Luke 1:57-66
Mary had been betrothed to Joseph with a formal witnessed agreement, legally binding, between the families of the young people, and a bride price paid to Mary’s family. It was expected that the formal marriage would take place about a year later, when Mary would be taken home to Joseph's family to live. Since later on in the story Mary returned to her home, not Joseph’s, we can assume that Mary and Joseph were not married at this particular time.
Accustomed as we are to benign images of the Annunciation, and of Mary and Joseph with the baby Jesus, we tend to blot out the reality of the situation: a young girl was pregnant, her fiancé knew he was not the father, yet the bride price had been paid.
In a Middle Eastern rural community at the time, this sort of situation could easily result in an honor killing of the young girl by her fiancé's family. What few commentators seem to realize is that Mary's visit to Elizabeth, about a hundred miles away in Judea, may have been a desperate attempt by her family to save her from this fate, to get her out of the way until some solution had been worked out.
Leaving Galilee and traveling south, Mary duly arrived at Elizabeth's house in Judea after a journey of about three or four days.
At first glance, this might seem like a commonplace event as two kinswomen, both pregnant, meet each other. But Luke was making oblique references to Old Testament precedents, alerting the reader to a deeper meaning in Elizabeth's story: read 1 Samuel 1:1-2, Judges 13:2, about a couple like Elizabeth and Zechariah, unable to have children, and Genesis 18:11 which describes an elderly couple who thought they would never have a child.
The two pregnant women met, and at that moment Elizabeth's unborn baby responded by suddenly moving and kicking in her womb. Twenty-eight weeks, the end of a woman's second trimester, is the normal time to expect an unborn baby to kick in the womb, and this may well have been the first time Elizabeth's unborn baby moved - an exciting moment for any mother. She took this sudden movement, at this particular meeting, as a sign.
In a moment of penetrating spiritual clarity, Elizabeth recognized she was being visited by the mother of the expected Messiah. She pronounced a blessing on the younger woman:
'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.'
Mary responded with the words of the song called the Magnificat.
Scholars now guardedly say this was a hymn sung by the early Christians in their liturgies, implying that it may have had a composition date later than the moment of meeting between the two mothers.
They also imply that an illiterate peasant girl from Galilee would not have had the ability to compose such a hymn.
But there is no reason to think that Mary could not have been capable of composing it herself. The Magnificat is closely based on the Song of Hannah in 2 Samuel 2:1-10, and Mary must have known this Song well.
She certainly would have learned it by heart, since women at the time had a rich oral tradition, all of it memorized, and
she would have seen the Song of Hannah as appropriate, since Elizabeth's pregnancy so late in life mirrored the pregnancy of Hannah.
Adapting passages from the Jewish Scriptures to suit current situations was a familiar part of the oral tradition, and Mary and her female relatives would have been familiar with the technique. True, there is some evidence it was adapted along the way before Luke translated it into Greek, but surely Mary is the source of this glorious song.
It is not clear from the text whether Elizabeth had the help of her young kinswoman when she gave birth to her baby. Commonsense and the lapse of time would suggest she did. Elizabeth would certainly have been surrounded by loving, concerned relatives and friends, especially since her advanced age must have made it a difficult birth.
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