Reading Luke 1:39–56 Ecologically

Luke 1:39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of the holy one comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a ful-fillment of what was spoken to her by the word of God.” 46 And Mary said, “My soul magnifies my God, 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour . . . 56 And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home. NRSV

“In those days Mary set out . . . to a Judean town.” This well-known text that we call “The Visitation” opens readers into two significant ways in which the human community understands its place in the cosmos, namely time and space. So often in reading our biblical text, we tend to read over these elements as merely backdrop to a divine/human drama. In seeking to read our sacred story ecologically as part of developing an ecological consciousness, I have suggested that we read not only for the human and holy but also for habitat and the profound interconnectedness of those three. They draw us into a new way of being, as well as a new way of reading.

Story Unfolding in Time

The opening phrase: “In those days”, locates us as readers in time, one of the inescapable frameworks through which we interpret and order our world. The phrase would not have been understood by first-century readers/hearers as linear calendric days, as we do now. It would more likely have caught up its hearers into life’s processes unfolding in a spiralling movement rather than in linear form. The angel’s words to Mary: “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son” (Lk 1:31), set a process in motion that readers know will unfold in the days that are forthcoming. Attentiveness to the phrase: “In those days”, can, therefore, invite readers into a new mode of conceiving and engaging with time. Our present carries in it what has gone before and it anticipates what will unfold in spiralling rather than linear mode.

Story Unfolding in Place

As readers encounter Mary setting out in haste to go to a Judean town in the hill country, they are reminded that our sacred story unfolds not only in time but also in space/place. In this instance, the place is an unnamed village in the Judean hill country surrounding Jerusalem. The Lucan narrator doesn’t pause even to tell readers the name of the village but the story cannot proceed without place/the village and all this referent evokes. The narrator is more concerned with what happens in the village, namely Mary’s entering the house of Zechariah and greeting Elizabeth. Just as there was no pausing over the identity of the village, so too the reader is moved quickly over the patriarchal structure of the household (it is Zechariah’s). The ecological reader notes the necessary critique of such a structure in order to prevent it from being read as norm. Here, however, the reader is moved on to the focal point of the narrative: Mary greets Elizabeth. In that action, two women pregnant with new life, touch and embrace.

Many beautiful images capture this embrace most poignantly in its bodyliness, its materiality. Each woman carries in her body new life at different points of gestation. They touch each other and in that movement each gives and each receives touch; they touch and they are touched. The material body of each conveys a message to the other, a message that is holy, a message that is of the holy.

Words or sound burst forth from Mary as greeting. Elizabeth hears, she hears the sound of the greeting. The narrative draws readers’ attention to a second sense—that of hearing. The meeting and greeting passing between these two women set a movement in play in the womb of Elizabeth — the child in her womb leaps for joy and she is filled with a spirit that is holy. The holy plays within the human as habitat in all its materiality.

Such play of the holy continues as Elizabeth cries out: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” She proclaims Mary as “blessed among women”, blessed among the community of women.

In her, Elizabeth sees the holy playing among women, playing in places or more particularly playing among people where the holy was little expected because of the dominant patriarchal perspectives. Elizabeth also proclaims the child taking shape in the womb of Mary as blessed: blessed is the fruit of your womb. Her words turn our attention as readers to the materiality of the promised child in the womb of the mother. This in turn reminds us of Anne Elvey’s insight that the birth of the child signals the birth of the mother as mother. All of this unfolds in the body, the material body of a woman, habitat for the holy.

Interrelationship of Holy, Human and Habitat

The narrative of the visitation concludes with verse Lk1: 45: “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the word of God.” The often repeated word “blessed” in this narrative designates a wisdom proclamation referring to those who are in right relationship with God (eg, Pss. 1:1; 32:1-2). For the ecological reader, that right relationship extends to the holy-human-habitat interrelationship. It is in the flesh that Mary has conceived. It is in her body that she has believed. In this same body she receives “what was spoken to her”.

The text moves from here to the well-known Song of Mary, the Magnificat. It is not possible in the space of this article to turn an ecological lens onto this song. Rather the final words of this reading turn to the concluding verse of the selected narrative, namely Lk1: 56: “And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.”

As at the beginning of the narrative, time and place play within an ecological reading. Mary remains with Elizabeth “about three months” and then returns to her home. It is the material space that she left earlier to come into the “hill country of Judea”. It is the space within which a most remarkable narrative of bodies touching and being touched has played out and has drawn readers into the places, the spaces, the materiality in which the intimate relationship between habitat, human and holy unfolds.

Published in Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 211, December 2016: 22-23.