Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 1.
I was reminded by today’s passage about a thought which struck me a few weeks ago. Mary was related to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was married to Zechariah, a priest. This suggests that Elizabeth was descended from priests (priests were not required to marry the daughter of another priest, but it seems likely that they usually did). All of this suggests to me that Mary was descended both from David and from Aaron, thus Jesus may have combined both the priestly and kingly lineages of Ancient Israel. Which brings us to the fact that John the Baptist was definitely of priestly lineage, like numerous Old Testament prophets. (I would like to point out that while only a few of the prophets whose writings we have in the Old Testament were also priests, several passages in the Old Testament indicate an expectation that prophets were of priestly lineage). Having said that, I am actually more interested by the fact that Luke was able to recount in detail what Zechariah said at the time of John’s naming. Luke has been noted for both his attention to detail and the reliability of what he writes. As a note on this, at various times historians thought that Luke had used incorrect words for the titles of individuals to whom he referred, or for areas he described, there were also times when people thought that Luke’s description of the order of travel was wrong. Later discoveries proved that Luke’s terms, and travel routes were accurate for the time. Now, we have reason to believe that Luke got the accounts of what happened to Mary directly from Mary, but Zechariah and Elizabeth would have been dead by the time Luke was compiling this account. Further, it seems likely that no one else present would have felt the event significant enough to remember the words spoken those many years later when Luke was gathering the accounts he recorded. However, John was raised according to the oath of the Nazirite, and apparently lived according to it as a grown man. This would have led people to think of Samuel and Samson. So, perhaps someone before Luke had sought to gather stories about John’s birth.
All of this reminds me of comments a speaker at our Sunday morning said a few weeks ago. He used the story of the Sidonian woman with a demon-possessed daughter who asked Jesus for help as a basis for this (although that story is really about something else). I cannot remember exactly what he said, but he said that sometimes we give bread from God to God’s children and other times we are just dropping crumbs from that bread to the dogs beneath the table. Whether what we say is bread or just crumbs, we should hope that someone benefits. Today, I feel that I am just dropping crumbs, but I pray that God uses it anyway.
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.
