Joyful Mysteries: The Visitation

Hello and welcome to our Bible study on the joyful mysteries. My name is Dr. Ben Acres. I'm the executive director of Formed and joining me today is Dr. Mark Echech, who is a professor of scripture at the Augustan Institute Graduate School of Theology. Thanks for coming Mark. Hey it's great to be here. And we've been going through, we have a whole series on Formed of Bible studies of diving deeply into the scripture passages to help you meditate more fruitfully on this beautiful gift of the rosary. And so we're now in the second joyful mystery, the first joyful mystery is the enunciation where the angel Gabriel comes and announces God's plan revealed to Mary. And then now we're at the point of Mary gets up and goes and visit someone. Yeah. Yeah so maybe the place to begin is to just think about Mary's journey, right? That she's going, it seems by herself, you know, but probably with a caravan of other travelers, about 90 miles on foot from Nazareth to Einkarum, which is where Elizabeth and Zachariah live. And whenever I think about this passage, I'm immediately transported back to the Holy Land because this site where Zachariah and Elizabeth's house is in the Holy Land has become a holy site, right? And it's got this big beautiful church on it. You can go pay a visit when you go to the Holy Land. It's a whole family like going up the hill. You do have to walk up a bit of a hill and this place, Einkarum, which means something like spring and vineyard is just a wonderful and beautiful place. And it has various, you know, little pieces of the Holy site, you know, leftover from the first century. And then it has the magnificat in many different languages on the wall, kind of inscribed on the wall. So the prayer that Mary is going to say is exactly. And then if you go inside the church itself, it has artwork of all of the female heroines of the Old Testament. So like Deborah and Jail and others. And it's just a really beautiful, prayerful place. So anyway, whenever I think about this mystery, I'm always just drawn back to that place at Einkarum. And that, you know, of course, I hope I get to visit again. Do you lead pilgrimage to the Holy Land? Well, yes. So before COVID, right? Yes. I got to lead one in 2019 and hopefully there will be many more in the future, you know. The Augustus, we have a pilgrimage. If you want to look at the pilgrimage, we try to go to the Holy Land, we go to Rome and Greece. Yeah. Yeah. So it means a really wonderful, I hope, in an experience that just puts you in touch with the scriptures in a way that nothing else really will, right? When you walk in a place and you think, wow, Jesus walked right here, right? Or Mary walked right here. And somehow it just changes your perspective in a way that I can't fully describe, you know? And so that whenever you're reading the scriptures or you're attending Mass or reflecting on the rosary, your imagination just has a lot more to work with, right? Because you've, you know, a swarm in the sea of Galilee, right? Or you've, you've, you know, walked through Jerusalem. And I don't know, it just, it just really gives you a different perspective. And here in particular when the hill country, it is, there's lots of hills surrounding this area. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, you have to go up and down a lot. So it wasn't just a 90 miles walking on a nice flat, flat, plain road. Yeah. No. How long do we have a sense of how long that would take on foot to do 90 miles? I mean, maximum pace for a walker, you know, in traditional traveling times is about 30 miles a day. Okay. So absolute minimum might be three days, but it is probably a lot longer. Sure. I would, I would put it at maybe more like a week. So when Mary just said, it's not when she decides after the angel leaves, you know, she goes with haste. Yeah. So she is, she knows what it entails to go, to go and to visit her cousin list, but it's so important for her to go. She does it very quickly. Yes. Yes. So if you want to join, if you want to open your Bibles, we're in Luke chapter one. And you want to, and in verse 39 is where the visitation starts. So when Luke chapter one, if you want to grab your Bibles and follow along. