The Glory of God in the Face of Christ: Zecharaiah
An advent meditation
The audio version of the essay remains on hiatus this week. This week Dr. Horner continues his series of Advent meditations.
Okay, I promise. No more Nietzsche in my Advent meditations. No more Zarathustra.
Second, while these meditations will appear during the period of Advent, they will not be Advent meditations—narrowly defined. They will not focus strictly on anticipating Christ’s birth but on the birth itself. They will be, quite simply, Christmas meditations.
And if I may be allowed a further introductory word, I would like to encourage all of my readers to assume this broader approach to Advent that allows us to enjoy the full wealth of music that Christmas affords (and not just carols that anticipate the birth of Christ). There is no event in all of human history that has yielded a greater harvest of wonderful music than the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and I would love for all those who celebrate his birth to delight in that rich harvest. As Milton notes, “this is the month.” May we spend every day of it in song.
Thank you for your indulgence; and with that, I will begin.
Several years ago, a phrase from the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians jumped off the page and opened up a wonderfully rich way of reading the gospels. In chapter four, verse six, the Apostle observes that “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ is the one who has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” The Creator God, who created light in the beginning, now enlightens our hearts by giving us knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
I would like to suggest that this verse offers an excellent window through which to view the Gospels. It suggests that those who walked with Jesus gained knowledge of the glory of God as they looked into his face; and through their witness, we who have come along much later can do the same. Though we were not present 2,000 years ago, we can come to know Jesus through the eyes of those who were present with him, and in this way, we too can look into the face of Christ and gain knowledge of the glory of God.
As one begins to reflect on the idea of the glory of God in the face of Christ, moments such as the transfiguration of Jesus will probably come readily to mind, and yet, Jesus did not reveal his Father’s glory so much through visually spectacular moments such as the transfiguration as he did through day-to-day demonstrations of the character of God. I am convinced that it was in the more mundane experiences of Christ that his followers best gained the knowledge of the glory of God as they beheld the very person of God in the face of Christ. I think the disciples saw it this way themselves. I find it striking, for instance, that after recording the miracle of turning water into wine, the Apostle John observes that Jesus “thus revealed his glory and his disciples put their faith in him” (John 2.11).
My premise for these meditations, then, is that one of the moments when Jesus most fully revealed the glory of God was when Mary gave birth to him and laid him in a feed trough. Those who looked into the face of her little baby saw “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”
On that premise, then, I would like to ask a few simple questions. First: What did people see when they looked into that little face? Here, the answer is pretty simple and straightforward. All the onlookers, whether in heaven or on earth, saw the same thing: a newborn, Jewish, baby boy, wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a feed trough. The questions that demand a bit more thought, however, are: What did each witness understand about this little boy? And: What did each one struggle to understand?
I encourage you to reflect on the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke in the coming weeks and ponder these questions for yourself. Who looked into the face of the child? What did they understand? What did they struggle to understand?
But allow me to prime the pump for your meditations by looking at one curious example of someone who encountered Jesus and saw in him the revelation of the glory of God. Strictly speaking, as far as we know, this person did not actually look into the face of Jesus, and yet he encountered Jesus and responded to him. I speak of the priest Zechariah and of his encounter with Jesus while Jesus was still in his mother’s womb.
Luke, who gives us the fullest account of the birth of Jesus, embeds that birth in the story of the birth of John the Baptist to Elizabeth and Zechariah. Luke’s gospel begins by introducing this godly, elderly couple and telling the story of the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah in the Temple. As you may recall, because of his unbelief, Zechariah was struck dumb until the birth of his son; but at that birth, the faithful Zechariah regained his speech, and to everyone’s surprise, he declared that his son’s name would be John.
When we ask the question: What did Zechariah see? The answer is a bit different from what the other characters in the birth narratives saw. Zechariah saw a young girl, a relative from Nazareth, who was pregnant with her first child. She wasn’t showing much, but by the end of the first trimester, which she spent with Zechariah and Elizabeth, it was clear that a child was growing in her womb.
When we come to the questions about what Zechariah understood and struggled to understand, we have to do some work. We can probably assume that his wife told him that their own son had jumped in her womb when the pregnant Mary walked through the door (Luke 1.39-45). We can also assume that Zechariah shared his wife’s view of Mary as “the Mother of my Lord,” but once Zechariah’s speech returned, we need no longer assume. He shares his understanding of Jesus in his own words in the prayer that he offered at the time of his own son’s birth.
In Luke 1.67 Luke records that after the birth of his son, “Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:”
68 “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come to his people and redeemed them.
69 He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
70 (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
71 salvation from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us—
72 to show mercy to our ancestors
and to remember his holy covenant,
73 the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
74 to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
and to enable us to serve him without fear
75 in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”
Does it strike you that there is something amiss in this prayer?
Zechariah’s wife has just been blessed with a child in her old age, and now Zechariah rightly offers a prayer of praise to God. His prayer, however, is not about his own son. It is about someone else. Zechariah is a priest of the tribe of Levi, of the house of Aaron, but here he is praising God for a child born of the house of David, a horn of salvation through whom the Lord, God of Israel, would redeem his people. Zechariah is speaking not of his own son but of the son that would be born to his relative, Mary, a child through whom the Lord would fulfill his promise to King David and his covenant with Abraham.
Finally, Zechariah speaks of his own son.
76 And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
77 to give his people the knowledge of salvation
through the forgiveness of their sins,
78 because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
79 to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
John would be the prophet who would go before the Lord to prepare the way for him. He would be a light that would shine in the darkness. He would point to a salvation accomplished through the forgiveness of our sins, rooted in the tender mercy of our God, and opening into the path of peace.
In his own unique way, then, Zechariah gained the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ. He “saw” the baby Jesus and knew who he was. The baby born to Mary would be the Lord himself, for whom Zechariah’s son would prepare the way. The son of Mary would be that horn of salvation through whom the Lord, the God of Israel, would redeem his people. He would be the fulfilment of God’s promise of a King in the lineage of David, whose kingdom would never end. He would be the fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham through whom both Abraham’s descendants and all the nations of the world would be blessed. He would be a light that shines even to our own day on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, a light that still guides our feet into the path of peace.
Dr. Richard Horner
Executive Director
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Recommended Reading
— Hans Boersma on advent and our longing for home:
Both the psalmist and the prophet urge the exiles to look for more than simply a return to the physical plot of land from which they have been banished. If the saying is true—“the home is where the heart is”—then Jesus himself is our true home. We are home when Jesus shows his face to us. We are home when Jesus makes his home with us at Christmastime.