Following the Baptism of the Lord we’ve had two Sundays where we heard how John and Luke introduced the public ministry of Jesus. Today we suddenly jump back to a story of Jesus’ childhood (Luke 2:22-40). This certainly isn’t the straightforward order that Luke promised at the beginning of his Gospel, and indeed it doesn’t follow the chronology of Luke which has this story in its “proper” place in Jesus’ life.
So what’s going on?
The fact that this week’s Gospel reading jolts us out of a chronological account of Jesus’ life might cause us to question whether chronology is the most important dimension to the story of salvation. It may be the most natural way for us to describe events in our world, but it is not the only way or necessarily the best way to learn. A teaching curriculum doesn’t normally progress in the order in which a subject came to be understood. The striking example of mathematics rarely includes any reference as to when or how mathematical truths were discovered. What’s important is the truth, not how it was arrived at. I think the evangelists, and the compilers of the lectionary, might have had a similar perspective – they want us to understand the truth, and they’ll present it in the best way they can to achieve that understanding. And just like parents bemused by how different the math education of their children is from the one they received, we have to recognize the same truth is being taught, even if the methods are totally different.
But accepting there is more to the life of Jesus than a chronological account, what specifically is the story of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple telling us, plucked out of its chronological sequence and positioned after the beginning of Jesus ministry?
A possible clue comes from asking who is this story about? The obvious answer is Jesus. But on a second look the more direct answer is Simeon and Ana. Jesus doesn’t do anything in the story and nothing happens to him – it’s the complete opposite of, say, the story of his baptism. The point of this story isn’t to illuminate anything about Jesus, rather it describes the reaction of certain people – not just two random individuals (nothing is random in the gospels), but two people who represent the faithful people of Israel and the Temple culture that had evolved over centuries.
We are very used to looking at the Jewish context of Jesus’ life through the lens of his conflict with the Scribes and the Pharisees. The gospels put a lot of emphasis on that, and subsequent Christian condemnation of the Jewish people as a group – a terrible error with horrendous consequences that was only acknowledged in very recent times (Second Vatican Council – Nostra aetate, 1965). Today’s gospel shows us that there was a substantial Jewish tradition that hadn’t gone off the rails into legalism and power politics, that was waiting for the true savior, and did recognize him and accept him. Simeon understands who Jesus is better than his mother!
And why do we need to see that just now in the sequence of our readings? Next week we will hear the story of Jesus calling his disciples. Those disciples are also representatives of a people that God had prepared for millennia to receive his son. Yes many failed in their historic task – as John puts it: He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him (John 1:11) – but not all of them failed. Not Simeon and Anna, and Peter, James and John, and countless others. We are the descendants of those who were faithful to God’s teachings through the patriarchs and the prophets. They were the first to recognize who Jesus was.