One of my favourite passages in the whole Bible is the meeting between Mary, the mother-to-be of Jesus and Elizabeth in some unnamed Judean village (Luke 1:39-56). Mary (single, teenage, pregnant and claiming God did it) was presumably in hot water and it is perhaps no wonder that she went ‘in haste’ to her relative in the hill country.
And so we have two women, or a woman and a girl, hugging, laughing, crying, bouncing around inside Elizabeth’s house.
In AD1, according to the all-knowing artificial intelligence, there were the following empires:
- The Roman Empire
- The Han dynasty in China
- The Parthian Empire, rival to Rome
- The Kingdom of Aksum (East Africa)
- Maurya and Stavahana Dynasties (Deccan region of India)
All proud empires and in the case of the Romans under Augustus and the Han, in something of a golden age. But the bouncing women in the kitchen, and the children growing inside them, would surpass and uproot them all.
And the women knew.
I think prayer is like that. That even now, amid children and shopping and figuring out what’s for dinner, people in prayer are receiving promises that will re-landscape the world. The proud will be humbled, the mighty brought down, while the humble are treated, by God, like royalty. Prayer is the ultimate slow activity, lowly, hidden. Receiving and bearing promises from God is lonely. That was why the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth was so happy: two people weighed down with God’s promises each met and recognized a sister in the believing and in its burden. Their acts of prayer and faith were acts of lowly love that rocked the world and outlived its empires.