Chapter 2
The One Who Doubted
Luke begins his story before Jesus is even born. In fact, Luke starts with the promised birth of a different baby. Chapter one introduces two characters: Zechariah (who was a priest in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem) and his wife Elizabeth (Luke 1:5–7). We immediately learn a few things about the couple. First, they’re good people. Luke says they are “righteous in the sight of God” and did everything blamelessly. But despite being good people, they have a problem: they have no children. And, on top of not being able to have kids, they’re old. So a solution to their childlessness seems well beyond reach.
In just a few sentences, Luke sets up some drama. An elderly couple who wants to have kids but can’t is a theme that pops up throughout the Bible. The most famous of couples is Abraham himself and his wife, Sarah. Just like Zechariah and Elizabeth, they wanted children but couldn’t have any, and age had become an impenetrable barrier to that goal. Luke wants his readers—or at least those of us familiar with the Old Testament stories—to sit up and pay attention. God has a habit of doing surprising things with couples who wanted children but couldn’t conceive them. And here we are with just such a couple. They are good, faithful people who have done everything “right”—even serving faithfully in the temple—but are missing out on an important part of their lives.
Adding spice to the story, Luke introduces some irony with the names of the couple. “Zechariah” is the name of an ancient prophet and means roughly “Yahweh will remember.” Yahweh is the ancient name of Israel’s God and the one he chose to mark his faithful commitment to the people. As if on purpose, Zechariah’s wife’s name—Elizabeth—means “My God makes an oath.” The ancient God who remembered his people had made an oath—a promise—to send a redeemer for them one day. By adding in the literary layer of the characters’ names, Luke sets us up to expect certain things from Zechariah and Elizabeth. Surely blameless people who serve their God faithfully and bear the hope of his promises in their very names will respond well to what’s about to happen. Surely.
With the background details firmly in place, Luke carries on with the story. While serving Israel’s God in the temple, it becomes Zechariah’s turn to offer incense. That incense acted as a physical representation of the people’s prayers (see Exodus 30:1–10; Revelation 5:8; 8:3–4), and makes what’s about to happen all the more interesting.
As Zechariah burns the incense, an angel appears right next to the altar. Naturally, it startles the elderly priest. The celestial messenger tells him not to be afraid and that his prayer has been heard. The messenger goes on to tell Zechariah that he and his aging wife will have a baby boy, and they should name him John—which comes from the Hebrew “Johanan,” meaning “Yahweh’s grace.” The promised baby boy is going to be a prophet like the ancient Elijah and succeed where Elijah failed: He will bring the people of Israel back to their God. Not only that, he will act as the herald of someone even greater. Who, exactly, the story won’t say just yet. But with that, the angel stops speaking.
We would expect Zechariah to respond with enthusiasm—after all, the thing he and his wife had prayed about for presumably years was just promised to him. Instead, he reacts with skepticism, asking how on earth he can know for sure something like that would happen given his and his wife’s age.
In Zechariah’s question, Luke alludes back to a different story much earlier in the pages of the Bible—the story of Abraham and Sarah and their promised son, Isaac. Both of them, when told of God’s intentions to give them a son in their old age, responded with skepticism (see Genesis 17:17–18; 18:10–15). Just like those parents–to–be all those centuries ago, Zechariah fully doubts the ability of his God to give him the answer to his prayer. The angel picks up on his doubt and chastises the aging priest. Because Zechariah refused to believe the words of God’s messenger, Zechariah will now not be able to speak his own words.
With that, the encounter ends. Zechariah leaves the temple unable to speak, but not long after his wife, Elizabeth, actually conceives. Just like the angel promised.
In this little vignette that Luke uses to open his version of the Jesus story, he sets up a kind of character that we’ll encounter throughout the book. Over and over again, it’s the people who are supposed to “get it” that don’t. Zechariah isn’t just from the right group of people—an Israelite—but he is also blameless and righteous by all standards. And yet, when presented with God’s plan, he immediately balks.
Zechariah shares a name with a prophet whose whole message was the restoration of Israel and the coming of God himself to rule in peace (see Zechariah 14:1–10). As a priest he should know the long–ago promises of God. He should know that his God not only could make old people fertile, but had done so before. He should get it. He should be the first to not only acknowledge the power of his God, but also celebrate the fulfillment of ancient promises in him and through his family. But Zechariah doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he identifies all the problems with the plan God laid out through the voice of Gabriel. His first instinct is to doubt rather than to trust.
That’s not an ancient problem. It’s still common today among the people who, for all intents and purposes, should be the first to “get it.” Those of us who have lived and moved in the church all our lives often tend to be the quickest to doubt the instructions of our God. We might have all of the right external symbols of being right: We go to the “correct” church in the “correct” denomination. We act in the right ways. We conduct ourselves well in public and even participate in the correct fashion in church work. Everyone looking at us from the outside would say, “Absolutely. If there’s someone who God will use for his purposes, it’ll be them.”
The day he met the angel, Zechariah woke up expecting a very normal day. Instead, God showed up and invited him to participate in something far greater than himself—to be a part of ancient promises coming to life. In that moment, Zechariah faced a choice: He could assume that life wouldn’t really change. That he’d go to sleep childless like he had for a thousand nights before. Or he could trust God’s words and allow his life to get swept up into the drama that was about to unfold both in his life and all around him.
Through his carefully crafted story, Luke puts the question to us, his readers. Will we allow the need to be the right kind of people who do the right kinds of things to keep us from seeing what God wants to do in and through us?
Will you be willing to allow your life to change—even a little bit—for the sake of something bigger than yourself?
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