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Zechariah and the Redemptive Potential of Silence

This Advent our church chose to focus on the theme of silence, specifically the spaces when God seems silent or inactive. It was good to be reminded that at some points between the pages that describe God’s redemptive work in the world there are some big gaps – generations of enslavement, decades of exile, centuries between the close of the Old Testament and the coming of the Messiah. Many Bible readers might benefit from a page inserted at the end of Malachi (or even Genesis) that just says:

[Centuries passed – God seemed gone]

Even as we move into the New Testament we encounter one of the most unique examples of silence in the scriptures – the period when Zechariah is made mute (and possibly also deaf) between his encounter with Gabriel in the temple and his son John’s presentation at the temple in Luke 1. While much of Zechariah’s experience is unique, it has been helpful to me in reflecting on my own experience of silence in relation to God.  

First, in the context provided by Luke, it is clear that Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth are no strangers to silence and waiting. They have already spent all their childbearing years praying and waiting for a child with no answer. They have almost certainly perceived God’s silence as his absence in a way that many of us can relate to. If not in waiting for a child, then perhaps for a spouse or freedom from an addiction that has plagued us for years. Like Zechariah and Elizabeth, we have prayed and prayed, only to be left with that embarrassed and frustrated feeling you get when you realize that your call got dropped and you don’t know how long you’ve been talking into a phone with no one listening on the other end.  

Endure this kind of silence for long enough and eventually you are likely to feel it less as God’s absence and more as punishment. Surely some, perhaps even Zechariah and Elizabeth themselves, wondered if this was why they were childless. Both from priestly families, what had they possibly done to prevent God from answering or even hearing their prayer? 

But that all predates the events described in Luke 1. When Gabriel appears to Zechariah with the good news that their prayer has been answered, Zechariah responds with an understandable question – how will they have a child in their old age?  The question puts Zechariah in good company: Abraham and Mary ask similar questions when the births of their sons are foretold. Abraham and Mary have their questions answered, but Zechariah has his voice taken away. Some commentators suggest the cause of Zechariah’s muteness (and possible deafness)  may be more complex than an outright punishment for faithlessness. Whatever the case, there is little doubt that Zechariah experienced some of the following months as a punishment.  

Can you imagine more than 9 months of silence? It seems like a perfect scenario for bitterness and depression to set in: Zechariah, living with his aged but now pregnant wife, and her pregnant cousin Mary, unable to verbally process any of what is happening. However genuinely grateful he was to finally have a son on the way, if you don’t know the rest of the story already, it would be hard to predict just what Zechariah will have to say when he regains his voice, after all those years of unanswered prayers followed by months of silence. 

By God’s grace I have been part of his body, the church, my entire life. But it wasn’t until the early years of my pastoral ministry that I came to see the value of observing Advent before celebrating Christmas. And even then the distinction between the two was fairly abstract for me until four years ago. 

That’s when I spent every day of Advent in 2018 in a hospital NICU, sitting with a son who had been born in November even though his due date wasn’t until February. In the weeks before he was born, aware that my wife was at high risk for preterm labor, we prayed for a full-term delivery unlike we had ever prayed for anything before. But he came at 27 weeks and then we began to pray for God’s mercy, that we might avoid the many complications that can come with such an early birth. But in the first week of December his doctors informed us that he had bleeding that had caused the ventricles in his brain to begin to swell. He had one surgery that we prayed would resolve this issue, but as Christmas neared and then passed it became clear that he would need at least one more surgery, and maybe many more. Doctors prepared us that he could have permanent brain damage affecting language and mobility.  

At a few points that Advent God’s silence felt like his absence. But most of the time it felt like the cruelest punishment I could have imagined for my family. I vividly remember wishing I could believe that some things were actually outside of God’s control, because then I could still cling to his goodness. But if I was convinced of his absolute sovereignty (and I still was), then that really complicated things, relationally speaking. Looking forward, into the possibility of neurological damage with long-term consequences, I not only worried for my son and my family, but also for how I might respond if God’s silence felt like punishment for much longer.

Back to Zechariah, when John is born and taken to the temple, we see how Zechariah has experienced these months of silence. He seems to have experienced them as a transforming grace. He is captivated with what God is doing in their midst - not just God’s provision for his family, but God’s faithfulness to his covenant people.  

Even before he can speak again, everyone is amazed by the chosen name for his son: John, meaning “the LORD has been gracious.” 

Then Zechariah’s voice is restored and he bursts with prophecy about the Lord’s redemption of his people, his faithfulness to his covenant, and perhaps most surprising, their proper response: “that we, being delivered from the hands of our enemies, might serve [God] without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:74-75). 

