Reflection on Luke 1:68-79

 

Luke 1:68-79

68 Blessed are you, Lord, the God of Israel, 

you have come to your people and set them free.  

69 You have raised up for us a mighty Savior, 

born of the house of your servant David.  

70 Through your holy prophets, you promised of old to save us from our enemies, 

71 from the hands of all who hate us,  

72 to show mercy to our forebears, 

and to remember your holy covenant.  

73 This was the oath you swore to our father Abraham: 

74 to set us free from the hands of our enemies,  

free to worship you without fear,

75 holy and righteous before you, all the days of our life.  

76 And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, 

for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way,  

77 to give God’s people knowledge of salvation

by the forgiveness of their sins.  

78 In the tender compassion of our God

the dawn from on high shall break upon us,  

79 to shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death, 

and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

 

Reflection

He stood at the door as snow lightly touched down around him, wondering if he should knock.  He could turn back.  He could go back to his old ways of life.  He could return to the confused days of drunken nights of ecstasy and blurry days of confusion as he drifted from job to job. 

That is no way to live, of course.  He looks at his thin hands which had been starved of proper nutrition through those years.  Look at what he had become, a mere shadow of himself; a mere glimpse of who he could have been.  All of those years wasted.  “All those years,” as if it had all happened a long time ago, as if it had been longer than just last week when he made up his mind to make his prodigal return to his parents. 

One of his buddies told him to try.  He told him to try going back to his parents to get a new start.  It is what he did anyway.  When he did so, his parents welcomed him back with forgiving hugs.  That welcome was not the end of his problems, but it was a start on the way toward the end.  The friend was his own personal John the Baptist, preparing the way for salvation, preparing him to be free from his past by sharing this promise of forgiveness.

As he reviewed all that his buddy had said, the song of Zechariah echoed through the snow filled heavens.

“And you, child (meaning John), shall be called the prophet of the Most High, 

for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way,  

to give God’s people knowledge of salvation

by the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:76-77). 

But that is the thing; would his own parents do the same?  Would they embrace him and forgive him?  He had disappointed them in so many ways.  He can still hear his dad’s voice shouting, “Out!  Get out of here!”

But, how else would he move forward?  How else would he finally be free of his past and find salvation? 

His dad’s shout, his family ousting, was two year ago.  Time heals.  God heals.  And, God continually promises to set us free.  He needed to be free.  He needed to be healed.  He needed God’s promises to be true tonight in a very real way because if they were not true tonight he did not know what else he would do.

The song of Zechariah continued to swirl with the falling snow, snippets of promise and hope jumbled up in the wind:

“…You swore to our father Abraham: 

to set us free from the hands of our enemies” (Luke 1:73).

These words swirled one way.

“Blessed are you, Lord, the God of Israel, 

you have come to your people and set them free” (Luke 1:68).

These words swirled another.

“In the tender compassion of our God

the dawn from on high shall break upon us” (Luke 1:78)

The promise landed on the back of his thin hand like snow as he considered the knock.  “The dawn from on high shall break upon us.”  “Shall” is a powerful word.  “Shall” means that it will happen.  “Shall” means that forgiveness is his and he will finally have a way forward.  “Shall” says this is certain to happen.  But, will it?  Will God’s compassion find him through the loving eyes and arms of his parents?  Or will those eyes and arms be cold and distant?

There was only one way to know.  He would have to knock.  “Knock and the door will be opened for you,” he once heard in Sunday School (Matthew 7:7).  He guessed that it was time to find out if the light of compassion could fall across someone like him; someone who knows the reality of darkness and death all too well.

He knocked.  The door opened.  And, his feet were guided, more like yanked, over the threshold of the door “into the way of peace;” so powerful was the hug from his dad (Luke 1:79). 

I guess you could say that God remembered the covenant of mercy (Luke 1:72).  It is the very mercy that we are promised in the hands and feet of Jesus Christ our Lord, for whom we await, hand ready to knock at the door.