Today, two pregnant women meet each other and are filled with joy!

Elizabeth stands as the penultimate image of the Old Covenant. She comes from the priestly line with John in her womb. Mary prefigures the New Covenant as she carries the savior of the world.

Tina Beattie has a captivating comment about Elizabeth. She says,

“Elizabeth was the last barren woman mentioned in the Bible to experience God’s presence in the physical manifestation of pregnancy. Elizabeth’s child would announce that the kingdom of God was at hand, and in that kingdom, with their personhood restored, women would become coworkers on an equal footing with men, valued not just in terms of their childbearing potential but as people of faith and vision.”

Elizabeth greets Mary:

“Blessed are you among women, 
and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, 
the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed
that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

In the Old Testament, “Blessed are you among women” is a greeting linked to Jael and Judith (Judges 5:24; Judith 13:18).

Jael brought Sisera, the enemy’s army captain into her tent. She was hospitable in giving him a blanket and milk to drink. After Sisera ate and fell asleep, Jael took a tent peg and a mallet and sneaked up on Sisera. She placed the tent peg’s point on his temple. She hit the peg with the mallet. It drove through his temple through the other side of his head!

 Judith took Holofernes’ sword and struck him twice to cut off his head! She puts his head in a food bag and leaves the enemy camp. They were two women warriors who tried to save Israel.

Now, this greeting reaches its new pitch as Elizabeth greets the docile one who carries within her the promise fulfilled. This is the one who tramples the head of the serpent!

Elizabeth is one of the characters who play her role in the story of salvation and then disappears. She falls in the cast of characters like Zechariah, Simeon, Anna, and Joseph.

Dr. Owen Cummings shares a beautiful idea on Elizabeth’s role in salvation history. It is an important lesson for us all:

“We come into this world, we play a role, partly not of our choosing and partly our choosing, and then we leave. In our Christian tradition, of course, we do not leave into nothingness, but rather into communion with the God who loves us. But we leave nonetheless …

Perhaps that is Elizabeth’s gift to us. We live our lives as well as we can, where we are, and in what we do, all the while in communion with God … And then it’s over, although in a quite other sense it is just beginning. Elizabeth, we may say, stands for the sheer ordinariness of life, the ordinariness of life that is our most common lot, and which is at the same time its grace and its beauty.”

Elizabeth and Mary. An ordinary meeting that was extraordinary. This meeting is a reminder that we carry Christ with us. In every meeting with others, we bring Christ. And many times, while we think we are visiting someone, we are also the ones being visited by the Savior. Let us take advantage of that moment. Jesus will come to us this Advent.