The Silent Prophet: Zechariah The Father Of John The Baptist
It is a peculiar thing about silence that it speaks louder than words, and nowhere in all our sacred history does silence thunder more magnificently than in the story of Zechariah the priest. Here was a man who spent his life speaking – speaking prayers, speaking blessings, speaking the ancient words that connected heaven and earth – and yet his greatest testimony would come in enforced silence. It is one of those divine paradoxes that marks our faith: that God would choose to announce the coming of the great voice crying in the wilderness by first sealing shut the lips of his father.
Consider the scene in the temple, where our story properly begins. Zechariah, elderly and dignified, chosen by lot to enter the sanctuary of the Lord. How many times had he performed the ritual of burning incense? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Yet on this day, this ordinary day chosen by an extraordinary God, the familiar act would become the setting for something utterly unprecedented. The smoke rising from his censer would be joined by a presence that would shake the foundations of his world.
Let us pause here to note something remarkable about the angel Gabriel's appearance. He stands, we are told, at the right side of the altar of incense. Not hovering in the air, not descended in some otherworldly manner, but standing – as if to suggest that the supernatural and the natural were, for a moment, on equal footing. The boundary between heaven and earth had grown so thin that an angel might simply step through and take his place beside the furniture of our world.
For when the angel Gabriel appeared (and we must picture him not as the soft, feminine creature of Renaissance paintings but as the sort of being whose first words must always be "Fear not!"), he brought with him that terrible clarity that marks all true heavenly visitations. This was no vague spiritual impression, no mere inner voice that might be dismissed as indigestion or imagination. Here stood one of those burning ones who see the face of God, for whom the mere act of existence is a kind of perpetual thunder of praise.
We make a mistake when we imagine angels as merely beautiful; they are, rather, beautifully terrible – as all things must be that live forever in the unfiltered presence of the Divine. The very light of heaven about them is so fierce that it must be filtered through our fear before we can bear to look upon their glory. We should remember that cherubim were set to guard Eden with flaming swords, not harps, and that the shepherds at Christmas were "sore afraid" before they were glad. Gabriel stood before Zechariah as a warrior might stand, as one accustomed to carrying out decrees that reshape the world, and the old priest's terror was not a failure of faith but a thoroughly rational response to finding oneself suddenly addressing one of the living weapons of God.
Zechariah's reaction is, perhaps, the most human moment in all of scripture. Here is a priest, a man who has spent his life in service of the divine, and when divinity actually appears before him, he is terrified. It is rather like a man who has spent his life studying tigers suddenly finding himself face to face with one – all his knowledge counts for nothing against the raw reality of the thing itself. How often we are similarly struck dumb by the actual presence of what we have long professed to believe in!
But then comes the announcement, and with it, the seed of doubt that would seal Zechariah's lips. "Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son." How impossible it must have seemed! Elizabeth was barren, and they were both well advanced in years. Yet here is another divine paradox: that God would choose to begin His greatest work of renewal through those the world had written off as finished. It is as if He delights in using dried-up possibilities to water the gardens of tomorrow.
The silence that followed Zechariah's doubt was not merely a punishment – it was a preparation. For nine months, he would carry his silence like Mary carried her child, growing heavy with unspoken words. And in that silence, something remarkable happened: he began to listen. Really listen, perhaps for the first time in his life. He listened as Elizabeth's barrenness blossomed into fertility. He listened as Mary arrived, carrying her own miracle. He listened as his unborn son leaped in Elizabeth's womb at the presence of the unborn Christ.
This brings us to that magnificent moment when Elizabeth and Mary meet, and here we see the first fruits of Zechariah's enforced silence. Because he could not speak, we hear instead the prophetic voice of Elizabeth, crying out in recognition of the Mother of her Lord. And we hear Mary's response, that magnificent Magnificat that would echo through the centuries. Would these women's voices have rung out so clearly if Zechariah's voice had been there to compete with them? God, in His wisdom, sometimes silences the qualified to make room for the called.