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll just read the first two verses. Yes. In those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a town in Judah. And she entered the house of Zachariah and greeted Elizabeth. So there are so many things here in the backgrounds. Really even before we get to much of what happens in the scene, Zachariah is a priest. And we know that because that's what happens earlier in chapter one. Right. It's engaged in priestly service at the temple. And this is part of the reason that he lives near Jerusalem. So I care him. It's basically a suburb of Jerusalem. It's quite close. And so he would be able to go and do service at the temple. And I mean, there's so many wonderful references to the Old Testament, which is really what gets me about this passage. Yeah. And this is actually helpful for us as we pray through these. Yeah. And I'm going to try to make it not as complicated as maybe I would in another setting. But as we go through, we see Elizabeth hears Mary's greeting and the baby leaps in her womb. So that's John the Baptist leaping in her womb. And then she's filled the Holy Spirit, which is telling us that she's about to prophesy. And what does she say? What's her prophecy? "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb." And of course, those words ought to be extremely familiar. To us, Mary prayer, which is a great side point of when we pray the Hail Mary, which we pray in the rosary regularly, we're actually just echoing the words of Scripture. Exactly. Exactly. So there are two different themes, two or three different themes that we're thinking about in this setting. One has to do with women in the Old Testament, and one has to do with the Ark of the Covenant. So let's talk about women in the Old Testament. "This blessing that Elizabeth pronounces sounds familiar." We're thinking, "Blessing, blessed are you, blessed are you." Okay, so what's the blessing? We've heard these blessings before in the Old Testament. They're very common and frequent in Jewish prayer. So most Jewish prayers begin with a blessing, with the word Baruch in Hebrew. So if you were to say, open up a Jewish prayer book, there are many, many, many blessings. And some of them are very common, like blessing for washing hands, blessing when you go to bed, blessing when you wake up. So it's a really common form of prayer in Judaism. And then of course, they remind us of the Beatitudes, right? Jesus pronounces blessings on his followers for various virtues and dispositions and this sort of thing. So first we get this blessing on her. And this blessing in particular should remind us of two blessings in the Old Testament, which are easy to overlook. Okay, so there's one in the book of Judges, chapter 5, verse 24. And if you remember the story that's unfolding there, right? It's Deborah and Barach and then the general, the Barach defeats and battle, flees and the highs and the tend to jail. And then jail murder, or kill him, right? And then she's blessed, right, for killing the enemy, or the general enemy of God's people. So that blessing is most blessed of women, be jail, the wife of Hebrew, the key knight, of tent dwelling women, most blessed. So it's very similar in that way, right? That she's lauded for her courage, right? And for this great act that she did on behalf of God's people, I better retract the idea of her murdering him, right? She's killing him in the context of war. Okay, so we don't count that as a murder. And then later, it's actually a very similar story in the book of Judith, chapter 13, verse 18. The story of Judith, right? It's not in Protestant Bibles, only in the Catholic Bible. And the story of Judith, it's a very similar one to jail, right? Where there's an enemy general coming against God's people, right? And she kills him, right? She beds him. And at the end of the story, she celebrated. And there we hear these words, "O daughter, you are blessed by the most high God above all women on earth and blessed be the Lord God who created the heavens and the earth who's guided you to strike the head of the leader of our enemies." So these blessings on these Old Testament heroines, jail and Judith, set the stage for the blessing that St. Elizabeth is going to pronounce over the Virgin Mary. So those sounds like to me an echo of the prophecy of Genesis 3 of the Prophet Evangelium. So the first gospel of that, the seed of the woman will crush the head of the enemy of Israel. Right? And we see that in jail, right? And we see that in Judith. And now, of course, in the Virgin Mary. So when Mary hears this and Elizabeth is prophesying in the full of the Holy Spirit, she knows what, yeah, the fulfillment of this prophecy is in her womb. Is that the next line? "Blessed is a fruit of your womb." It's actually going to be the fruit of the womb that is the one that crushes the head of the serpent. Well, it depends on whether we're in Hebrew or not. Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, this is worth mentioning just because it's interesting because of our statues, right? So we have all these statues of the Virgin Mary standing on the head of the serpent. But then when you go and read your Bible, it says, "You shall strike at his heel and he shall crush your head." And so it introduces a kind of confusion into our Catholic minds. Like, what's going on here? What's going on is that in the Latin tradition, it says, "She shall crush your head." But in the Hebrew, it says, "He shall crush your head." Right. So that's why we have that kind of cognitive dissonance there. I mean, Mary can only crush the head of the serpent because of--exactly. In Jesus' right. And in that sense, we participate in his victory as well. It also crushed the head of the serpent. Well, because in Romans 16, right? So many crush the head of the serpent as well. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the other things. to notice is this idea of two boys and wombs, right? And we've seen this scene before, right, back in the book of Genesis, there are two boys in the womb of Rebecca and they're struggling with one another, right? They're wrestling with each other. And of course, famously, Esau is born first and then Jacob comes out holding onto his heel, right? I love that, right? So here though, it's like that same scene, but kind of, but it's like the positive, you know, photo negative, right? It's the positive version of that, where John the Baptist, even as a baby in utero, right, recognizes Jesus' presence and leaps for joy. Okay, and it's also a sign of Mary's motherhood. So there was a heresy in the early church that said that, well, Mary's the mother of Christ, but not the mother of God, right? And it took an ecumenical counsel to affirm, no, she's actually the mother of God. She's Theotocos, not just Christotocos, not just the mother of Christ. And we hear about this in Elizabeth's word. Why is it granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? So Elizabeth recognizes Mary's identity, not just as her relative or whatever, right? But as mother of the Messiah, right? Mother of my Lord, and who is my Lord? The Davidic King, right? The Messiah, the one who has come to redeem God's people and bring about the restoration. So, I mean, that's a lot of themes, right? You got the babies in the womb, right? That mother of God, mother of the Davidic King, blessed among women, but the Ark of the Covenant thing is really what everyone to get to, right? So this scene has a lot of parallels with 2 Samuel chapter six, which is where David is moving the Ark of the Covenant towards Jerusalem. And there are so many different resonances there. So Elizabeth says, right, how is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Well, David says, how can the Ark of the Lord come to me? Yeah. So, I have Elizabeth, like in the role of David, they're pronouncing these words, and we see Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, right? With the presence of the Lord dwelling within her, and almost like the new Tabernacle, right? In that she's overshadowed by the presence of the Lord. That's the initiation. Right. In the same way that the Tabernacle in Exodus 40 is overshadowed by the presence of the Lord in the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud. And then it says, she entered the house of Zachariah. Well, this reminds us of 2 Samuel chapter 6, verse 10, where the Ark of the Covenant comes and enters the house of Obed Eda. So the Ark of the Covenant has to kind of make a stop along its way to Jerusalem. And it stops at the house of Obed Eda. And what happens when they bring the Ark from Obed Eda's house to Jerusalem? David dances with joy before the Ark, right? Just like John the Baptist now leaps in the womb of his mother. So beautiful. But the other connection that's like kind of subtle, 2 Samuel chapter 6, verse 11, how long does Mary stay at Elizabeth's house, house bed? Three months. Right. Which is the exact same amount of time that the Ark of the Covenant stays at the house of Obed Eda. And 2 Samuel 6, 11. So all of these connections are deliberate. Right? None of them are by mistake. Luke is trying to show us. And Mary, it's the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah. And I was thinking the whole country of the Bologn, did you that like this? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So Luke is intentionally making us think of the Ark. Well, one other connection, right? So Elizabeth shouts, right? She speaks with a loud voice. It's the only time in the Testament this word is used. And where do we find it in the Old Testament? First Chronicles 15, 28 in the Septuagint, where the people of God shouts as the Ark is brought to Jerusalem. And also in 2 Samuel 6, 15, people are shouting as the Ark is brought to Jerusalem. Now at the end of this, right, she pronounces another blessing. Right? So we already heard, bless her, you among women, bless her as the fruit of your womb. At the end of this, she says, blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. She's like, not like my husband. Not like Zachariah. Who heard, but didn't believe her. Who was punished for his lack of faith, right? Yeah. What's