UNLIKE MANY of my friends and colleagues, I did not grow up in a Christian family nor in the church. I’ve sometimes envied the way in which their identity is grounded in a church tradition that goes back several generations. They’re not just Christians, they’re Presbyterians, or Baptists, or Mennonites, or whatever, through and through. By contrast, my family went to church at best twice a year when we visited my grandparents, just to make them happy. But I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I didn’t know the songs.

Thus, I have no treasured childhood memories of worshiping in community with others. The music of my youth came from the tinny little radio at my bedside, not the church. And still today, those are the songs that will sometimes pop spontaneously into my mind. I may even walk around the house singing them—until I realize how empty or embarrassing the lyrics might be.

I do know and can sing many of the classic hymns, of course, having learned them after I became a Christian in college; that goes for a host of contemporary praise songs, too. But I can’t honestly say that these songs are as deeply rooted in me as the songs I listened to over and over as a kid.

What about you? Were you raised in any particular church tradition? If so, do you still value it? Are the songs of that tradition also your songs? Do you find yourself humming or singing them? Are they part of your identity, part of how you see and respond to God, to the world?

This is how I imagine it was for Zechariah, for Mary. Both Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, the first priest of the people of Israel. Mary was Elizabeth’s relative—perhaps a cousin—so she may have been a descendant of Aaron as well. All of them, I assume, were raised as faithful Jews. Stories of God may have been told in their homes and exchanged with neighbors. They went to synagogue, heard the reading of the Torah or the Prophets, and chanted the Psalms. These were the texts and songs they grew up with, the words that shaped their identity as a people.

We can even see the tradition being passed from one generation to the next in the pages of Scripture itself. God is not just God, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Newer psalms draw from older psalms and repurpose them for new situations. In his teaching, Jesus frequently quotes from the Psalms and Prophets, and the writers of the New Testament do the same.

Thus, when Zechariah sings his song of praise, the words reflect the deep and rich tradition in which he was raised and trained. That doesn’t mean that the Benedictus is nothing more than a string of quotes from the Old Testament. But it does mean that the Torah, the Psalms, and the Prophets thoroughly shaped his vision and his identity as both a faithful man and as a priest.

Consider, for example, his opening words:

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel… (Luke 1:68, NIV)

The very same words can be found in Psalm 41:13, at the end of Book 1 of the Psalms. They’re also found at the end of Books 2 and 4, in Psalm 72:18 and 106:48. That’s not a coincidence; the placement signifies how the phrase was part of the worship life of Israel.

In Luke 1:69, Zechariah sings that God “has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David.” The horn was a symbol of strength; Zechariah was saying that God had given the people a mighty king. Similarly, Psalm 18:2 speaks of “the horn of my salvation,” and in Psalm 132:17, we’re given an oracle from God stating “I will make a horn grow for David.”

The theme of God’s mercy, as we’ve seen, is central to the Psalms, and the same could be said about God’s covenant faithfulness. Zechariah sings that by his mercy, God was remembering “his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham” (1:72-73). Similarly, in the Psalms, we read:

He remembers his covenant forever,
    the promise he made, for a thousand generations,
the covenant he made with Abraham,
    the oath he swore to Isaac. (Ps 105:8-9)

The writings of the prophets also play a role. When he turns to sing directly to his son, Zechariah proclaims that by the mercy of God “the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:78-79). Compare this to Malachi 4:2, in which God declares through the prophet that for the righteous, on the day of judgment, “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.”

Or consider Isaiah 9:2:

The people walking in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
    a light has dawned.

That verse, significantly, is also quoted by Matthew in his gospel (Matt 4:16) as he introduces the preaching ministry of Jesus.

Zechariah ends by saying that God’s intention is to “guide our feet into the path of peace” (Luke 1:79). The imagery of walking the right path can be found throughout the Psalms. But we could think here also of Isaiah 59:8, which describes evil and violent people in these terms:

The way of peace they do not know;
    there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads;
    no one who walks along them will know peace.

Again, none of this is to say that Zechariah was cobbling together a list of quotes. It’s better to say that both he and Mary were schooled well in the language and images of their Jewish heritage. They didn’t praise God by singing about how happy they were; they praised God for being faithful to the covenant promises they already knew so well.

In a highly individualistic culture, “tradition” can be a bit of a dirty word. And to be fair, just because something is traditional doesn’t automatically make it right or good. But we’d do well to try to steep ourselves in the thought-world Zechariah inhabited. We won’t do it perfectly; we’re inescapably people of our own time and place. But we might learn a thing or two about the worldly traditions we already take for granted, and how the Scriptures provide a different way to imagine life.