walk in humility before God. He never forgot that he was simply a voice crying out in preparation, ready to fade into the background when Jesus appeared.
All who heard these things took them to heart, saying,
“What, then, will this child be?”
For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.
God has a history of doing great things when it is least expected. He is the most free to work when people trust in his promise more than the comforting familiarity of daily life. He called past generations out from lands they knew to sojourn as strangers, but only so that he could give them something better than what they had left behind. He called many to hope in his word when it seemed that all earthly grounds for hope were lost, and in return gave them more than they asked or imagined.
John was the result of a family who learned to trust in the promises of God. And he in turned lived a life defined by helping others learn to do the same. After all, being ready to receive the messiah meant being prepared for something new that God was doing, the final fulfillment of his promise to those who would put their faith in him. What was going to come about was by no means the result of circumstances taking the course. It was God's intervention for the salvation of the world. It was the dawn from on high breaking through in a new and definitive way.
I will make you a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.
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