Luke 2:21-38

We know very little about Jesus Christ, before he started his ministry at age 30.  Of that, pretty well most of what we have, comes to us from today’s scripture.  It’s a very important piece because it gives us a wealth of information that is not always immediately obvious to the reader.  And yet, if we do a deeper, more intentional exploration of the text, we can learn something about the culture into which Jesus was born - and which would have influenced his own faith and world view. 

In fact, so strongly do the nuances of this text beg to be unpacked, that on this first day of the New Year, I offer you an exercise in biblical interpretation which I hope you will find interesting and valuable.  As with any search for truth, we will discover something more, and we will be left with questions we did not know were there.  And that’s ok, because it reminds us that we are always to approach the word of God – indeed the mind of God with humility – not assuming we have it all before us, but recognizing that we have enough.

If you take our Gospel today and read through, it looks like on the 8th day of his life, Jesus was brought to the temple, given a name and circumcised.  And in fact, this is  exactly what happened.  Then we read about how they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord – all of this according to the Law of Moses.  There a sacrifice of either two turtle doves or two pigeons were made – we’re not sure which.  And there of course, we have the encounter with Simeon, who had been promised by God that he would not die until he saw the face the Messiah – the anointed one – and the prophetess Anna.

Well, according to Jewish custom at the time that Jesus was born, a father had four responsibilities outside of teaching his son the law, and this especially applied to the firstborn son – because the first born males of all of God’s creatures – both human and animal, belonged to God personally and there were some very important things that needed to be looked after in that case.

So, Joseph’s responsibilities would have been specifically to raise his son and teach him the Law.  He would have been required to have him circumcised on the 8th day, according to the command of God to both Abraham and Moses.  So important was this command, that even if the 8th day of the child’s life fell on the Sabbath, it was done anyway.  In fact to not circumcise your son was to be the equivalent of a heathen and would bring great shame on the family because it did not honor God’s covenant with the people.  The father was also required to redeem his son from God.  The redeeming, in this sense, was where they bought or purchased back from God, the child, …  in a ceremony in which the priest was paid 5 shekles of silver.  This happened in the home on the 31st day of the child’s birth.  The final two obligations the father had was to teach him a trade, and finally to find his son a wife.  ….. Any father not doing those five things was mocked and considered a scourge to that community. 

Tradition tells us that Jesus wasn’t married … but in fact we only infer it, from what is not said.  The bible makes no reference to a wife and that could be for any number of reasons, so that’s one of the questions to which we truly do not have an answer.  Neither do we know for sure, that he was redeemed from the Lord, because it doesn’t tell us specifically, that they did that ceremony.  And yet, we have every reason to believe according to what is before us, that his parents did everything that was required of them under the Law, for their son.

The religion of the Jews at the time Jesus was born had ancient roots going back to what is called the Mosaic Law – to a time when God gave the Law to Moses, and Moses gave it to the people.  Most of them were what we call “Purity Laws” which were designed to keep the Israelites pure before God, or in other words separate from everyone else because they were God’s chosen covenant people, through whom God was revealed.  I’ll come back to that.  But for our purposes, this was all designed to help them maintain their own separate distinction from the surrounding peoples.  As we know from Old Testament scripture, the people were always mixing it up with the locals, and the prophets were always calling them back to God.  What is important in this, is that there emerged a very complex set of rituals and sacrifices that were designed to keep the people ritually clean or ceremoniously pure – to keep them in their place, so to speak.  This was always done through making sacrifices at the temple.

