Commemoration: 5 September
On 5 September the Church commemorates Zachariah and Elizabeth, the parents of Saint John the Baptist. Zachariah was a priest at the Temple in Jerusalem. Elizabeth, his wife, was also of the priestly line of Aaron. They both reached old age without children, and the son who was given to them in the end did not remain with them for long.
A Righteous Couple Without Children
Saint Luke begins his narrative with them. Before the Annunciation and before Bethlehem, the first chapter opens in a priest’s house in the hill country of Judea, in the days of Herod.
Zachariah served in the division of Abijah. The priests of the Old Law were divided into twenty-four divisions, which came to the Temple in turn, a week at a time, twice a year; the division of Abijah was the eighth of them (1 Chronicles 24:10). Elizabeth was of the daughters of Aaron, that is, of the same priestly line. Both came from a family in which service at the altar passed from father to son.
Saint Luke the Evangelist writes of them that “they were both righteous before God”, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord (Luke 1:6). And immediately afterwards he adds that “Elizabeth was barren, and they were both well advanced in years” (Luke 1:7).
The Evangelist sets the two side by side without drawing any connection between them. He does not trace their barrenness to any fault, and he does not explain it. Their righteousness had brought them nothing of what they had asked for.
The Burden They Carried
They carried, for a whole lifetime, their childlessness and the reproach that came with it.
In Israel a family without descendants was regarded as one on which the blessing did not rest. A barren woman bore a shame that everyone could see. Elizabeth herself speaks of this after she conceives, saying that the Lord had taken away her reproach among men (Luke 1:25). Her words show what had weighed on her: not only the grief within the house, but the eyes of others upon her.
Something heavier than the reproach came upon them as well. When the angel appeared to Zachariah in the Temple, the first word he spoke to him was this: “your prayer is heard” (Luke 1:13). That petition cannot have been a new one. Zachariah and Elizabeth had reached old age without children, and the angel’s words come as an answer to a prayer held for a long time. How long they had prayed in this way, the Gospel does not say.
Here the measure of their patience can be seen. They kept the commandments without seeing their prayer fulfilled. Zachariah served at the altar and returned, course after course, to a house where no child was waiting for him. They did not abandon their service, and they did not demand an accounting.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, in his homily on the Nativity of Christ, shows why so long a delay was permitted. So that men should not think the birth from a Virgin incredible, he says, the grace of God prepared the way by a lesser wonder: a child born of a barren woman advanced in years. Elizabeth too gave birth not by the power of nature, but by the will of God. Whoever receives the lesser wonder comes to the greater one with an open heart.
Those years of waiting, then, were not wasted time. Through Elizabeth’s barrenness it was first shown to the world that God can open a closed womb, and the sign that would come six months later was received by men precisely because they had seen the first one.
The Hour of Incense
The announcement did not come to Zachariah at home, but in the most solemn hour of his service.
The offering of incense, performed within the Temple, was assigned by lot. According to the rule recorded in the Mishnah, the collection of rabbinic tradition edited in its classical form around the year 200, those called to the lot for the incense were the priests who had not yet performed this service (Tamid 5:2). The priests were many, and this turn came to a man once in his life, if it came at all.
In that hour a single priest went in to place incense on the golden altar, while all the people prayed outside in the court until he came out (Luke 1:8-10). It was the moment when the prayer of all Israel passed through the hands of one man.
Then the angel appeared to him, standing at the right of the altar of incense. And what was announced to him concerned a child who would go before the Lord “in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17).
The service of the Temple still went on according to its order: the sacrifices were offered, the incense rose, the lots were cast. Within that service, on one of its ordinary days, there was announced the birth of the one who would point to the Lamb of God. The priesthood of the Old Law received its last tidings in the place and at the hour of its own work.
Zachariah did not believe at once, and he remained mute until the day the child was born. His silence and the song by which his tongue was loosed were treated at length at the commemoration of the Nativity of Saint John.
The First Confession of the Theotokos
Elizabeth’s part in the history of salvation is not confined to her giving birth.
Shortly after the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary went in haste to the hill country and entered the house of Zachariah. When Elizabeth heard the Virgin’s greeting, the babe leaped in her womb, and she was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out with a loud voice: “Blessed are you among women” (Luke 1:42).
The angel had announced to Mary that her Son would be called the Son of the Highest and the Son of God (Luke 1:32, 35). It is Elizabeth, however, who is the first in the Gospel to say with a human voice, “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43). She said it in her own house, while both children were still unborn. An old woman, who until six months before had been counted barren, was the first to utter the truth that the Church confesses about the Theotokos.