the echo here? Well, the beauty of this, in my view, right, is that it shows that Mary is blessed for her faith. Mary is blessed for her faith. I think so often we just think of Mary as kind of like so far above us. She's foreign, you know, and just exalted. And we're just kind of down here and lowly. But we forget, right? That she actually has the virtues, right? Which are the same kinds of virtues that we have access to, like the virtue of faith. And what is it that makes her blessed her faith? It's just such a powerful testament to the importance of that virtue, or the centrality of faith, you know, that we need to believe what God tells us, right? We need to believe in Him and believe in His promises. And we will be blessed, right, if we believe. I think of that, that the catacism when it talks about Abraham being the father of faith for three major religions, but that Mary is also a mother of faith. And this is a great example of her faith. Yes. Yes, exactly. So then what follows from this beatitude, right, is Mary's song, right? My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit, my choices, and God, my Savior. This is the magnificat, right? So it's, if you think of Mary, or sorry, as Elizabeth, has been filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesying. Now Mary's filled the Holy Spirit and prophesying, singing this prophetic song. And I think sometimes these types of, like poetic interruptions and stories can be disarming for us as Bible readers. Like, what's going on? Why is there a whole-- And a musical, I'm part of a musical all the time, because it's just singing songs. I was just reading in First Maccabees, chapter two. It's like, we're about to have this great scene with Matathias, but it's preceded by this poem where he's like expressing his mourning, you know? So the poem here reflects on the significant of the event that's unfolding, right? And the main theme is this great reversal of fortunes, right? Where the mightier being torn down from their thrones and the lowly are being lifted up and exalted by God. So in this way, it really reminds us of the song of Hannah. Way back at the beginning of 1 Samuel, when Hannah is barren, praying for a child, the priest prophesies over her, and then she conceives and bears a son. And she sings this great song of vindication. And it's the same kind of idea of this kind of reversal of fortunes. So if you're reading the Magnificat, it might be great to go turn back to 1 Samuel and read Hannah's song as well. And Mary's song sounds a lot like a lot of the songs, like Psalm 34. I think it's Psalm 102 or 103. Where we hear about God's mercy, about God's power, about his strength, and how he exercises his strength and his power on behalf of his lowly people, right, and exalts them. And so in this way, it's really a song of encouragement. I remember reading Pope Bank the 16th and reflecting, and he reflects on this theme in one of his encyclicals and he says that the Magnificat is the portrait of Mary's soul. Yeah. And I'm doing it like what Mary looked like. We don't know what she looked like. We have Mary in apparitions, but if you want to know what Mary really looked like in her inner life, it's full of scripture. Yes. It's just like of the Psalms of the other literature in the Old Testament. It just lives and breathes the word of God. And it comes out when she has a chance to sing. Yes. And this is the value of memorizing scripture, right? If we know it by heart, then it's in our heart, right? Mary clearly knows the scriptures by heart. So the word of God that she knows so well, what we call the Old Testament today actually takes flesh inside of her, the word of God in the incarnation. The church in her wisdom puts this song on the lips of all the people that commit to praying to the Lord of the hours every day, every evening. Yeah. That's how important this song is. Yes. Yeah. And so in that way, it's a kind of summary of Christian prayer, right? And the victory that she's singing about and the vindication is something that God's bringing constantly bringing about through Christ. Mark, thank you for joining me today as we reflect it on. There's so much more. I know you're excited to share. And this is a good teaser for you. There's so much more that we encourage you to keep praying, all the mysteries of the Rosary, but we've been going through the joyful mysteries, in particular with the second joyful mystery today. So thank you for support of the Augustine Institute. If you'd like to, if these conversations have been beneficial for you, we have a mission circle. It's a small group of monthly donors that contribute to the mission so we can have conversations on form and all the other things that we do here at the Augustine Institute. So thank you for joining us and God bless.