Asking for a tablet, Zachariah wrote, “His name is to be John.” That took everyone by surprise. Surprise followed surprise—Zachariah’s mouth was now open, his tongue loose, and he was talking, praising God!
A deep, reverential fear settled over the neighborhood, and in all that Judean hill country people talked about nothing else. Everyone who heard about it took it to heart, wondering, “What will become of this child? Clearly, God has his hand in this.” (Luke 1:63-66)
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Do you like surprises? Christmas is a time for those, in abundance. Seems that historically, at least with gift-giving, there is a long list of surprises that intersect the season. “I remember when [fill in your memory]…and I was so shocked!”
The personal event that sticks the most in my mind in this category happened on Christmas Day of 1970. My father was in Vietnam. He had retired from the U.S. Air Force about a decade before, and had gone to Saigon to support the U.S. Army as a civilian for a year and a half. He had sent me a letter telling me that he was coming home on a short leave, arriving on Christmas Day, but not to tell my mother. This was a “growing-up, man-of-the-house” kind of letter, he said, and I was to keep it secret.
The moment arrived. I remember looking out the window to our driveway on a very rainy morning—must have been some kind of commotion out there, or just the sound of the car pulling in that caused me to look—and there he was, getting out of the taxi cab from the Dothan, Alabama airport! What a surprise!
I do recall that my mother had set an extra place at the dinner table for him. My mother either suspected something or had found the letter, and had never revealed that information to me. Or, maybe the faithful wife had hoped against odds that he would turn up. Maybe he had hinted at it earlier in some random comment in one of his many letters, but didn’t know for sure if he could make it. Who knows? Those details are lost to history now. At any rate, he did show up, and his quiet entrance from the other side of this unfathomably large world was a huge Christmas surprise.
The surprises from the John the Baptist part of the Advent story have added up to make a long list! Old lady Elizabeth is pregnant. Her old husband, the old priest Zachariah, with his once-in-a-lifetime chance to offer incense in the Temple, encounters the angel Gabriel and emerges without being able to speak—and remains that way until the baby is born and has been named. The crowd was surprised when Zach started speaking again. The crowd of friends is surprised to learn that the baby who will come from their union is to be named John: “But,” they said, “no one in your family is named that.” Didn’t matter; “that’s his name!” And this baby, who came from a supernatural resurgence of vitality of this elderly couple, is the one who about 30 years later, will go before his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth, to announce to any and all that Jesus is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. (As you think about Christmas surprises you are familiar with, like in the story I shared of my father’s surprise homecoming, can we top any of these? As magnificent and welcomed as they were, the comparisons are small.)
Peterson rendered this series of events in his translation as “Surprise followed surprise.” When I think of the conception of the virgin Mary, and the conception of the elderly Elizabeth, yes, of course, I am surprised. When I think of Elizabeth’s baby leaping in the womb when Mary arrived to visit her cousin, that is a surprise. Looking again at the naming of baby John, and the surprise demonstrated by their friends and neighbors, the surprise theme just keeps rolling in. Shifting to the focus on Mary and Joseph and the way that God orchestrated the details surrounding the announcement of the birth of Jesus to far-away star-scholars and close-at-hand shepherds, it all fits right in line with this surprise theme.
I see it now: it was all certainly a surprise to this cast of characters in this Greatest Story Ever Told, and it is a surprise to us, as we benefit from the hindsight of reading and discovering how it all unfolded.
But there’s not one element that was a surprise to God Almighty. We do not have a single verse that recorded God’s words of “Oops, I didn’t see that coming.” God planned all of this, down to the least of the details, and recorded it so that we can see his hand at work and rescue-plan in operation.
A friend of mine told of her encounter with someone who shared with her the Good News of Jesus Christ. She had never been to church, never read the Bible, had never heard this Greatest Story Ever Told. When the person sharing with her finished his presentation, he asked her, “Would you like to commit your life to Jesus and follow Him?”, she responded with, “Of course I would! Who wouldn’t?!” She was not aware in advance that this opportunity was coming, but she seized it when it did.
I am praying today for those who haven’t yet gotten in on the surprise. It’s a life-changing discovery, and one that won’t disappoint those who earnestly inquire about what God is doing!
“Father, thank you for the way that you perfectly unfolded the surprising events of the Advent story. Turn after turn, things occurred which we weren’t expecting, things that leave us gasping and saying, ‘I wasn’t expecting that!’ But you did it all within your perfect plan and perfect timing. Surprise to us, but not to you. We are reminded again in this Advent season that you are the One in charge of the universe and also in charge of our lives and circumstances. You know our intimate and obscure details—such as the number of hairs on our heads! And with your infinite knowledge of us, you still love us completely. Father, knowing that you love me completely, despite all of my frailty and humanness, is a surprise to me! But it is one for which I am eternally grateful. Thank you!”
Freddy Boswell 