In this episode there is one circumstance that appears strange if ethnographic details are taken into account. The point is that among Jews a son can receive his father's name only if the father died during the mother's pregnancy. It is hard to say when this custom arose, but if it already existed by the time of John's birth, then the position of Zechariah, who was forced for a long time to remain silent, looks tragic: he is not taken into account; he is equated with the dead. The neighbors and relatives, rejoicing at the infant's birth and proposing to name him Zechariah, are in essence disposing of things in a house that is not theirs.

But Zechariah, despite the humiliations he endured, kept faithfulness to God. We hear his inspired speech, containing prophecy, and the evangelist notes that he spoke under the action of the Holy Spirit. But in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit, Zechariah had to pass patiently through the trial of rejection.

On the day of the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Church offers us readings that tell of the relationship between God and His chosen people. And although John is first mentioned only in the New Testament, he has the most direct connection with all the preceding history of Israel. Sometimes he is spoken of as the last prophet of the Old Testament, and this is truly so. Being the son of one of the priests of the Jerusalem Temple, he became heir to all the piety of the Old Testament, and not only by origin. He experienced an encounter with the Lord even before his birth into the world, and the Lord called him "from the womb to be His servant, to bring Jacob back to Him and that Israel might be gathered to Him" (Isa. 49:5).

John continued to carry out his service to God, calling people to repentance, even after the beginning of Christ's preaching. But by his actions he "fulfilled," that is, brought to fullness, what the whole people of Israel had been called to do during the Old Testament period: to live before God and bear witness to the world about the coming Savior. He shows the fullest possible holiness for God's people: the closest possible approach to God by human strength. But as the Lord Himself said, "among those born of women there has not arisen one greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he" (Matt. 11:11), because our efforts alone are not enough. And the Lord wants us to make efforts, to try as much as possible to draw near to Him, and He will fill up the rest by coming to us.

Today's reading completes the evangelist's account of the birth of John the Baptist. It is notable that Luke's conclusion of the account of this event follows immediately after the account of the Annunciation, which turns out to be included within the account of John's miraculous conception and birth. This composition of the first chapter of the Gospel is clearly not accidental. Each of the evangelists describes in his own way the reality of what theologians today call the Incarnation. For Luke, as we can see, it has first of all a historical, or more precisely, a philosophy-of-history dimension.

This approach was not something completely new: the sacred texts that existed in early Christian times (the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets, and the Latter Prophets) were likewise works concerned with the meaning of history. They presented the history of the people of God as the history of Revelation. And the history of Revelation was, naturally, above all the history of God's relationship with the human being. It is no surprise that it was chiefly the history of prophets and righteous people: one can learn about revelation only through the testimony of those who hear God and are not afraid to testify to what they have heard.

For Luke, who knew how Jesus evaluated the ministry of John the Baptist (Luke 7:28), this prophet clearly became a symbol of prophetic ministry as such, a kind of quintessence of the entire prophetic tradition. It is no accident that the evangelist describes his miraculous birth in such detail, as if making it clear that God Himself points to John as the one who will complete what the prophets of former times had begun. And Luke describes the birth of the Messiah-Christ as an event that proves to be the center and meaning of the whole history of Revelation.

In this respect the composition of the first chapter partly resembles the composition of an Eastern icon, where what is shown in the center and in the foreground is usually not what three-dimensional perspective requires, but what is the center of meaning in what is depicted. In Luke, this composition has an additional meaning: the Nativity of Christ is woven into the fabric of history, even if it is portrayed symbolically, and yet it is entirely real. In this way Luke expressed the truth of what today is usually called the Incarnation, without which the whole history of Revelation would have remained incomplete.