Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Luke · About this commentary
The Baby Leaped
Luke 1:39-45
39 Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah, · WEB
Two pregnant women meet in a hill village, and the first person to recognize him is unborn.
Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah Luke 1:39.
She goes at once, and she goes a long way — the hill country of Judea is several days south of Galilee, and a girl in her position had reasons to be somewhere else. The sign she was given was a person, and she goes to look at it.
When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit Luke 1:41.
The order of that sentence is worth marking. The child moves first, and then his mother is filled with the Spirit and understands what the movement was. The promise made in the temple — filled with the Spirit even from his mother's womb Luke 1:15 — is being kept in front of us, and the forerunner begins his work six months before he is born, doing the only thing he will ever do: pointing at someone else.
"Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!" Luke 1:42. Elizabeth knows what has happened to Mary, and no one has told her. She is the older woman, the priest's wife, carrying the child the angel came to the temple about, and the deference runs entirely the other way.
"Why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Luke 1:43.
That is a large sentence for a village kitchen. My Lord said of an unborn child, by a woman speaking under the Spirit, is the first confession of him in the book — and it comes from a relative rather than from a prophet or a priest.
"For behold, when the voice of your greeting came into my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy!" Luke 1:44. She interprets what her own body did, and the word she reaches for is joy. This chapter keeps using it: joy at John's birth, joy in Mary's song, and the joy the shepherds are sent.
"Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of the things which have been spoken to her from the Lord!" Luke 1:45.
The second blessing is not for what Mary carries but for what she did — she believed. Set beside a husband upstairs who could not speak because he had not, the contrast is exact and it is not cruel; it is the chapter's way of saying which response God was after. And the ground of the blessing is the reliability of the speaker rather than the strength of the believing.
settled What this mark means