The image of pregnancy is a favorite prophetic trope: that is, the prophets’ propensity for likening the People of Israel, waiting for their deliverance, to a pregnant woman who is coming to term. Jeremiah prophesies, “For I heard a cry as of a woman in labor, anguish as of one bringing forth her first child, the cry of daughter Zion gasping for breath…” (Jer. 4:31). Or the prophet Isaiah, “Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near her time, so were we because of you, O Lord…” (Is. 26:17). Isaiah even likens God himself to a woman in the pangs of birth, “For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant” (Is. 42:14).
We see this same motif in our reading today from the prophet Micah. As in the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah, the People of Israel are awaiting a Savior, earnestly expecting what lies ahead, but the time is not yet. The prophet foretells the coming of the Messiah; yet the moment of deliverance has not yet come. “Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth”( Mic. 5:3). Before the Messiah comes forth to rule there will be a delay, a time that must still be fulfilled. “Writhe and groan, O daughter Zion, like a woman in labor” (Mic. 4:10), Micah says earlier in another part of the prophecy. “Why do you cry aloud?”, he says. “Is there no king in you?” (Mic. 4:9).
Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Micah himself are using pregnancy and labor as a metaphor for God’s deliverance of the People. A metaphor brings together two unrelated things into a relationship through comparison. When a poet talks about “the evening of life,” that is a metaphor: human life has its beginning, its “dawn,” just as a day has its start, and its conclusion as well, its “evening.” Obviously, the course of a life is very different from the course of a day; there is no direct connection between the two things, except that human life is numbered in such days. Yet the two can be compared, and the comparison can be understood, and not only by poets, but by folk like us. Not only that, but the comparison is useful, especially as we try to understand more deeply the nature of human life.
Our prophecy today uses metaphor in a similar way: to illustrate some truths about the way God works. Israel’s deliverance is an extensive process, over a period of centuries; a patient suffering by the People of the birth pangs of the coming age. It’s also like childbirth in that the timetable is set by God. It requires expectancy of the part of the People, a looking out for God to act and to bring to term what has been set in motion long before.
The coming of the Messiah is an agonizing process, as well, demanding patient forbearance. “Writhe and groan, O daughter Zion, like a woman in labor” (Mic. 4:10), as Micah says. It involves a crisis that is like the crisis of childbirth, for both mother and child. For the child that is born, of course, it is the unique crisis that is common to all of us: coming into the world. In deploying this metaphor of childbirth, the prophet helps us understand more deeply what it is to wait for redemption; to wait for God to act.
Now the curious thing about this prophetic metaphor of childbirth is that, in the birth of Jesus Christ, the metaphor has been actualized and become real. No longer simply a metaphor, the deliverance of the People has come to term in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As we heard in our Gospel today, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk. 1:42). Mary’s cousin Elizabeth goes on to say, “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk. 1:43-45). Mary’s child is the fulfillment of the promise, the working out of the metaphor.
Mary’s pregnancy is not like Israel’s patient waiting for the Lord to act. It is in fact itself the patient waiting that has come to term and become our redemption himself. Mary believed the word of the Lord, as Elizabeth says in our Gospel, and brought the Messiah to birth. “The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name” (Lk. 1:49), as Mary says in our Gospel. The child to be born from her is himself, in the words of the familiar Advent hymn, “Israel’s strength and consolation, hope of all the world thou art; dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.” In short, Jesus is the Messiah himself: the metaphor enacted, the foreshadowing brought into the full light of day.
We live in the time after his birth, but we still look out for his coming again in glory. We have our own time of expectant waiting. In a troubled world, we look for the security and peace that have been promised by the prophet. We still ask, what is God doing in each of our lives? A time of waiting may not be particularly comfortable for us, but surely God is not finished with us yet. Likewise, and most particularly in this time of transition, we wonder what new thing God is bringing to birth at St. Mark’s Church. We, as God’s People, continue to look forward in hope, waiting expectantly for the new thing that God will do.