Origen's homily on Luke 1's infancy narrative, reading Mary's three-month stay with Elizabeth and Zacharias's prophecy as signs of hidden spiritual growth.
This homily belongs to Origen's series of sermons on the Gospel of Luke, preached to a congregation and later translated into Latin by Jerome. It works through a short stretch of Luke's infancy narrative: Mary's three-month stay with Elizabeth after the Annunciation, the birth and naming of John the Baptist, Zacharias's loosed tongue, and the Benedictus, the prophecy Zacharias speaks once he can talk again.
Origen's method is to treat every narrative detail as deliberate and meaningful, since he holds that Luke would not record something without reason. He asks why Luke bothers to mention that Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, and answers that John and Zacharias were being spiritually formed by Christ's hidden presence during that whole period, not just in the single instant when the unborn John leapt for joy at Mary's greeting. He contrasts John's wondrous, accelerated life -- taken into the desert as an infant rather than nursed and reared in the ordinary way -- with Moses, who only fled to the desert after forty years. He also draws a distinction between the births of the righteous, whose "time is completed," and the births of sinners, about which scripture never uses that phrase.
The homily then moves into the Benedictus itself, reading Zacharias's prophecy line by line: the "horn of salvation" raised up in David's house, deliverance "from the hand of our enemies" read as freedom from spiritual rather than bodily enemies, and mercy shown to the patriarchs. Origen insists the patriarchs benefited from Christ's coming even though they died centuries earlier, extending the logic to claim that Christ's saving work reached heavenly as well as earthly beings. The homily matters as a specimen of Origen's typological and allegorical exegesis, treating a brief Gospel episode as dense with theological implication about spiritual formation, Christ's cosmic reach, and the difference between literal and hidden meaning in scripture.
“it is left to our conjecture what progress John made in the three months, while Mary was staying beside Elizabeth.”
— Homily on Luke 9 · read this chapter →
“The birth of a righteous person has fullness, but the nativity of a sinner has, so to speak, emptiness and vanity.”
— Homily on Luke 9 · read this chapter →
“As long as his tongue was bound, it was human; for unbelief had bound it. As soon as it was loosed, it ceased to be merely human, and he spoke, blessing God”
— Homily on Luke 9 · read this chapter →
“For it is not credible that those who earlier saw his day and rejoiced should afterward, at his coming and his birth from the virgin, have received no benefit.”
— Homily on Luke 9 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon on the early chapters of Luke's Gospel covering Mary's three-month stay with Elizabeth, the birth and naming of John the Baptist, Zacharias's loosed tongue, and the Benedictus. Origen reads each narrative detail as spiritually meaningful, arguing John and Zacharias were secretly being formed by Christ's hidden presence during those months.
Origen argues it was so that Christ, present in Mary's womb, could spiritually instruct not only John but also Zacharias over the full period, since it would be unfitting for John to leap for joy in a single instant and then make no further progress over three whole months.
Origen contrasts them: Moses only fled to the desert after living forty years in Egypt and spent another forty years tending flocks before his mission began, while John passed into the desert as soon as he was born, showing what Origen calls a more wondrous upbringing.
He argues this should not be read as deliverance from bodily enemies but from spiritual ones, since the rescue Zacharias describes happened without visible conflict and 'without fear,' unlike ordinary deliverances that come only after facing danger.
Yes. He states it is not credible that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who rejoiced at seeing Christ's day in advance, received no benefit from his actual coming, and he extends this reasoning to argue Christ's saving work benefited heavenly beings as well as those on earth.
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