Mary and Elizabeth in the Hill Country of Judah

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A woman is standing in a doorway in the hills, with one hand on the wooden frame and the other on the small of her back, and she has just heard somebody say her name from the road.

She does not call back at once. She is not the kind of woman who shouts at a stranger in the road. She turns her head, and she tilts it, as you do when you have heard a voice you know and cannot yet believe it. And then her whole face changes.

There is going to be a great deal of joy in the next few minutes. There is going to be a song. There is going to be, somewhere under a heavy apron, a small kick that is not entirely the baby's fault. But first there is a road, and it is a long one.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start where the road starts.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter one, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather on the road, the smell of a kitchen, what a young woman might have thought as she walked, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin in Nazareth.

Nazareth, at the time of our story, is a small town in the hills of Galilee, in the north of the country. It is not a big place. If you stood on the ridge above it and looked down, you would see a few hundred people's worth of houses, made of the pale local stone and packed close together, with flat roofs where people sleep in the hot weather and dry their figs. There are olive trees on the slopes and a spring at the bottom where the women fill their jars, and you could walk across the whole town in about the time it takes to boil an egg.

It is the sort of place where everybody knows everybody, and where news travels faster than a person on foot. If somebody has a new goat, the whole street has heard by lunchtime. If somebody has a new baby, the street has usually heard some months before the baby has.

This is worth remembering, because the young woman at the centre of tonight's story has just been given some news of her own, and it is the kind of news that is very difficult to carry around a small town.

Her name is Mary. She is engaged to a carpenter called Joseph, a man of the house of David, and she is living, as engaged girls did in those days, in her own family's home until the wedding. Luke does not tell us how old she is, and neither will we. Luke does not tell us what her house looked like. What he tells us is what happened to her, and it is the most astonishing thing in the whole Gospel, and it is told in a few quiet verses.

An angel came to her. The angel was Gabriel, who is the same angel who had appeared, six months earlier, to an old priest in the Temple at Jerusalem. He told her that she was favoured by God, and that she would have a son, and that his name would be Jesus, and that he would be great. Mary asked a sensible question, which was how it could be. Gabriel told her that the Holy Spirit would come upon her, and that nothing is impossible with God. And then, almost in passing, as if he were mentioning a bit of good news to cheer her up, he told her something else.

Your relative Elizabeth, he said, who was called barren, has also conceived a son in her old age. She is in her sixth month.

And Mary said, let it be done to me according to your word. And the angel left her.

Now, it is the next part that we are going to tell tonight. Because here is a thing. Luke says, in the very next verse, and I love this verse, that in those days Mary got up and went with haste into the hill country.

Not that she waited for the weekend. Not that she called a meeting. She got up, and she went. With haste.

Before we follow her, we need to meet the person she is going to see.

Her name is Elizabeth, and Luke says she is a kinswoman of Mary. He uses a word that means a relation, but he does not say what kind, and so the old guesses about cousins and aunts are only guesses. We shall simply say a relative, and leave it there, as Luke does.

Elizabeth is married to a priest called Zechariah. The Gospel tells us they are both from the line of Aaron, the first high priest, which in their world is rather like belonging to a very old and very respectable family that has been doing the same job for twelve hundred years. Luke says they are both righteous before God, and that they keep every commandment without blame. He also says, in the same breath, with a plainness that I find tender, that they have no child, and that both are well on in years.

Elizabeth has been the woman in the village who has no children for a very long time. You can imagine what that was like. In those days a childless wife was often the subject of talk, and the talk was not always kind, and Luke tells us elsewhere that she called it her disgrace among people. Some of the neighbours would have been kind. Some would have said, in the most helpful voice, that perhaps she should pray harder. And she had prayed, and he had prayed, and for decade after decade the answer had been no, or not yet.

And then, in the same year as our story, Zechariah took his turn at the Temple in Jerusalem. The priests of that time took turns, by lot, and it was his week. He was chosen to go into the sanctuary and burn the incense, which was a thing a priest might get to do once in his entire life. And as he stood there, with the smoke going up, the angel Gabriel appeared to him, on the right side of the altar, and told him that his prayer had been heard. His wife Elizabeth would bear a son, and they should call him John.

