Saints Zachary and Elizabeth

Parents of Saint John the Baptist
(1st century BC)

Saints Zachary and Elizabeth are honoured by the Church as the parents of Saint John the Baptist and as the couple whose long childlessness, patient prayer, and ultimate miraculous fruitfulness prepared the way for the greatest of the prophets. Their story, told with extraordinary beauty in the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke, is one of the Old Testament themes that reappears, transformed and glorified, at the very opening of the New Testament narrative.

Zachary was a priest of the course of Abia, one of the twenty-four divisions of the priesthood that served in rotation in the Temple at Jerusalem. Elizabeth was herself of priestly descent, a kinswoman of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Both were righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord, as Saint Luke notes with particular emphasis. And both had suffered the grief of childlessness throughout their married life, and were now advanced in years.

The decisive moment came when Zachary was chosen by lot to burn incense in the sanctuary of the Temple, a privilege that fell to any priest only once in a lifetime. While he was performing this sacred duty, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him and announced that Elizabeth would conceive and bear a son who was to be called John, who would be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb and who would go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah. Zachary doubted this announcement, and as a sign he was struck dumb until the day of the child's circumcision.

Elizabeth's exclamation to Mary at the Visitation, Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, is among the most beautiful utterances in the New Testament. Both Zachary and Elizabeth are venerated as holy people whose fidelity and patience prepared the way of the Lord, and they are commemorated together on November 5th.