Origen's fifth homily on Luke reads Zechariah's temple-muteness as an allegory of Israel's loss of prophetic speech after rejecting the Word.
Homily on Luke 5 is a short sermon by Origen on the opening of Luke's Gospel, focused on the priest Zechariah, who is struck mute in the temple after seeing an angel and can only communicate by nodding until his son John the Baptist is born. Origen treats this episode not as an isolated miracle but as a figure for the condition of the Jewish people after the coming of Christ: 'It is the silence of the prophets among the people of Israel.' Where the Word, who was with the Father in the beginning, has passed to the Gentile nations and speaks freely among them, among the Jews he remains silent to this day.
From that reading, Origen builds an extended allegory in which Jewish ritual observance becomes a series of 'nods' rather than reasoned speech. Circumcision, the Passover, and the festivals are performed, he argues, without an accompanying rational account, and are therefore mute gestures rather than truth-bearing acts. He links this to Moses's own claim at the burning bush to be a man 'without speech, without reason,' arguing that the whole nation was in a childlike, wordless state before receiving the Law, and has returned to that state now that it has rejected the Word.
The homily closes with a citation of Isaiah's image of the daughter of Zion left desolate 'like a watchman's hut in a cucumber field,' applied to Israel's abandonment, and a warning to the homily's own Gentile Christian audience: since salvation has been transferred to the nations on account of Israel's rejection, those nations must not grow complacent, lest they too prove unworthy and incur a still greater judgment. The piece is a compact example of Origen's method of reading Old and New Testament narrative details as coded commentary on salvation history and the shift from Israel to the church.
“It is the silence of the prophets among the people of Israel. God no longer speaks to them at all”
— Homily on Luke 5 · read this chapter →
“To this day the people of Israel are deaf and mute; nor could it be otherwise than that the one who had cast the Word away from himself should be deaf and mute.”
— Homily on Luke 5 · read this chapter →
“the daughter of Zion will be left like a shelter in a vineyard, and like a watchman's hut in a cucumber field”
— Homily on Luke 5 · read this chapter →
“we ought to take care, lest perhaps they were cast out for our sake, and we prove worthy of a greater punishment”
— Homily on Luke 5 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon on Luke's account of the priest Zechariah being struck mute in the temple and communicating only by nods until the birth of John the Baptist. Origen reads that muteness allegorically as the silencing of prophecy among the Jewish people after the coming of Christ.
In Luke's narrative he is struck mute after doubting the angel's announcement of John's birth. Origen takes that literal event and turns it into a figure for Israel losing its prophetic voice once it rejected the Word, who has instead 'passed over' to speak among the Gentiles.
He argues that circumcision, Passover, and the festivals are still performed but without a reasoned account of their meaning, so they are like Zechariah's mute nods rather than speech joined to reason -- gesture without the Word behind it.
He rereads Moses's protest that he is not eloquent as meaning 'without speech, without reason,' and treats it as evidence that the Israelites in Egypt were themselves in a wordless, reasonless state before receiving the Law through Moses as its minister.
Origen closes by cautioning his hearers that Israel's rejection made room for the nations' salvation, but that Gentile believers must not become complacent -- they risk a greater punishment if they too fail to live up to God's adoption and mercy.
Commentary on John, Book 1 · Commentary on John, Book 10 · Commentary on John, Book 2 · Commentary on John, Book 4 · Commentary on John, Book 5 · Commentary on John, Book 6 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 10 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 11 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 12 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 13 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 14 · Commentary on Matthew, Book 15