As the child’s mother and father stood there wondering about the things that were being said of him, Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother: “You see this child: he is destined for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is rejected. – and a sword will pierce your own soul. Too. – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare.” Luke 2: 22-40
The ceremony for which Joseph and Mary took the eight-day-old Jesus to the Temple was very much like the baptismal ceremonial for which modern-day parents take their children for initiation into the Christian community. Jewish parents took their first-born sons to the Temple in order to have them circumcised and to dedicate them to the God who had loved them into life.
I wonder how parents these days would react if an elderly parishioner were to tell them that the son they had brought for baptism were to become a source of division in the community and be a cause of deep sorrow and grief for his mother. Yet, as Simeon gave thanks to God for being inspired by the Holy Spirit for recognising the Messiah in the child in front of him, in the same breath he asserted that this same child would be rejected, cause his mother grief and come to a violent end. Hot on Simeon’s heels came Anna, an eighty-four-year-old widow and prophetess whose assertions were much more moderate, but unrelenting in pointing out to anyone who would listen that the child in front of them would bring hope and deliverance to everyone who longed for the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Simeon and Anna don’t rate another scriptural mention even though their words have found their way into Christian hymns and prayers. It may well have been that they were seen by the community as Temple stalwarts and even dismissed as pious, old fogies given to wild imaginings.
Rather, however, their story might well be Luke’s way of telling his audience and us, that God’s way of working in our world is very different from what they had expected and we now expect. Luke made it clear that the very first witnesses to God’s coming among us in the person of Jesus were poor, unlettered shepherds with a reputation for being untrustworthy and an old man and woman who frequented the Temple and were very likely regarded as being a bit odd.
A close look at the history of God’s revelation to the people of Israel reveals that it was mediated through a succession of prophets who were different, even odd or eccentric. How else could we categorise the likes of Abraham, Noah, Moses, Rehab the prostitute, Jeremiah, the prickly prophet, the Gerasene demoniac and Matthew the tax crook? All of these characters spoke their mind and lived outside the acceptable circles of the society of their day. Many of them had personal qualities that excluded them from refined social circles. Yet they all witnessed in their own unconventional ways to the abiding love of God for humanity.
We are probably all familiar with St Irenaeus, a Second Century Bishop and Doctor of the Church. He is noted for asserting that “The glory of God is a living person, fully alive…and the life of such a person consists in beholding God.” It strikes me that Simeon and Anna, together with those other prophetic characters listed above were all very much alive and unafraid to speak out as God’s Spirit inspired them.
The renowned Twentieth Century American novelist and short-story writer, Flannery O’Connor once stated: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” Jesus knew and spoke the truth and the more he lived and spoke it led to a progression in the way in which he was labelled by those whom his words and actions disturbed. He moved from being popular with the crowds who flocked to see and hear him to being regarded by those in power as odd, fanatical, blasphemous, traitorous and, finally, criminal.
The message in all of this for us is that we, too, are called by God’s Spirit to be instruments of, and witnesses to, the truth of the Gospel. Simeon and Anna were able to speak as they did to Joseph and Mary because, over their long lives, they had come to recognise and appreciate the story of God’s faithfulness over centuries to their people. We, in our turn, can look to a future full of hope because of the ground prepared for us by giants of hope and fidelity like Pope John XXIII, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King Jr simply because they, and prophets like them, have come to know God’s fidelity and justice across the course of their lives. Now it’s over to us to be witnesses to God’s fidelity, truth and justice made tangible in the life and love of Jesus, and in the lives of those women and men who have walked in his footsteps.