Zechariah, who was a good man and also a bit frightened, said how shall I know this? We are old. And Gabriel said, in effect, I am Gabriel, I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to tell you this good news. And since you did not believe my words, you will be silent, unable to speak, until the day it happens.

So Zechariah came out of the sanctuary and could not say a word. The people waiting outside realised something had happened and they could not get any sense out of him. He went home, to the hill country of Judah, nodding and gesturing, and writing things on a tablet if he had to. And shortly after, Elizabeth found that she was going to have a baby.

She went into seclusion for five months. Luke tells us this, and gives her reason in her own words, which are lovely. This is what the Lord has done for me, she says, in the days when he looked on me, to take away my disgrace among people.

So that is where things stand. There is an old couple in the hills, one of them silent, the other tucked away and rather pleased about it. And there is a young woman in Galilee who has been told, by the same angel, that she is also to be a mother. And only one of the two of them knows about the other.

Now. Let us talk about the road.

We do not know exactly where Elizabeth lived. Luke says only that it was a city of Judah in the hill country. A tradition, and we shall return to it at the end, puts it in the hills a few miles west of Jerusalem. If that is right, the distance from Nazareth is something like a hundred miles, give or take, depending which way you go. That is an estimate. Nobody drew a map in the Gospel.

A hundred miles is a long way on foot. On a good day, with decent weather and a road that is not too stony, a person walking steadily could manage perhaps fifteen or twenty miles. So we are talking about a journey of five days, or six, or seven, with all the stopping and starting that human beings do.

And a young woman did not simply walk it alone. That would have been unusual, and not very safe. Luke does not mention who went with her, and so we do not know. We might imagine she went with a family caravan, going up to Judea for some reason of their own, as such groups often did. There were always cousins of cousins going somewhere. A young woman might very plausibly have fallen in with a company of travellers, an uncle or a neighbour, a man with a donkey and a wife who talked all the way. But I am telling you that as a guess, and you should hold it lightly.

The road from Galilee to Judea ran down through the valley of the Jordan, or else across the hills of Samaria, and travellers in that country have used both routes. The Jordan road is lower and hotter. The hill road is cooler and more tiring. Both go through places where a person can buy bread and water. Both have inns of a sort, which is to say a courtyard and a wall and a place for your donkey, and a woman at the gate who will sell you lentils if you ask nicely and will tell you the whole history of her family if you do not.

So here is how I picture the first morning.

It is early, and the air is cool. Her mother has packed a bag with bread, and dried figs, and a small flask of olive oil, and a cloth to put over her head against the sun. Her father has said several things about being careful. Joseph is nowhere in the picture, which is another story, and we shall not wander into it tonight.

And Mary walks out of the town, and down the hill, and onto the road, and she does not look back for quite a while.

What does she think about, on the road?

The Gospel does not say, so I can only guess, and it is a guess. But I have a feeling that, if I had just been told what she had been told, I would be thinking about very little else. I would walk along and the whole landscape would be a blur. I would be going over it again and again, the way you replay a conversation in your head. What did he say? What did I say? Was it real?

And then, perhaps, in the second or third day, with the sun on her back and the dust on her sandals, I think she would begin to feel something else. A kind of steadiness. Luke says, later in his Gospel, twice, that Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. That is how she is described. She is not a person who has to talk about everything. She is a person who holds things, and turns them over, and lets them settle.

So perhaps she walks, and she turns it over. And in the evenings, when the company stops, she sits a little apart and watches the stars come out over the hills, which are very clear in that country, and says whatever she says. And in the mornings she gets up and walks on.

She has one good thing to look forward to. The angel told her a piece of news that she could check. Elizabeth, who was called barren, is six months along. That was a sign, you might say, that came with a return address. All she had to do was walk there and see.

Now the hills begin.

