Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time.”
~~~
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.
~~~
Why is it that Zechariah is punished for his question while Mary is not? After all, “How can I be sure?” does not seem materially different from “How will this be?” Further puzzling is the fact that Mary not only is not punished for her question, but she actually receives an answer! How can this be right?
The answer, I think, lies in the difference between memory and hope, between knowledge of what God has already done and expectant desire for what God has yet to do.
Mary’s question is sanctioned and answered because of the uniqueness of her calling: never had a virgin conceived; never had a woman borne the “son of God.” She had every reason, therefore, to wonder how it could be that this would happen. Her question needed asking.
Zechariah’s question, conversely, did not need asking. He, unlike Mary, ”doubted in his heart” and so his is a faithless – and therefore false – question. Repeatedly in her history with YHWY, Israel witnessed God’s power to “settle the barren woman in her home as a happy mother of children” (Ps 113.9). Indeed, Israel’s history begins with just this story! The angel silences Zechariah because he fails to remember what God has already done. This miscarriage of memory reveals his lack of faith in God’s covenant faithfulness.
Also, notice that Zechariah’s question is really very different from Mary’s, even if on the surface they seem synonymous. He asks for certainty: “How can I be sure?” Apparently, he is seeking to diminish his risk, to find a way around what it is God is requiring of him. His question curves him back on himself, as he demands God to kowtow to his “need to understand.” The truth is, Zechariah stands convinced of the realities of his limitations rather than God’s power to transcend and reconfigure those limitations.
Mary, of course, has no analogical event to remember. She’s hearing of a “new thing” that never before has been, and so she is envisioning an impossible future possibilized by God’s infinite and infinitely good generativity. Leaning into this future, Mary asks – in faith - “How?”
Her question is qualitatively different from Zechariah’s. She does not ask for certainty, but for direction. In fact, she asks nothing for herself. She does not fear the risk. Her question opens her before God, reveals her readiness to be and to let be:
I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.
She is moving herself toward God, already beginning to narrate herself into God’s story, already trying to imagine the unimaginably good future. She is joyfully surprised to find that what she had thought were limits are in fact portals for the in-breaking of God’s power.
Zechariah’s question, then, is faithless; Mary’s, faithful. Zechariah could not believe God would overcome Elizabeth’s – and, therefore, Israel’s – barrenness; Mary could not imagine how she could virginally bear a child and was astonished that this was the way God would redeem God’s people. His is a failure of nerve and memory; hers, a simple incapacity to conceive the ways of God and delightful bewilderment before the one whose thoughts are beyond all imagining and whose love is past understanding.
~~~
We see, then, that some questions arise from disbelief, from a failure to remember what God has done and a failure of nerve before the involved risks. Some of us suffer from a spiritual amnesia and so our questions should not be asked and can not be answered. They are dead-end questions. In the end, they reduce us to silence.
On the other hand, there are questions that do open out to other questions; questions that are always taking us nearer and nearer the one who is the answer to all. These are questions of hope emerging from our puzzlement at God’s always-surprising creativity, and our happy incredulity before the promises of one “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3.20). These are the questions that humanize us, sanctifying our hearts and minds, drawing us into the eternal divine conversation.
