Nine months earlier, Gabriel told Zechariah he would stay silent until the promise came true (Luke 1:20). Now the day has come. At the child's circumcision on the eighth day, the neighbors expect the family name Zechariah. Elizabeth cuts across them: 60"No; he shall be called John." When they turn to the mute father, he writes on a tablet, 63"His name is John." At once his mouth is opened, and he speaks, blessing God. The priest who once asked for proof cannot stop praising. Fear comes over the neighbors, and word spreads through the hill country, and everyone who hears it asks, 66"What then will this child be?" Zechariah's song is the answer.
Zechariah's song begins with God. 68"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us." A priest's long-awaited miracle becomes, in his own mouth, praise for a rescue far larger than his household, one that comes through the house of David. Only at verse 76 does he turn to John: 76"you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways."
Two phrases in the song answer each other. Zechariah opens with God who 68"has visited" his people, and he closes with the sunrise that 78"shall visit us from on high." It is the same verb, stretched across an already and a not yet. God has visited, and God is still coming.
The last lines turn from covenant language to poetry. The sunrise comes 79"to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." Malachi closed his book with a similar image, the sun of righteousness rising with healing in its wings (Malachi 4:2). Zechariah, standing where Israel's long prophetic silence is finally breaking, reaches for the same dawn.
It fits that the man who spent nine months unable to speak chooses, the moment his voice returns, to describe God's mercy as light over people in the dark. He knows what it is to wait in silence for a promise to break open. Nine months with no words to say had time to do their work in him, and the song shows it.
The chapter ends quietly. 80"The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel." A boy promised in a temple full of incense and praised in a prophecy full of covenant history spends the years before his ministry the way any child does, growing, mostly unseen. Even the forerunner waited for his sunrise, and the waiting was part of the work.
If you are in a silent season, with nothing left to say to God, notice what Zechariah's nine months produced. What came out at the end was praise, and it was about light.
Prayer
Father, thank you for visiting your people again and again. Thank you for a silence that becomes praise, and for a tender mercy that sends a sunrise into our own darkness. Guide our feet into the way of peace, and give us Zechariah's instinct, to spend our first restored words on you. In Jesus' name, amen.