Her words were not lost. The prayer “O Theotokos and Virgin, rejoice”, which has entered deep into the worship of the Church, joins to this day the greeting of the angel with the blessing spoken by Elizabeth.
The Gospel says that Elizabeth was Mary’s kinswoman (Luke 1:36), without showing in what way. The Tradition of the Church holds that she was the sister of Saint Anna, the mother of the Theotokos, and so the Virgin’s aunt. This is not written in Scripture but comes from Tradition, and it should be stated as such.
The Slaying of Zachariah
About the end of Zachariah the Gospel according to Luke says nothing. Saint Luke stops at the child who grew and became strong in spirit and who remained in the deserts “till the day of his manifestation to Israel” (Luke 1:80). What happened in the meantime to his father and his mother we are not told.
What is known beyond this comes by two paths: from a word of the Lord, read in a certain way by some of the interpreters, and from a tradition which the Church received and set in the hymnography of the day.
Rebuking the scribes, Christ speaks of the blood of Zachariah, son of Barachiah, killed “between the temple and the altar” (Matthew 23:35; and, without the father’s name, at Luke 11:51).
Saint Gregory of Nyssa reads this word as spoken of the Forerunner’s father, and he also gives the reason for the killing. After the Virgin had given birth, Zachariah continued to reckon her a virgin and left her to stand in the place reserved for virgins in the Temple; and that place was precisely the space between the temple and the altar. He was killed because he had confessed by his deed what the minds around him would not receive: that the Mother of the Lord remained a virgin after giving birth.
Alongside this stands a second reason, preserved in the Synaxarion and attested early in the Protoevangelium of James. It is a writing of the second century, outside the canon of Scripture, in which other traditions received into the life of the Church are also recorded, among them the names of Saints Joachim and Anna. According to it, when Herod ordered the killing of the infants, Elizabeth fled with John into the hills. The soldiers came to the Temple and demanded that Zachariah tell them where the child was. He did not tell them, and he was killed there.
The Old Testament, however, records another Zachariah, the son of Jehoiada, stoned in the court of the house of the Lord by order of King Joash (2 Chronicles 24:20-22). Some interpreters have connected the Lord’s word with him, precisely because of the likeness of the place. The father’s name does not fit: Matthew writes “son of Barachiah”, not son of Jehoiada.
On one thing the liturgical tradition of the Church is clear: Zachariah, the father of the Forerunner, died slain in the Temple. The troparion of the day, in the fourth tone, says to the priest that in God’s temple he “was slain with the sword”. This is sung in church. His identification with the Zachariah named by the Lord in Matthew 23:35 was received by a considerable part of the patristic tradition. Origen, an ecclesiastical writer, knows it, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa makes use of it. But not all interpreters accepted it: Saint Jerome knows it as well, yet does not consider it proven from Scripture, and he takes into account Zachariah the son of Jehoiada.
Two things, then, should be distinguished. The martyrdom of Zachariah in the Temple belongs to the liturgical tradition received by the Church and is confessed in the hymnography of the day. His identification with the Zachariah of the word at Matthew 23:35 remains a matter of interpretation, on which the Fathers did not speak with one voice.
The Repose of Elizabeth
The Synaxarion goes on to say that forty days after the killing of Zachariah, Elizabeth reposed in the cave where she had hidden with the child, and John was kept in the wilderness until the day of his manifestation to Israel.
It was not given her to see him grown. She carried him in her womb in old age, bore him to the joy of her neighbours and kinsfolk, took him out of the path of the sword, and died beside him, in a cave, far from the priestly house in the hills of Judea. The child she had asked for all her life was left alone in the wilderness.
Their Commemoration
Zachariah and Elizabeth are not commemorated merely because they had a great son. They are commemorated for the way they stood before God both before and after the son was given to them.
For a long time they asked for one thing and it was not given. During that time they kept the commandments, with no visible reward. When at last it was given, it was not given for them to keep: she took him into the wilderness and died there, and he, according to the tradition preserved in the Synaxarion, died without telling his killers where the child was. What they had waited for all their lives they were called to entrust to God again after very little time.
This day concerns all who have prayed a long time for something that does not come. Two righteous people passed through a like silence and did not come out of it embittered. And when God answered them, the answer was greater than the request: out of a womb counted barren came the voice that would show Christ to the world.
Holy Prophet Zachariah and Righteous Elizabeth, pray to God for us.