You can tell when you are getting near the hill country of Judah, because the land gets rougher. It is not forest. It is stone and scrub and terraces. The terraces are old walls of piled rock, stepped down the slopes, and on each shelf of earth behind them a farmer has planted something: a row of vines, a few olive trees, a little barley. The roads wind up between them. The light is whiter than in Galilee, and the air smells of dust and thyme and goat.

There are springs, though, tucked into the folds of the hills, and around the springs there are villages. And around one of these, on a day that Luke does not date, a young woman comes up the last path with the dust of a week on her feet, and sees a house on the hillside, with a small yard and a fig tree, and a line of washing.

She stops.

I think she stops for a moment to straighten her scarf. I think anyone would. You have walked for a week and you are about to knock on a door and the person behind it is an elderly relation you have not seen for years, and what you really want is to look presentable. I do not think it matters that an angel has told you your child will be great. You still tuck your hair in.

Then she goes up to the door.

And what Luke says is this, and I am going to read it as simply as I can: she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

That is all. She came in, and she said hello.

Hello, in that country, is usually a word of peace. It is something like, peace be with you. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, the thing you say when you come through a door.

And here is the moment I told you about at the start.

Luke says: and it happened that when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Let us go slowly, because this is the heart of it.

Elizabeth is in the kitchen, perhaps, or in the yard, six months along and very aware of every movement of her body, because it is the first child she has ever carried and she has waited for it a lifetime. She hears a voice at the door. It is a voice she may not have heard in years. And in the same instant, the child inside her moves, a sudden, strong leap, as if he were a small boy who has seen someone he loves come through the gate.

And something comes over Elizabeth. Luke says she was filled with the Holy Spirit. She does not say, oh, how nice to see you. She does not say, you must be tired. She lifts up her voice, and she cries out, and what Luke says is, with a loud cry.

I like that. It is not a polite remark. It is a cry, a shout of joy, such as you might give if the whole sky had opened.

And what she shouts is two blessings, and a question.

Blessed are you among women, she says, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And then, the question, which is one of the most beautiful questions in all of Scripture. And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Think about that. Elizabeth is the older woman, the wife of a priest, a person of standing in her village, and Mary is a young girl from a far-off town. By every rule of that world, Mary should have come and bowed to Elizabeth. Instead it is Elizabeth who steps back, in astonishment, and asks what she has done to deserve a visit like this.

And she does not stop. For behold, she says, the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy.

So the first witness to Jesus, in the whole Gospel of Luke, is an unborn child. And the first person to say out loud who Mary is, is an old woman in a kitchen. She says the mother of my Lord. Not my cousin's girl. Not the lass from the north. My Lord's mother.

And then one more blessing, which has gone with Mary ever since. Blessed is she who believed, says Elizabeth, that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.

It is worth noticing what she praises. She does not praise Mary for being clever, or for being strong, or for knowing what to do. She praises her for believing. Mary said, let it be done, and she meant it.

There is a prayer that Christians say, that you may know, and the first part of it is made from the angel's greeting to Mary, and the second part is made from Elizabeth's words at the door. So when people say that prayer, in a church or by a bedside or in the dark on a long drive, they are saying the words that two women said to each other, in a house in the hills, a very long time ago.

Mary has not said very much so far. She has said hello. And now, after Elizabeth has spoken, she opens her mouth, and what comes out is not a remark about the road.

It is a song.

The song is called the Magnificat, after its first word in the old Latin, which means, it makes great. It is the longest thing Mary says in the whole Gospel, and it has been sung every evening for fifteen hundred years, in monasteries and cathedrals and village churches, by Catholics at evening prayer, and by the Orthodox in their morning service. It is one of those texts that people carry with them without noticing.

I am going to tell you the song in plain words, in my own rendering, because I do not want to quote a modern translation that someone else owns, and because a bedtime story is a good place for plain speech. If you know it by heart in another form, you will hear it underneath.

She says: my soul makes the Lord great, and my spirit is glad in God my saviour. For he has looked on the smallness of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

She says: his mercy goes on from generation to generation, for those who fear him.

She says: he has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the thinking of their hearts. He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

And she says: he has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his children for ever.

Now. I want to tell you two things about the song, and then we will go on.

