By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli.

Martin Luther speaks imaginatively of the Old Testament as "the manger in which Christ lies." Richard Hays begins his splendid book, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, citing Luther's insight. Then, he expands the image: "[Jesus Christ] is the treasure who lies figurally wrapped in the folds of the Old Testament." "Figurally" because Jesus Christ, "prefigured" by God-inspired personages and events of Israel's history, recapitulates them, bringing them to historical and spiritual fulfillment. Like swaddling clothes, Israel's Scriptures both reveal and conceal the promised Messiah.

The first chapter of Saint Luke's Gospel masterfully weaves the ties binding the testaments not in abstract terms, but in the concrete persons of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph. What Luke says of Zechariah and Elizabeth, can be said, a fortiori, of Mary and Joseph: "they were righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly." (Luke 1:6) Yet notwithstanding this clear embeddedness in the faith of Israel, there also emerges, gradually but unmistakably, the newness that will become manifest in the Good News of Jesus Messiah.

Already the angel's double annunciation heralds the newness. Announcing to Zechariah the birth of the Baptist, Gabriel proclaims that "he will be great before the Lord. . .and will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb." (Luke 1:15) But in his annunciation to Mary Gabriel attests that "the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God." (Luke 1:35)

Now, it is true that, in the Greek, the verse does not contain the definite article and therefore is more literally translated "son of God." But as Luke Timothy Johnson affirms, "for Luke Jesus was not only a son of God. . .but the Son of God in a unique fashion."

This conviction is confirmed by Luke's lovely account of Mary's visitation to Elizabeth, the first part of which is the Gospel for this Fourth Sunday of Advent. Elizabeth, "filled with the Holy Spirit," cries aloud: 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!'" (Luke 1:42) How many times has her cry been repeated, over the ensuing centuries, in the prayers of millions, especially the poor and needy imploring, "Hail Mary!"

But Elizabeth continues with words less familiar, but no less significant. "And how does this happen to me that the mother of my Lord [kuriou] should come to me?" (Luke 1:43) Elizabeth senses that the fruit of Mary's womb is one greater than a prophet, one whose Lordship is unparalleled in Israel's past.

Later, after the birth of John and the loosening of his muteness, Zechariah bursts forth in praise of God, as he foretells his own son's mission. "You, child, shall be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord [kuriou] to prepare his ways." (Luke 1:76) Ever less astute than his spouse, Zechariah belatedly comes to realize the uniqueness of the child whom Mary bears.

There was a time in the final quarter of the last century when a prevailing view was that the Synoptics presented a "low Christology" - Jesus as teacher and prophet, though perhaps the greatest in the line of prophets. Thus, many commentators contrasted the Synoptics with what was deemed to be the uniquely "high Christology" represented by John's Gospel.

Richard Hays is one of the scholars who are successfully challenging that facile disjunction. He writes: "the more deeply I became engaged with the Synoptics, the more the conviction grew on me that their common witness to the divine identity of Jesus belonged closely together with John's witness." And he espouses the view that "Luke's Gospel creates a narrative identity of Jesus as 'Lord' - an identity shared with the one God of Israel."

That identification, illustrated in the prayerful confessions of Elizabeth and Zechariah, already takes distinctive narrative shape in the very first chapter of the Gospel....