Today is one of the few feast days in the church’s calendar that takes precedence over the lessons for Sunday. It is a Feast of our Lord called the Feast of the Presentation. It is the day when Jesus was presented in the temple as was the law of the Jews after a child was born. Mary and Joseph took the infant Jesus to the temple to offer the appointed sacrifice for purity, so that Mary can be considered “clean” after childbirth and enter the temple again. Women were considered unclean for a time after childbirth due to the bleeding that takes place, and so, here they are, with the infant Jesus, to be reunited in a sense with the temple and the community.
If any of you are familiar with the traditional Dominican rosary, this story will be familiar to you. I can remember my grandmother on my father’s side saying her rosary every day. I can still see her squared, brown wooden beads and silver crucifix. When one prays the rosary, depending on the day, there are different mysteries that one is supposed to meditate on while saying the prayers. One of the joyful mysteries is the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. I think that this story is important for us for a few reasons.
First, if we think about Jesus’ ministry and words when he is going about his ministry, one of the things that he tells the disciples is that if the temple is destroyed, it will be raised in three days. While the disciples may not have understood what he meant, we have read the story enough times to know that Jesus is talking about himself as the true temple, not the stone temple in Jerusalem which was in fact destroyed by the Romans in about 70 AD. And so here we have Jesus coming into the temple as an infant; and as I have thought about this image in my own prayers, what comes to mind is that the true temple, Jesus, has come to the temple built by humankind; a temple that was temporary, while Jesus as the true temple will live for eternity. While the family is there, prophecies are spoken about the child by Simeon and Anna, which must have sounded incredible to Mary and Joseph, and anyone else who might have been there. Prophecies of hope for God’s people who were oppressed, and prophecies of bringing the Gentiles into God’s fold. Jesus, the true temple has come to the place where God’s chosen people have worshiped in order to foreshadow the bringing together in one place the worship of the Jews and well as the worship of the Gentiles. Even here, in the beginning of the story, the old is being made new, and God’s people are symbolically being brought together to worship Jesus, the one true temple that ultimately cannot be destroyed.
If Jesus is the true temple, that has implications for us as well. We have been made children of God because of Jesus, and he is within us; that makes us, the church, a temple of his Holy Spirit. As such, we the church as individuals and as THE church, must become vessels of hope for others; we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, but also to take care of those that God has placed in our care. When we are acting in the world, everything we do ought to be on behalf of Jesus’ Holy Spirit that resides in us. As the church we are a refuge for those seeking comfort; we are an island of peace when the world is at war… we are bearers of the gospel to those who have not yet heard it or experienced it. Being the temple should be a sign to those who know us, that we are a safe place where sins are forgiven, the hungry are fed, and the lonely are comforted. The temple should also be a place where the empire is challenged and the kingdom of God is made known. It isn’t an easy task being a temple, but it is the work that Jesus has asked us to do.
Another reason that I think this story is important, is because of the sacrifice that was offered by Jesus’ family. They offered the sacrifice that poor families offered, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons. From the beginning of his life on earth, Jesus experienced the difficulties of life that many of God’s people experience. God became poor in Jesus in order that we would never have to go to places he had not been; he took on our life in order to transform it; God could have come in the life of anyone, and yet he chose to come as a carpenter from a small town. God chose poverty in order to be generous and to give everything. In the stories of St. Francis, Francis chose poverty in order to be more like Jesus, not for the sake of poverty itself, but in order to be generous in giving all that he had to others who needed it. God sacrificed everything in order to live as one of us; he gave his life so that death would never again have the last word for any of us. His life was given, not because he needed anything, but because we needed everything. God’s generosity is foolish to us; we cannot imagine giving everything we are for the sake of others; maybe we can for those we know and love, but for just anyone? Giving everything for those who might be different from us, or for those whom we don’t even like? Not an easy task for us to think about, and yet, it is exactly what God has done for each of us, and for those whom we do not like or care about… it is exactly how we are supposed to love others. St. Francis was afraid of lepers, and yet when he saw them as children of God just like he was, he began to minister to them and to love them. He knew that God was calling him to reach beyond himself, and feed, clothe, and love those whom society had cast out. It was on the margins where he found Jesus, and it is the same for us. God’s poverty that God lived in Jesus is an incredible gift to the world. It joins us to God in Jesus; it helps us to live our lives that are often difficult; it helps us to know that we are loved even when we are unloveable. Being temples of Jesus’ Holy Spirit requires us to sacrifice for others. Like Jesus, we are to constantly question and challenge the empire, so that those who are on the margins are brought into places of comfort and healing. We are to be messengers of hope. May we all receive God’s comfort, mercy, and grace in this place… may we bring God’s comfort, mercy, and grace to those outside this place, and especially to those on the margins of society, so that they may know they are children of a loving and merciful God.