Now, this was a patriarchal society, so it was always the responsibility of the men to make at least three trips to the temple each year to offer sacrifices.  Wives could attend in a limited fashion, but generally were not bound to that – in part because of childcare responsibilities.  But women – mothers - had two responsibilities in the sacrificial system that was specifically theirs and theirs alone.  --- and we read about it today.  The first was that she had sole responsibility for naming her child.  And Mary named her son Jesus, which is the Greek form of Joshua or Yeshua in the Hebrew and which means: Salvation of Yawheh.  The other thing was that childbirth made a woman ritually impure or unclean.  Now they didn’t mean it in the way we would think of unclean today.  It was a complex way of thinking, and required her to remain separate from the community until her purification ceremony.  If she had a boy, that happened 40 days after he was born.  If it was a girl, 80 days.  She became ritually clean and re-entered the fullness of her community, once she offered a sacrifice of burnt offering and sin offering to God through the temple priest.  The burnt offering represented her part in prayer that the nation would remain free from sin, and the sin offering was for unintentional sins she might have made in the sight of God. 

Again, we are reminded that Mary was a good, pious Jewess who followed the customs of her people, just as Joseph did.  And if we know that, and we do because it is attested to in the reading, we also discover, much to people’s surprise, that despite all the talk of her coming from a royal line, which is also said about Joseph by the way …. That in fact, she was a poor peasant woman – not without dignity – but without wealth.

How do we know that?  Because of her sacrificial offering.   She followed the Law of the Lord by offering a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.  And if you read the Law of Moses which is quoted here, and contained in the first seven chapters of Leviticus – essentially a handbook for priests -  you will read that a mother had to make an offering of a young lamb, but that if she did not have any money and was poor, God would accept a pair of pigeons or a turtle doves.   By modern standards we could compare it to the difference between offering hamburgers vs prime rib at a wedding.   And yet, God accepted this.

It is a humbling revelation to realize the mother of Jesus was not only young, pregnant and unwed, but also poor.  And I wonder sometimes how that might have affected him.  If we read ahead after this chapter, we will pick up the story of Jesus when he was twelve when they visited the temple, and his parents sort of lost him in the crowd, and he’s gone for a while before they realize he’s not with them.  After that we read nothing more about Joseph.  He becomes absent from the story, and I wonder if he died young, and how that might have affected Jesus and his ministry.  Again, we don’t know.  But we do know, his roots were truly humble. 

We don’t always know for sure in the bible what is true, and what is a story designed to illustrate something for us, but we can be confident, that what we have read and explored today is in fact historically accurate – even to the most arduous critics of the bible – because to the early church, it was potentially embarrassing that a child of God would have had to have been circumcised and brought into the covenant – if he was who they believed he was.  And it would have been embarrassing that his family, couldn’t afford the proper sacrificial offering of a young lamb.  When these kinds of things appear in the bible, they give us real insight into the very human, world and culture in which Jesus was born and raised and the writer of this Gospel, made no attempt to gloss this over.   

Christians are sometimes unintentionally arrogant about the gift they have been given in the person of Jesus Christ.  And sometimes we are misled to believe that because there is a new covenant, that it somehow superceeds that of the Israelite covenant – that it somehow replaces it.  In fact that is not true.  The primitive Church, argued this point extensively.  It created a huge rift between Peter and Paul.  And yet, that is how the word got out, so we are never to diminish the story or experience of God’s chosen people in favor of our story.  Both have a place. 

And I offer you today, in the naming of Jesus, evidence that that is the case.  The Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews, raised up for us, a savior who is Christ Jesus.  Out of an otherwise, nondescript, previously unknown people, God revealed himself as the one true God, who unlike those of the neighboring nations, was just, kind, merciful, loving and present.  By demanding that his chosen people remain pure and separate from others, he himself became distinguished even among the Gods of other nations – who were so cruel, they demanded the sacrifice of children.  This is the revealed God of Israel.  This is the God who through this people made himself known; this is the people who are the crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, as Isaiah tells us today. 

It is Simeon and Anna also, prophets of that culture, who in being present at the Purification of Mary declare Jesus to be the light of revelation of God to the Gentiles.  No longer is God, only to be known as the God of the Jews.  After thousands of years of work and preparation with this people, he has now offered himself to ALL PEOPLE  and all nations as was prophesied in the declaration “unto you, a son is born..”   Jesus – Salvation of Yahweh, in whom the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.  Jesus, the human face of God and the mirror in whom we are all reflected.