Progressive reflections on the lectionary #46

Monday 2nd December 2024

Luke 1:68-79 - how to re-use old material

The second Advent gospel reading is this one from Luke’s story about the the birth of John the baptiser - the context is that like Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth also experience a ‘miracle birth’. Further, though, Zechariah is struck dumb for the nine months of the pregnancy and upon finding his voice again he sings the song often known as the Benedictus or ‘the canticle’ of Zechariah.

We are prompted by the evangelist to imagine that the song is of his own devising - I’m going to suggest that it is actually a repurposing of much older material.

It’s not unusual to suggest that the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke were the last parts of the gospels to be written, nor is it hard to notice their striking differences to the rest of the gospel accounts. That they are both ‘mythological’ in the sense of presenting the birth of Jesus as ‘the birth of a hero’ is a pretty straightforward claim to make.

What is less obvious, perhaps, is the role of the songs that come in Luke’s narrative: the Magnificat, and, for this week’s consideration: the Benedictus.

We might start with the more obvious - it seems that these were songs that were in use by the early church - and then given their own back story by being inserted into the narrative. This wasn’t necessary for the psalms, of course, because these had an origin point. The Magnificat, though, a re-write of Hannah’s song, may well have been developed in the ‘inter-testamental’ period - the Maccabean era, describing as it does, the Maccabean campaign. So what about the Benedictus?

The line in verse 69: “He has raised up a mighty saviour for us in the house of his child David…” is interesting here - we take it to refer, in this context, to Christ. But note the ‘mighty saviour’ phrase, an alternative translation is offered: ‘a horn of salvation’ - perhaps the language immediately puts you back in the apocalyptic world of ‘Daniel’ with his heavily coded phrasing referring to political manoeuvres of times past. It should.

The Jews, and so by extension the Christians, of the first century remained fixated on the exiles and the need for a deliverer (a Christ) to redeem them from their plight. According to their way of thinking this, after all, would usher in the expected ‘end of the world’. The Benedictus is a throwback to that time - which makes it, most likely, a much older hymn than it might first appear, a psalm that survived outside of the written tradition.

In the second line of the Benedictus is talk of redemption, but redemption from what? Babylonian Captivity. That being the case then the original horn of deliverance is actually Cyrus of Persia - the real but heavily mythologised (miracles again) emperor who repatriated the Babylonian captives. The spiritual is political, and the political is spiritual.

Who, after all, are the enemies in this song? And who are the people ‘who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’? The Babylonians are the archetypal enemies, and those who sit in darkness were the Jewish exiles.

Long story short: in retrofitting the nativity story to the front end of his gospel Luke also provides context for old hymns that were sung by early Christians. In the case of the Benedictus he situates it in the story of John’s miracle birth, but it actually comes from a time much further back - it refers, in its original form, not to events of the first century but to the plight of the Jews several centuries earlier when they were in captivity in Babylon. Of course these are then mapped on to more contemporary matters.

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Image: Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash