WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you were unable to speak for three months? How would you communicate? Would life become a perpetual game of Charades? Perhaps you’d try to write everything down—but surely this would get very old, very quickly. I’m guessing you’d probably decide early on that many things would simply have to be left unsaid until you got your voice back. If you knew for certain that this would happen on a particular date, you’d have it circled on your calendar and be counting the days.

And when that day finally came…imagine the joy and relief! It might feel like being released from prison. What would be the first words out of your mouth?

To Zechariah, as a priest, words were often holy things. With words, the stories of old were told and sung, helping the people remember the faithfulness of their God. With words, a priest would bless the people or invoke God’s presence. And it was with words that God spoke to his people through his messengers, the prophets and the angels.

Having endured three months of silence as a punishment for doubting the words of Gabriel, Zechariah anticipated the day of his release. I imagine him listening with growing impatience as his neighbors and relatives argued with Elizabeth about what the name of their newborn son should be. Snatching the writing tablet that was handed to him, the priest scrawled out with firm strokes, “His name is John.”

And with that, his tongue was set loose. Whatever he may have said first, what Luke gives us is a song of praise whose language echoes the psalms and prophets. Christians through the ages have called it “Zechariah’s Song” or the Benedictus, and the song breaks naturally into two parts. Here’s how it begins:

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
    because he has come to his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
    in the house of his servant David
(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
salvation from our enemies
   and from the hand of all who hate us—
to show mercy to our ancestors
    and to remember his holy covenant,
    the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
    and to enable us to serve him without fear
    in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. (Luke 1:68-75, NIV)

We’ll explore the Benedictus in more detail in the next post. For now, notice how part of Zechariah’s song echoes the theme and language of Mary’s Magnificat, in which she describes God as “remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors” (vss. 54-55). Likewise, Zechariah also sings of God’s mercy to the ancestors, remembering the covenant promise to Abraham.

We can also hear the theme of God’s mercy in the second part of Zechariah’s song, when he turns to sing these words directly to his son:

And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
to give his people the knowledge of salvation
    through the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace. (vss. 76-79)

These are prophetic words about John’s future prophetic ministry, and everything is grounded in God’s mercy. Why is the message of salvation and forgiveness given? Because of “the tender mercy of our God.” If we were to translate the phrase “tender mercy” literally, it would be something like “bowels of mercy.” After all, the word for “bowels” is the same one Luke uses in Acts 1:18, when Peter describes the death of the traitor Judas: “his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out” (I know…gross).

Similar language is used in the gospels to describe the compassion of Jesus. There’s a verb related to the noun that means bowels or intestines; it describes someone having what we might call a “gut reaction,” being viscerally moved to compassion or pity by what they see. In Matthew 9, for example, we read that

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (vss. 35-36)

“He had compassion on them”: that’s the verb describing Jesus’ gut reaction to the suffering of the masses. His ministry of compassionate healing was controversial, because it broke the boundaries of religious convention. He healed people on the Sabbath, making his enemies livid with frustration and rage. He healed people who were ritually unclean by touching them, which would have made him unclean as well. But in doing such things, he wasn’t simply meeting needs; he was demonstrating the very character of God, the character of covenant love and mercy.

Psalm 98, for example, invites the people to “Sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things” by remembering “his love and faithfulness to Israel” (vss. 1, 3). Psalm 136 turns that gratitude into liturgy. The worship leader recites one by one a long list of the things God has done in creation and on behalf of his people; after each one, the people respond, “His love endures forever,” a full 26 times.

The Hebrew word that the New International Version translates as “love” in all these cases can also be translated as “kindness” or “mercy”; it’s one of the central ways the Old Testament refers to God’s care for his covenant people. God even used the word to describe himself as he caused his glory to pass before Moses on Mount Sinai: “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness…” (Exod 34:6).

Surely, Zechariah experienced both the gift of a son and the return of his voice as divine mercies. But his song is not simply about what God has done for him. It’s about the mercy God showed to his people in the past, and how that same mercy was being demonstrated in promises made and fulfilled. Let’s take a closer look at how the words he spoke in the present echoed words spoken in the past.