The story reaches its crescendo at John's birth, when Zechariah's tongue is finally loosened. Nine months of silence burst forth in a prophecy so powerful it became part of our scripture. But then comes the true climax of his story – a death that echoes with the same paradoxical power as his life.
When Herod's murderous decree went forth, when the streets of Bethlehem ran with the blood of innocents, the soldiers came at last to the temple itself. They had heard whispers of a priest's son, born of an elderly couple, marked for greatness by strange signs and wonders. Such rumors would naturally reach Herod's paranoid ears, and the tyrant's imagination would easily transform every extraordinary birth into a potential threat to his crown.
Here we must picture Zechariah, no longer silent but speaking with all the thunder of his prophetic office, standing between the altar and the sanctuary. How fitting that he who had first encountered Gabriel at the altar of incense would make his final stand in the same sacred space. The soldiers demanded to know where his son was hidden, but Zechariah had learned well the power of holy silence. He who had been struck dumb by doubt would now choose muteness for love. The soldiers grew angry – as the powerful always do when confronted with the quiet strength of faith – and threatened him with death.
It is said that Zechariah smiled then, the same sort of smile that would later grace the faces of martyrs. For what was death to a man who had seen an angel? What was the threat of silence to one who had worn it like a garment for nine months? He had already learned that God's greatest works are done in silence – in the quiet of Elizabeth's womb, in the hush of Mary's visitation, in the stillness of his own enforced contemplation. His silence now would be his final sermon, his blood his last baptism.
They struck him down between the altar and the sanctuary, in that liminal space between earth and heaven where he had spent his life ministering. The same stones that had witnessed his encounter with Gabriel now witnessed his passage into glory. His blood, they say, could not be scrubbed from the temple floors – it had seeped into the very stone, as if the temple itself refused to forget this final testament of faith. Christ himself would later speak of this murder, linking Zechariah's blood with that of Abel [Luke 11:51], as if these two righteous deaths formed bookends for all the martyrdoms of the old covenant.
Yet there is triumph even in this tragedy. For while Zechariah's blood stained the temple floor, his son was safely hidden away, preserved by his father's final silence to become the voice crying in the wilderness. The prophet who would prepare the way for the Lord was protected by the priest who prepared the way for the prophet. Herod, like all tyrants, thought he could silence the voice of truth with violence, not understanding that every martyrdom is but a seed planted in fertile soil, waiting to burst forth in new proclamation.
As we approach another Advent season, Zechariah's story calls us to a particular kind of preparation. Perhaps we too need a holy silence, a time of listening rather than speaking. Our world is full of noise – opinions, arguments, assertions, denials. But the greatest truths often come wrapped in silence. The Word became flesh in the quiet of a virgin's womb. The greatest revolution in human history began not with a shout but with a baby's cry.
Let us then prepare for Christmas as Zechariah prepared for John's birth – in watchful silence, in patient waiting, in hopeful expectation. Let us remember that God often works most powerfully in what appears to be barren and empty. And let us take comfort in knowing that every silence ordained by God, no matter how long or difficult, ends in song.
For it always ends in song. Zechariah's silence burst forth in prophecy, Elizabeth's barrenness in blessing, and Mary's humble submission in the greatest birth in human history. This is the pattern of our faith: that God takes what is empty and fills it, what is silent and gives it voice, what is dead and gives it life. This is the promise of Advent, and the hope toward which we now turn our faces, as the days grow shorter and the Light of the World draws near.
In Zechariah's story we see the full circle of divine paradox: the priest who doubted becoming the martyr who believed, the voice that questioned becoming the silence that protected, the man who demanded a sign becoming himself a sign for all generations. As we prepare our hearts for Christmas, let us remember that God's greatest works often begin in silence and end in song, start in doubt and end in faith, emerge from death and culminate in life eternal. For this is the way of Him who makes all things new, who brings light from darkness, and whose coming we now await with hope and trembling joy.
-The Seeker's Quill