The first is that it is not new. It is made, almost entirely, of pieces of older songs. The one it most resembles is the song of Hannah, in the first book of Samuel, which we heard in an earlier episode. Hannah was another woman who had waited a long time for a child, and when the child came she broke into a song of thanks, in which the hungry are filled and the mighty are brought low and the barren woman bears. Mary has known that song all her life. She has heard it in the synagogue. She has probably sung it. And now, when something enormous happens, the words come to her, because they are the words she has stored up.

I find this rather lovely. It tells us that Mary did not make up her song out of nothing. She sang what she had been taught, and it fitted, because God had been preparing it. The whole of her people's praying was in her mouth, and she opened it.

The second thing is that the song is, for all its gentleness, a rather revolutionary one. It talks about the proud being scattered and the mighty brought down. But look at the shape of it. It begins with her own small self. It says, he looked on my smallness. And then it widens, to the hungry, the lowly, her whole people, and all generations. She is not boasting. She is a girl who has been picked out of an obscure town, and she says, with perfect clearness, he has done this, not me.

The song also says that she will be called blessed by all generations. She says it quite calmly. Not, I deserve this, but, this is what God has done, and people will notice. It has been true for a very long time. If you went into a church somewhere in the world tonight, you would very likely find her name on the wall.

The Gospel tells us that Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months. And then it says she returned to her home. That is all it says, and it is all that we know.

So let us spend a little time in those three months, because I have been wondering about them, and I think you might like to as well. This is the part of tonight's story that is mostly our guess, and I want to say so plainly.

I think about the two women in that house, in the evenings. Zechariah is there too, and he is silent, you remember, so he does a lot of nodding. He is a priest and he knows every psalm, but he cannot say one. There he sits by the lamp, listening to two women talking, and his face, I imagine, is full of everything he cannot say. Perhaps he writes on his tablet now and then. Perhaps he draws a small lamb, or a crooked star. We do not know. We only know that the house is full of good news and one of the people in it is unable to speak.

Elizabeth is getting heavier. She does not move as quickly. Mary does the fetching and the carrying, because that is what a young woman does for an older one, and because she wants to. She carries water up from the spring. She sweeps the yard. She learns where Elizabeth keeps the flour. She sits with her in the afternoon when the baby is restless, and they compare notes about what it is like, to be so astonished and so ordinary at the same time.

There is a lot of bread, I think. A great deal of bread, and olives, and lentil soup, and a certain amount of laughter. Elizabeth, who has waited for decades, probably has a good many opinions about how to look after a baby, and Mary, who is only starting, listens to nearly all of them.

And at some point, in those weeks, I think they stop being a young woman and an old woman, and become two friends who happen to have, between them, the two most extraordinary pregnancies in history, and nobody else in the world to talk to about it.

That is a very specific kind of loneliness, you know. To be given something enormous, and to have nobody to tell. Mary has gone a hundred miles to find the one other person who can understand. And Elizabeth, in her turn, has been alone in that house, in seclusion, with a husband who cannot speak. It is hard to know which of them needed the visit more.

I think that is why the Gospel remembers this visit so carefully. It is not a miracle in the usual sense. Nobody is healed, nobody is raised, nothing is multiplied. What happens is that two women meet, and are glad. And the gladness, it turns out, is what carries.

Luke does not describe the parting. He says only that Mary stayed about three months and returned to her home. Luke tells his stories in the order they matter, and it seems the parting was not one of them.

But I like to think about the morning she left. I imagine Elizabeth standing at the gate, with a hand on her belly, and the dust of the road already rising ahead. I imagine her saying something simple, like, go carefully. I imagine Mary turning, once, at the bend in the path, to wave. And I imagine Elizabeth standing there until the little figure disappears, and then going back in, very slowly, to start on the washing.

Because the Gospel does tell us what happens soon after. Elizabeth's son is born, and the neighbours are delighted, and they want to call him Zechariah after his father. And Elizabeth says no, he is to be called John. They argue. They turn to Zechariah, who is still silent, and ask him by signs. He asks for a writing tablet, and he writes, his name is John. And at once, Luke says, his mouth was opened, and he began to speak, praising God.

