THE PRESENTATION OF THE LORD
(Mal.
3:1-4; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40)
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There are a few things we should note about St. Luke’s
gospel account of Mary and Joseph bringing the Child Jesus to the Temple in
Jerusalem. First of all, since it was not
necessary for them to bring the Child to the Temple, why did they choose to do
so? Secondly, Luke tells us that:
When the days were
completed for their purification according to the law of Moses, they took Him
up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of
the Lord, “Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord,”
However, the Law prescribes that the firstborn of man
should be ‘redeemed’, not ‘presented’:
You shall dedicate to
the LORD every newborn that opens the womb, and every first-born male of your
animals will belong to the LORD. Every human
firstborn of your sons you must redeem. (Exodus 13:12-13)
The price of redemption was five Temple shekels, the
money going towards the upkeep of the Temple worship and the support of the
priests of Levi who had no land in Israel in order to be totally devoted to the
worship of the Lord. Since no redemption
price was paid for Jesus -- only the sacrificial offering of a pair of turtle
doves for Mary’s purification according to the Law -- there is no question of
Mary’s first-born Son being bought back, redeemed, as the Law laid down, and
that is why Luke changed the wording of the Law and spoke of Mary and Joseph presenting
the infant Jesus to the Lord.
That very presentation -- doing something unique for this unique Gift
from God -- was the reason for their bringing the Child to the Temple in
Jerusalem: in the mind of Mary there was no question of ‘redeeming’ -- buying
Him back -- from God, on the contrary, in acknowledgement of His ‘gifting’ to
her (and to us) by God, Mary was, of her own initiative and free will, bringing Him to God’s Temple in
order in order to present Him to His Father: to offer Him along with
the childhood-long years of her own worshipful service of maternal love,
cherishing, and teaching, to present Him to His Father, God, for God‘s purposes
on earth:
They took Him up to
Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord (just as it is written in the law of the
Lord, “Every male who opens the womb shall be consecrated
to the Lord” ), and to offer (for Mary’s purification) the sacrifice of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons”
in accordance with the dictate of the law of the Lord.
Just as Samuel had been given to the Lord in the old
Temple of Shiloh by his mother Hannah in thanksgiving that the opprobrium of
childlessness had been taken from her, so here Jesus is presented by Mary to the
Lord in the Temple at Jerusalem. He was
consecrated to the Father before His birth on earth and in His birth; here His
Mother acknowledges God’s claim on her human Son and, yielding her own claims
upon Him, presents Him to His Father in the Temple, with a sense of gratitude
immeasurably greater than that of Hannah (Lk:46-48):
Mary said: "My
soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour. For He has looked upon His handmaid’s
lowliness.”
See how wonderfully that holy Mother co-operates with
her Son in the work of our salvation! At
this, her very first opportunity, Mary does what her Son cannot yet Himself
physically do: for, graciously aware of the depths of her own lowliness she
offers Him – out of heart-felt personal gratitude and with wondrous sensitivity
to the working of the Spirit of the Son within her -- to His Father of Whom we
are told in the letter to the Hebrews (10: 5-7):
For this reason, when He
came into the world, He said: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a
body You prepared for Me; holocausts and sin offerings You took no delight in. Then I said, ‘As is written of Me in the
scroll, Behold, I come to do Your will, O God.’”
Here Mary is shown as the perfect realization of the ‘daughter
of Sion’, following in the steps of Abraham, who, when leading his
son Isaac on the way to sacrifice on Mount Zion, said (Genesis 22:8):
My
son, God will provide for Himself the sheep for the burnt offering.
Abraham became the father of Israel and indeed our
father in faith because he had been willing and prepared to sacrifice his only,
beloved, son Isaac, in obedience to God.
However, at the point of sacrifice, the Lord intervened and said:
Do not stretch out your
hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God,
since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me. (Genesis 22:12)
Isaac was not the lamb of God, nor was Abraham‘s
obedient -- though heavy -- heart a full foreshadowing of the future. For, when the old covenant was come to its
fulfilment, Mary, the supreme daughter of Abraham was offering, presenting, her
Son entirely to God His Father with a most wonderfully grateful and rejoicing
heart:
Mary said: "My
soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.
The New Covenant was at hand, and this Presentation of
the Infant Jesus is the very first fully, purely, Christian act,
Christian sacrificial act … Mary offering her Son to His Father for His,
indeed soon to be, both Their, purpose(s).
As the annotators of the of ‘The Jewish Annotated New Testament’ make
perfectly clear, “no law prescribes this presentation, presenting children at
the Temple is not a recognized custom”.
It is true that Mary did not as yet know what would be
asked of her: she did not foresee the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, her offering to God was given
in total faith and sincerity, complete trust and self-abandonment. Therefore, having presented Him to the Lord,
she was not called to leave Him in the Temple as Hannah had done with
Samuel. Samuel had been left with Eli
the high priest; here, there was none worthy to bring up Jesus save Mary His
immaculate mother, and therefore He went back with her to Nazareth and began
learning, as we are told:
To grow and become
strong, increasing in wisdom; with the grace of God upon Him.
God accepted at the Presentation Mary’s offering of
her Son, as an implicitly sacrificial, TOTALLY CHRISTIAN offering made under
the supreme guidance and sublime inspiration of the Spirit of her Son, the Holy
Spirit of Truth and of Love, already working fully, freely, and unrestrainedly,
in her. In the subsequent hidden years
of life in Nazareth she helped her Son become a man before God:
He
had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest. (Hebrews
2:17)
Unbeknown to Mary, the Spirit of her Son was already leading
her, preparing her, for the time when He would leave her, first of all to enter
upon His public mission, and when, finally, He would be taken from her in the
Crucifixion. This preparation began to
be revealed to Mary almost immediately after she had presented her Son in the
Temple, for the prophet Simeon came upon the scene and said to her:
Behold, this Child is
appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and for a sign to be opposed
-- and a sword will pierce even your own soul -- to the end that thoughts from
many hearts may be revealed.
And we can glimpse how gently God would lead her over
the years ahead, for, lest those words of Simeon should hang around in her
memory like some small but threatening cloud on the distant horizon, the
prophetess Anna came shortly after Simeon with a paean of praise for the Child
and for God:
She
began giving thanks to God, and continued to speak of (the Child) to all those who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.
It was with such mysterious words of wonder, joy, and
hope that Mary and Joseph:
returned
to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth.
The work of our redemption was beginning with God and
man, One in Jesus; and with Mary co-operating in wondrous responsiveness to the
Spirit, both in the birth, and now in the Presentation, of her Son. This presentation of her Son by Mary was no
blind gesture, rather it was the occasion when she seized with both hands a
blessing offered her by God, affirming it most solemnly in the Temple at
Jerusalem; and then, over the subsequent thirty years, confirming it by her daily humble faith and prayerful
trust under the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit as He prepared her to be able to
fully and finally live out the offering she had so spontaneously and whole-heartedly
made in the Temple.
It is frequently like that with us, People of
God. We can be called, invited, to respond
to God with decisive self-commitment, and that moment is not the time to
want to think out, anticipate and foresee, all that might result from such an
invitation. God wants our response of
humble trust and total commitment; for He Himself will enable us to carry out
what He has encouraged and invited us to take on. Mary was totally pure, and that does
not simply mean sin-less, it also means totally self-less before God,
totally unselfish in her response to His will … God often wants to find something
of that purity in us her children too.
