The Glory of Israel
3 February 2008
The writer of the gospel of Luke, especially the passage which we have just heard, gets rather a bad press. To put it bluntly, Luke is supposed to have got it wrong: he has Mary taking Jesus to the temple to present him as the first born and to offer the due animals for her purification, when it was not necessary to go to the temple to do the latter; it was the father who did it to any priest with five shekels and there was no ceremony so associated with the firstborn. It is of course possible that Luke ‘failed to read the question’, but I think it unlikely that Luke did not know exactly what he was doing, with respect to the story we have heard. Luke has often been regarded as not among the brightest of the evangelists, bound for a low 2.2 and the like.
Luke, this ‘gentle scribe of the humanity of Christ’ (Dante), sees everything that is to happen as part of the fulfilment of Israel’s promises, and taking place where holiness and humanity come together, where the holiness of God becomes worthy of trust, accessible, touchable. This means that the Temple, so compromised as such a place, has to be claimed for this new twofold, humanity and holiness. The holy place has to be claimed back, it is where He belongs. Remember Samuel in the Temple, son of (H)Anna? This is a better Samuel.
Yet the holiness is different; it is poor. Mary brings two pigeons rather than a lamb, veggie burger rather than Carré d’agneau à la Provençale. And nothing is required for its redeeming; there is no handing over of five shekel. This one is different, does not need buying back, all perfectly obedient to the law but quite free. Here is God’s unspoken and as yet unspeaking word.
Holiness has formerly been remote, but this is a holiness which is welcome; there is the sudden welcome of Simeon, the amazement of Mary. A joy is completed, so deep for Simeon; he is content to have lived and nothing more can make him more full. We forget that Simeon may have been a young man – the age of a student perhaps?. It is enough to have seen the Lord’s Christ, a salvation seen.
It is a time of joy and light to be sure, but there is darkness at the door. “The time will come when – Jesus - this victim will no longer be offered in the Temple, nor in the arms of Simeon, but outside the city and in the arms of the cross. “ (St Bernard ‘On the Purification of Mary, sermon III) This meeting of holiness and humanity involves us in a combination about which Christians can be either evasive or can go soupy and sentimental, of pain and great happiness, joy rather.
Simeon will talk of the time when this salvation will be opposed and to Mary herself ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’, when the openness of future life and decision will be thrown open.
It is a sharp contrast; is it a matter of having the lamb now so you can put up with the veggie burger later? There is nothing essentially good about having a bad time, about suffering. Some Christians do talk a bit as if you have to enjoy putting up with severe pain; yet there is nothing remotely faithful to the good news of Jesus Christ about trying to make out that suffering in itself is a good thing. It may be good to put oneself through the mill for the sake of a good end, rowing early morning to do well and the like. But hurting yourself, fancying that that it does you good, is sinful and simply to suffer, without good purpose is not a good thing. It is one of the reasons why it is no part, no part, of the teaching of mainstream Christianity to say that God suffers. Yet some of us, some of you now and here, have had a rough time, a very rough time of things. That will come in the wake of following Jesus Christ or it will appear with sharper edges because you will know it, you will meet with it in the light of the humanity and the holiness of the Lord’s Christ. After all this is the one, the Lord’s Christ,the only one who knows the God of love and loves without reserve, and He suffers and dies.
Luke knows this; and he opens a scene where the holiness and humanity which is coming, and also the togetherness of suffering and – what to call it? – joy, are here. In the poor of God, in Mary and then Anna, God has been welcome and is made at home, the holiness proper to the temple is on its way, touchable, accessible. For Luke this is not a message which is erased or rubbed out by that experience, that testing, that suffering which cannot be avoided if you – well – happen to live, happen to be alive in this world. The humanity of Christ is so strong for Luke, but he is the sole gospel writer who can bluntly ascribe to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration glory proper to God; and like the humanity and divinity of the one held in the arms of Mary and of Simeon, suffering and joy are not to be held apart in the following of Christ. When it comes to that reality of being with the Lord’s Christ, where pain and suffering arise, their meaning is not denied but open to, present to that holiness and humanity of God and to that experience, to the hope of it, it is right to give the name of joy.
That may sound startling, but joy is not the same as being happy, bouncing around from dawn to dusk with a smile on your face; joy is something which comes from going the way of the Lord’s Christ. If you are content with being happy, bouncing around from dawn to dusk, then you are content with something counterfeit, something less than the good news.
If we are honest, you would rather that hard decisions and pain were not the order of your day, but the way of Mary and Simeon is to hold suffering accepted and the light given not as Cox and Box, but as something which can be properly one, something human, simply around and will yet open, eventually and deeply to God, holy.
Where you see this done, there you find holiness; there you find the praise of Simeon and the communication of Anna, the offering and wonder of Mary. It is good to look for help and guidance from those who have brought together suffering and joy, bearing the one and sharing the other, Mary being the first and most wonderful, the one who has not only brought forth that holiness and that humanity, but has known it as surely as any could before or since. Happily in recent years many have lost inhibitions and are able to ask in wonder and in amazement of one who lives with those who look through pain to the joy of God.
There is in Herefordhsire a disused chapel, near a factory, in a place called Rothewas I think. In the south chapel there is a lovely stained glass window of the Mother of God and it bears a legend, a quotation from an old breviary, in die nova ridebit, in the last day she will laugh, in the last day she will have joy, and so for those who begin to know it now because they with her hold the Lord’s Christ.
Father Thomas Seville CR The Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield