The Benediction of Zacharias and Christmas

Called “the Benedictus,” Luke 1:67–79 is not merely a father’s (Zacharias) celebration of a newborn son (John the Baptist). After nine months of divinely imposed silence, his first words give a hymn of redemptive history. In the first half of the song, he looks past his own son to the very covenant faithfulness of God: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people, And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David” (1:68–69). “Visited” implies sovereign intervention. No longer silent, God stepped into human history to fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant. “Horn” symbolizes strength and victory, the salvation not merely political—as many in Israel hoped—but a deliverance from sin and spiritual death.

Then the focus shifts to the infant John, whose greatness lies wholly in his subservience to Christ and defined by his mission: “And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins” (1:76–77). Salvation is called the “remission of their sins.” Zacharias shows that the Messiah did not come to save Israel from Rome but from their iniquities.

John’s life work was to prepare the soil of the heart through repentance, so the “Dayspring” could take root: “Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:78–79). Dayspring refers to the sunrise – humanity pictured as huddled in the freezing darkness of a graveyard (“the shadow of death”). The essence of the Gospel then is the light of Christ breaking over the horizon, bringing “tender mercy” and providing the only path to true peace with God.