After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she hid herself, saying, “Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.” Luke 1:24-25
To be delivered from reproach among men–what deliverance this would be! To throw off your cloak of shame, to step out from the shadows, and to walk confidently into the company of men and women whose easy camaraderie you had looked upon longingly from your own dark rooms. Who among us wouldn’t put this type of deliverance on their Christmas list this year (and every year to come)?
To feel reproach for the infertility which has defined you for years, however, is a singularly female condition. This is a largely silent form of reproach, a form consigned to whispers and quick looks passed among fertile women. It is reproach that defies our better sense, for we intellectually understand that biology fails in a broken world, and we socially acknowledge that a woman’s worth is not measured by how productive her womb is–or not. And yet, nonetheless, this reproach persists.
Reproach grows from the seeds of difference, and difference often blossoms into discrimination. Polish psychologist and WWII prisoner of war Henri Tajfel pioneered a series experiments called the minimal group paradigm. Tajfel wanted to know just what conditions would prompt people to discriminate against others in an outgroup. What he discovered was that he could create distinctions between groups that were truly minimal–even trivial–but they still provoked one group to discriminate against those in the perceived outgroup. Regardless of the degree of distinction, it seems that humans generally reproach those they regard as other.
There would have been nothing to visibly mark Elizabeth as infertile. She would have easily moved within the throng of women in the market place. Still over the years, Elizabeth would have been relegated to the outgroup of the barren, and she would have felt the sting of reproach even long after her child-bearing years. As she looked longingly at women who took their fertility for granted, she may have felt as though infertility was a life-sentence from which she would silently and privately suffer.
I am painfully and personally aware of this outgroup, as are many other women who have faithfully charted their ovulation cycles, desperately resorted to the latest medications and medical procedures, hopefully turned over their life savings to doctors, herbalists or whoever offered the possibility of pregnancy, and silently braved their days among fertile female colleagues, friends, and family. Although the stigma of infertility was clearly more public and reproachable in Elizabeth’s day, it lives today. At the very least, it lives though self-reproach, which is perhaps the most brutal form of all.
We live in a world with so many outgroups. Is it any wonder that this world is rife with reproach? Even when we believe we are far too complex to be defined by any group or label, it is inevitable that our personal, political, social, or spiritual views will land us squarely in some outgroup. And it is inevitable, then, that we will become reproachable.
In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ character Belle, the beautiful young woman whom Ebenezer Scrooge was once engaged, says to him:
“You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”
We often fear the world too much. And when our hopes meld into a single desperate hope to escape the world’s sordid reproach, we yearn for deliverance. For reproach, like black mold, sends spores behind the walls of the tender selves we send into the world each day. And there it grows. And grows. We breathe it in, and it weakens what immunity we have against all that threatens to undo us. We yearn for a toxic clean-up crew to deliver us.
The author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien writes: Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. Could Tolkien be right? Could sorrow and failure be necessary for the joy of deliverance in the real world as well as in fairy tales? As an older woman (some estimate at least in her 60s), Elizabeth bore a child. After a lifetime of reproach, after decades of sorrow and shame, she was joyfully delivered.
Like Elizabeth, most of us long for the joy of deliverance. French writer Alexandre Dumas understood that our longing should center less on deliverance, however, and much more on the deliverer. He writes:
God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.
Although Elizabeth and her husband Zechari’ah had spent their lives walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, it is God–not their upright living–who delivers them from childlessness and the world’s reproach. He sends the angel Gabriel to Zechari’ah:
“Do not be afraid, Zechari’ah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth” [Luke 1: 13-14]
As I reread Elizabeth and Zechari’ah’s story, I cringe at my attempts to deliver myself from sorrow and shame. I recoil at the countless times I have exhausted all other means of deliverance before I turned to God. I am going to edit my Christmas list this year. I will begin by removing Deliverance and replacing it with The Deliverer. In this season of Advent, truly the joy of deliverance begins with the right deliverer.
