Luke 1:39-45 - Blessed are you

1:39-41

Mary went to see Zechariah and Elizabeth. An incidental point to note here is the emphasis that Luke places on the role of women in all that happened. When Mary arrived at their house she greeted Elizabeth, and the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leapt. The immediate point of importance here is that the baby recognised Jesus. Back in v15 the angel had said that he would be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he was born.

The second point is that this has profound implications for our understanding of life. A child in the womb is still a child, is still God’s creation. Our society’s thinking on abortion and related matters is completely wrong. We worry about Islamic terrorism, and justifiably so, but our secular societies in the west are responsible for many more deaths than Islamic terrorism has caused. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

1:42

The previous verse finished by saying that Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, the significance of this is that what she said next was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth declares that Mary is blessed, and that the child she was carrying was blessed. Now we need to understand what blessed means. It most certainly does not mean a trouble free life, for Jesus’ life was definitely not trouble free. If we are blessed it means that we are part of God’s plans, He is working in us and through us to bring His plans about, and to bring blessing to others. This may well mean “good things” for us as well, may be in the short term, definitely in eternity, but we sometimes have a very superficial view of what it means to be blessed.

1:43-45

Elizabeth recognised that the child Mary was carrying was special, indeed was the Lord. It was the Holy Spirit who revealed this to Mary. Elizabeth considered herself favoured to be meeting the “mother of the Lord”. We should always rejoice when someone else is blessed. Elizabeth knew that Mary had believed the promises of the Lord, the words the angel had spoken to her. This may have been direct revelation from the Holy Spirit, or it may be that they had been talking to each other about their experiences and the Holy Spirit had enabled her to appreciate the full significance of it all. The text would seem to imply the former, but these accounts are condensed.