So the silence ends, in the end, with a name, and a song, and a house full of people who cannot believe their ears. But that is another night.

It is time to slow down, now. The lamps are low.

Let us say a little about what became of these people, and what has been remembered.

John, the child who leaped, grew up in the desert, and became the one we call John the Baptist. He is a great saint of both traditions, and the Orthodox Church honours him especially, as the Forerunner, the one who goes ahead. He told the people to get ready, and he pointed to Jesus. It is the same thing he did in the womb, if you think about it, only now with words.

Zechariah and Elizabeth are both honoured as saints, in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches alike. They are remembered as a faithful old couple, who kept waiting and were not forgotten. Elizabeth's name means, my God is an oath, or something very close to it, and it is one of the oldest names in the Bible. It was the name of Aaron's wife, you may remember, in the book of Exodus. She has had it for a very long time.

And Mary went home, to Nazareth, to Joseph, to the rest of her story, which is the whole of the Gospel and which we will not try to tell in a single night.

As for the house in the hills, there is a tradition, and I will call it that, because the Gospel does not say so, that the town where Elizabeth lived is the place now called Ein Karem, a village in the hills a few miles west of Jerusalem. The name means, spring of the vineyard. There is a spring there, and the old tradition says it is the one where Mary drew water. There are two churches in the village, built in the last few centuries on older foundations, one for the birth of John and one for the meeting of the two women, and pilgrims come to both. In the church of the Visitation, I am told, the Magnificat is written on the wall, in dozens of languages, on ceramic panels along the courtyard wall. I have never been there, since I am a synthetic voice, but I find the thought of it very moving. Dozens of languages, all saying the same song.

The Catholic Church keeps the feast of the Visitation on the thirty-first of May, the end of the month of Mary. The Orthodox Church remembers the meeting on days of its own, and the calendars differ, so I will not give a date I cannot vouch for. Either way, the song is sung at evening in many places, and there is probably, somewhere in the world, a community of tired sisters or brothers who are singing it right now.

Some notes for the curious. The whole story we have told comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter one, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. The visit is in verses thirty-nine to fifty-six. The background about Zechariah, the angel in the Temple, the silence and the five months of seclusion is in the verses before, and the naming of John is in verses fifty-seven to sixty-six. Mary's haste, the hill country, the greeting, the leap of the child, Elizabeth's loud cry and her two blessings and her question, the song of Mary, and the three months, are all in the text. The road, the weather, the stopping to straighten her scarf, the bread and the lentil soup, the sweeping of the yard, Zechariah's drawings, and most of the small jokes, are ours.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, the Gospel does not say who Mary travelled with, how long it took, or exactly where Elizabeth lived. The hundred miles and the five to seven days are our estimate, and the town is named only as a city in the hill country of Judah. Ein Karem is a long tradition, and we have called it one.

Second, the song. The words we gave are our own plain rendering, not any one published translation, and we have tried to keep the meaning close to the Gospel. Scholars point out how many of its phrases echo the Old Testament, especially the song of Hannah, and we have mentioned that echo as a reading, which is the usual view, rather than a certainty about what Mary was thinking.

Third, the Gospel does not say whether Mary was still with Elizabeth when John was born, only that she stayed about three months and then went home. The order in the text suggests she left before the birth, and we have told it that way, but the text does not say so outright.

Mary and Elizabeth are both honoured as saints in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Mary is honoured above all the saints, as the Mother of God, and we have said so plainly, as both traditions do.

That's the story of Mary and Elizabeth for tonight. The Catholic Church keeps the Visitation on the thirty-first of May. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have, tonight, someone to go and see. May the road to them be shorter than you fear. May you be met at the door by someone who is glad. May you be able to say, out loud, the good thing that has happened to you, and be believed. May you be a person who goes with haste toward joy. May your small song be made of old songs, and fit. May the hungry be fed and the lowly be lifted, and may you have a share in the doing of it. And may the God who looks upon the small keep you and yours, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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