Of all the things Zechariah could have said to exhort the faithful remnant of Israel that he and Elizabeth represent in this account, it is almost laughable that he implores them to serve God “without fear.” The man who faithfully served in the temple for years as his prayer for a child went unanswered, who later saw an angel (a universally terrifying experience), and had his voice taken away for asking a clarifying question, wants anyone who will listen to know that his faithful God can be served “without fear.” 

Personally, it took me a bit longer than Zechariah to be reoriented to the goodness of God. Or for my perception of his goodness to be less about my immediate experience and more about his unchangeable faithfulness and mercy. By God’s grace, my son’s second surgery successfully resolved the swelling in his brain and within several months his neurosurgeon was very hopeful that he would experience little or no long-term effect from the swelling and surgeries. But God continued to feel distant and silent for some time. 

For the last three years it has been much easier to lean into the themes of Advent – waiting, longing, even in darkness and silence. As the hustle and bustle of commercial Christmas takes over my phone still shares daily picture “memories” with me of a tiny baby on a ventilator. And though I am thankful to be another year removed from that experience, I long for the pain of it to be fully redeemed. As my kids sing in the church Christmas program about Jesus’ first coming I long for his second coming in a different way than I did before. For the day when Christ’s completed work will ensure that all the pain from our waiting will be redeemed, when there will be no more silence in his presence, no more fear of God’s absence or punishment, when we will finally be fully enabled to serve him “without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all of our days.” 

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Becoming Whole

“When I get out of prison, I’m gonna….”

I heard a sentence start like that at a Backyard Bible Club of all places. Even more startling than the setting, it came from the mouth of a boy no older than 10. 

The church I was part of at the time ran Backyard Bible Clubs every summer in city parks throughout the urban neighborhood where we lived and worshipped. This particular night, as we were playing with the kids, someone asked the classic question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The first few answers shouted back contained no surprises given the ages of the kids. But when one kid’s answer started with “When I get out of prison, I’m gonna…” one woman in the group laughed, in a baffled kind of way. She asked, “Why would you go to prison?!” And he looked back at her equally confused. 

One of the leaders quickly diverted the conversation, but wisely revisited it with us later, knowing it had surely made an impression on each person, whether that impression was confusion, sadness, or something else. He clarified what some had already realized: it was likely that every adult male this little boy knew had been to prison at some point in their teenage or early adult years. It wasn’t that he wanted to go to prison. Based on his experience of the world, he didn’t realize it was avoidable. 

The authors of Becoming Whole identify four primary influences in the process of individual and cultural formation: individual persons, formative practices, environmental and social systems, and a story of change. The story of change is “the community’s understanding, which may be explicit or implicit, of the goal of life and how that goal can be achieved.”

In the case of this little boy, that story involved overcoming the initial setback of prison to achieve some level of success in life. 

The night I heard a boy share his dreams by starting with the phrase “when I get out of prison…” it dawned on me that I did not personally know a single person who had ever been to prison. It was a stark reminder of the vast disparity between my life experience and that of this boy and many of my neighbors. But at the time I still lacked the ability to examine the stories of change I grew up with, to examine whether or not they also may have malformed me and my peers in some way. 

The subtitle of Becoming Whole is Why the Opposite of Poverty Isn’t the American Dream. As I read the authors’ analysis of the prevailing stories of change in modern America, it helped me to better understand the stories that shaped me. While I remain thankful that I never saw prison as an unavoidable chapter of my life, my surroundings did not create perfect virtue either. The highly competitive academic environments where I received schooling formed many students who were as adept at cheating as they were math or foreign languages. By college, most of my peers didn’t question the narrative that success was defined by one thing: the accumulation of material wealth for the sake of personal enjoyment. 

The book also made me think historically about the stories that have shaped human experience. Perhaps the most obvious example across time and culture is the way the value of women has been minimized to their child-bearing capability. 

The authors of Becoming Whole define personal wholeness in four dimensions of relationship: a person’s relationship to 1) God, 2) him/herself, 3) other people, and 4) creation. Taking all these dimensions into account, we will almost always find them lacking in some way as we examine stories of change. It would be worthwhile for each of us to examine the story of change that drives our own lives, as well as the stories of those around us that may shape us more than we realize. But even as we engage cross-culturally, with people whose backgrounds and stories of change may be totally different than our own, the framework offered in Becoming Whole is incredibly helpful because it gives us a point of comparison beyond our own experience. 

As we begin our time together studying this helpful book, I look forward to hearing others process their own stories of change and how they may have formed us in ways for which we can be thankful, and also in ways for which we can repent.