This Week: Presentation of Jesus at the Temple
Gospel: Luke 2:22-40
The gospel passage for the presentation is rich with event, dialogue, and majestic theological connection, bonding the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures together in the person of Jesus. In the right hands, a well-crafted homily that marries the historical, the biblical, and the theological concepts would be deeply rewarding for all involved.
Some of us are either less keen to do that or not able to give it the time necessary for such an endeavor. What we’ve got is a story that starts like a simple purification rite that turns into the prophetic encounters with Simeon and Anna — a moment which rivals Zechariah’s proclamations in the temple (after his tongue was loosed) for fervent intensity. I suspect that allusion is also quite necessary.
The Prophets.
Zechariah, remember is Jesus’s uncle, and his story was just months before this, John being six months older than Jesus, this appearance at the temple being some 40 days after Jesus’s birth. So it wasn’t ancient history — it was within the last year.
The songs of Zechariah and Mary both are present, occurring in the last half of chapter one of Luke. Then we have the birth of Jesus at the top of chapter two, the shepherds visiting from the fields, the naming of Jesus at day eight and then this moment. The reader has words of the glory of God still ringing in their minds, about “knowledge of salvation to [God’s] people,” of his mercy, and of his bringing down the mighty and lifting up the lowly.
What I’m saying is that it is spiritual malpractice to not have this stuff in mind when we hear Simeon greet the infant Jesus at forty days old.
A lot of theological conviction might rest on the phrase:
“for my eyes have seen your salvation,”
too easily, I fear, resting on a kind of spiritual (read personal and internal) salvation that is offered in response to a (personal and internal) belief in Jesus Christ as a personal savior of all humankind and not something more embodied and physical than that.
The Materialist Salvation.
I’ve started to bristle at the notion that the notion that God’s help only occurs inside where none can witness it or, in fact, notice it, really. As if our needs are only ever hidden within us and not the material conditions of our lives.
Here, I don’t want to swing to heavily in the other direction, landing upon an exclusively materialist response to the salvation question, but it would take a lot of swinging to get from where most yappers in the church are before we ever found ourselves remotely close to the exclusive materialist territory.
This story involves real people in a real place finding the grace of God revealed in the flesh. And that must not be shortchanged in any way. And this total stranger named Simeon is caught up in a revelation that comes to him in the form of Jesus in the flesh, that he would be the source of salvation — including the material salvation of the people. And his warning to Jesus’s mother, that she would feel the material loss of her son and that would cause her real pain.
We are tempted to dive then into the crucifixion, and perhaps we should. But I would invite us to linger longer and deeply in the question of salvation, in this physical, embodied moment of people standing in the temple and feeling totally joyful that their life’s work in the world is complete because there before them is the infant messiah. Now they can shuffle off this mortal coil because they have born witness — that was their job and they completed it.
The Stunned Parents.
The smallest part of the story is really held by the parents of Jesus, which is surprising because it is told as if it were their story. They’re on this family pilgrimmage, of course. And we might find their amazement at Simeon’s words to be a bit of shock and surprise to hear this about their baby boy — which is not exactly it. We remember that Mary did know, I offered a short reflection on that earlier.
Are we not surprised (amazed?) when someone swoops in and talks about our kid like they actually know them?
What we receive from Mary and Joseph is an unexpected reversal. They are able to bear witness to the prophetic revelations of others. To hear what others say about their infant messiah. That, itself is a weird feeling that I, as a parent, can attest to. But take this another step further into the concept of witnessing itself. That Mary was a personal witness to the grace of God in the angel’s visitation and the miracle baby. Joseph, likewise, in the miracle baby’s birth.
What we see in the shepherd’s visitation and now in their visit to the temple, are people offering their witness back to them. And this is an opportunity to be amazed. We needn’t be rigidly attached to the substance of Simeon’s revelation to recognize the situational amazement of the parents and the theological depth of participating in it.
However, and this is a big caveat, the similarity between Mary’s song of praise for God’s glory in the world and Simeon’s witness of God’s glory in this child are resonant verses of the same song. A song to which the evangelist anticipates we will want to sing along.