The Visitation: Life Recognizing Life

Today's Scripture

Luke 1:41-44 — "And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.'"

Exodus 21:22-23 — "When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life."

The Big Idea

Today we hold two passages side by side. One is a doorway scene so joyful it has been painted for two thousand years: an unborn baby leaps at the approach of an unborn Lord. The other is an ancient law so difficult that good scholars still argue over a single Hebrew verb. Both belong in this conversation. Faith does not need to hide from hard texts — because the heart of today's reading is not an argument at all. It is a fact: when God came to save the world, he came as an embryo.

Reflection

Two mothers, two hidden sons

Anyone who has stood near a pregnant mom when the baby kicks knows what happens next. She grabs the nearest hand and presses it to her side. Everyone leans in. Someone says, "Hello in there!" Nobody in that room is talking to "tissue." Love has already recognized a person.

Luke 1 is that moment, charged with the Holy Spirit. Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, hurries to the hill country to see her relative Elizabeth, six months pregnant with John the Baptist. Mary calls a greeting through the door — and the unborn John leaps. Elizabeth, "filled with the Holy Spirit," interprets the kick: "the baby in my womb leaped for joy" (Luke 1:44). Not a reflex. A response. The forerunner began his work of pointing to Jesus before either of them was born.

Luke was a physician, and he chooses his words carefully. The Greek word he uses for the unborn John is brephos — baby. It is exactly the word he uses for the newborn Jesus lying in the manger (Luke 2:12 — "you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths") and for the toddlers people brought to Jesus (Luke 18:15-16 — "Now they were bringing even infants to him... 'Let the children come to me'"). Unborn, newborn, toddler: same word. Luke draws no line where our debates draw one.

The Old Testament tells womb stories the same way. When Rebekah's pregnancy turns turbulent, Genesis 25:22-23 says "the children struggled together within her," and the LORD tells her, "Two nations are in your womb." Children. Nations. Persons with futures — before birth.

C.S. Lewis saw what all this means for Christmas itself, and said it with his usual bluntness:

"The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman's body." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Let that land. For nine months, the Maker of galaxies was an unborn child. Whatever else Christians say about the unborn, we can never say they are beneath God's dignity. God has been one.

An honest look at a hard text

Now the difficult passage. Exodus 21 is Israel's case law — real-life example cases used to teach judges how to rule. This case: two men are fighting, a pregnant woman is struck, "so that her children come out." If "there is no harm," the guilty man pays a fine. If "there is harm," the penalty rises: "life for life, eye for eye" (Exodus 21:23-24).

The fight among interpreters is over what "her children come out" means. Does it describe a premature live birth — in which case "harm" covers the child, and the law protects the unborn at the highest level? Or does it describe a miscarriage — in which case the fine might suggest the unborn carried a lesser legal status? The Hebrew verb yatsa, "come out," is used elsewhere for ordinary births, which supports the first reading. But honest scholars on both sides have made careful cases, and a devotional should not pretend otherwise.

So let us say what can be said with confidence. Even on the most minimal reading, harming the unborn is never treated as nothing in God's law — it is penalized, taken seriously, brought before judges. And the surrounding witness of Scripture does not leave the question hanging. David confesses, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5) — tracing his own moral story, his me, all the way back to conception.

It is worth knowing that John Calvin, one of history's most careful readers of the Old Testament, studied this exact passage and concluded:

"The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy." — John Calvin, Harmony of the Law

You may weigh the Hebrew differently than Calvin did. But notice his method: he did not skip the hard text, and he did not let one ambiguous verb overturn everything the rest of Scripture had shown him. That is what faithful reading looks like — convictions built on the whole counsel of God, with honesty about the parts still debated.

Why would God leave an ambiguous verse sitting in his Word at all? Perhaps partly for this: hard texts keep us honest. They force us to admit that we come to the Bible wanting it to agree with us — and they train us to let it speak first. A faith that can only survive on easy verses is not yet a grown-up faith.

Witnesses from the modern darkness

The twentieth century gave this question two unforgettable witnesses. The first is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing his Ethics inside Nazi Germany — a state that had officially decided some lives were "unworthy of life." He had watched where that logic leads, and he refused to let the church blur the starting point. "Nascent" life simply means life that is just beginning, and Bonhoeffer wrote:

"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Strong words — among the strongest he ever wrote. But read what he says in the very next breath, because almost no one quotes it:

"A great many different motives may lead to an action of this kind; indeed in cases where it is an act of despair, performed in circumstances of extreme human or economic destitution and misery, the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Hold those two quotes together and you have this entire plan in miniature. Full moral seriousness about the child. Full moral seriousness about the desperation — and about a community whose failures help create it. Bonhoeffer aims his hardest sentence not at frightened women but at the church and society that left them alone. Tomorrow's reading will walk straight into that challenge.

The second witness is Mother Teresa, who spent her life among the discarded poor of Calcutta. Invited to speak in Washington in 1994, with presidents and senators in the room, she asked a question nobody could answer:

"And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?" — Mother Teresa, National Prayer Breakfast, 1994

Her logic is simple enough for a child and heavy enough for a nation. If love is not safe in its first home, it is not safe anywhere. And like Bonhoeffer, she did not stop at words: her communities took in the mothers and children nobody else wanted. Conviction that costs the speaker nothing convinces nobody. Hers cost her everything she had.

God was once an embryo

Step back now from the arguments and look again at that doorway in the hill country. The deepest claim of today's passage is not about law or biology. It is about God. The early church father Athanasius stated the wonder this way — and he did not mean we become gods, but that through Christ we are brought to share God's own life:

"For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." — Athanasius, On the Incarnation

And how did the Son of God become man? Not by descending on a cloud, full-grown. Augustine never stopped marveling at the route God chose:

"Man's Maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breasts." — Augustine, Sermon 191

The Ruler of the stars passed through every stage of human smallness — embryo, fetus, infant — and in doing so he answered our question from the inside. How does heaven regard the unborn? Heaven has been the unborn. The first creature on earth to celebrate the Incarnation was an unborn child, and the Lord he leaped for was an embryo only days old.

This is the gospel's word to a world that ranks lives by size, strength, and wantedness: God entered the world at the bottom of every ranking. He was microscopic. He was dependent. He was, by Roman law and modern logic alike, disposable — and he came that way on purpose, to redeem us, because "whoever receives one such child in my name receives me" (Matthew 18:5). Long before Sinai, God set the choice before his people: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). In Jesus, God did more than command that choice. He made it — choosing our life at the cost of his own.

Going Deeper

Today, practice honest reading. Take the position on Exodus 21:22-25 you find most convincing — and then, for five minutes, write out the other side's best argument as fairly as you can, as if a friend who holds it were checking your work. Then read Luke 1:39-45 once more, slowly. Notice which kind of certainty God has actually given you: not the settling of every scholarly debate, but a Savior who was once as small as the lives we are discussing.