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When we read the New Testament, we encounter moments that hint at story lines we long to know more about. The mysterious encounter on the road to Emmaus is one of these. The Visitation of our Lady to her cousin Elizabeth is another. Saint Luke gives us crucial details about these two women that no other Gospel writer provides. We cannot help but be curious about this meeting of two women, at such an important turning point in human history.

Both are bearing children under completely anomalous circumstances: one an old woman, the other a virgin. Both will lose their sons in appalling circumstances. But that end point, where the life they carefully nurture will be extinguished by the terrorising force of human sin, is not with them yet. For now, it is their joyful, exultant voices we hear. Elizabeth reveals Mary’s identity when she gives her the appellation the mother of my Lord (Lk 1:43). She reveals too that her own son literally leaps at the sound of her voice. Like a young salmon leaping upstream: a small, but telling detail from a master storyteller.

We are not told anything more about Elizabeth’s life, if she will still even be alive when the life of this strong son is extinguished by human corruption. Of Mary, on the other hand, we are told that she is present when all this bubbling joy drains to sorrow. We also know that she will be alive to witness her Son’s victory over death and sorrow: though we are not given her personal details when it comes to that glorious mystery. The writer of Acts could surely have made a different narrative choice, yet he leaves us, who stand on the outside of all these events, to fall back on Mary’s earlier declaration, made at the moment when the women communed in the hill country. Holy is his name, and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him (Lk 1:49-50). If we truly want to get on the inside of the story, the Magnificat tells us everything we really need to know.