Here is the next installment of reflections on the Sunday Gospel. This is for Feb. 2, 2014 Feast of the Presentation, Feb 2, 2014 LK 2:22-4 When the days were completed for their purification according to the law of Moses, Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord, and to offer the sacrifice of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons, in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout, awaiting the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. He came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform the custom of the law in regard to him, he took him into his arms and blessed God, saying: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.” The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him; and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted —and you yourself a sword will pierce— so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” There was also a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple, but worshiped night and day with fasting and prayer. And coming forward at that very time, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him. REFLECTION The chance is one in seven. The Feast of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple always occurs 40 days after Christmas (When the days were completed…), that is, on February 2. Once in every seven years, therefore, February 2 occurs on a Sunday, and because it is regarded as a major feast of the Lord, it overrides the ordinary cycle of Sunday readings; and Sunday-sized congregations get to enjoy it. This feast has oldsters fondling a baby; ancient promises fulfilled and then again new prophecies uttered; a mother marveling; candles burning; turtledove sacrifices offered, etc. Something for everyone makes it a perennial favorite. If one was to compile a list of holy days for non-practicing cultural Catholics to attend church, this would be one! For some old fashioned devotees of the Yuletide this is the unofficial close of the Christmas Season; they leave their festive lights on all dark January to mark the forty days passage till Jesus, Mary and Joseph come to the Temple. Some of us remember that the day was once called Candlemas, because in the Mass of the day a year’s worth of liturgical candles are blessed; to highlight the coming of Christ, (the Light of revelation to the Gentiles), into the Temple. (Tomorrow, February 3, newly blessed candles will be used to bless throats of Mass goers, on the Feast of St. Blaise, but that’s another story). Most Catholics remember that this Feast Day is commemorated by the second decade of Ave’s in the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary; the first decade reserved for the Nativity. Familiarity and warm sentimentality about the events of The Presentation may however dull the mind a bit about much of the fuller meaning of the Gospel. Our impression of this gospel passage is probably colored by the later church’s customs regarding babies, mothers and christenings more than by the cultural setting upon which St. Luke draws. Indeed, this gospel passage was so successful in its popular appeal that the later church’s customs about babies, churching mothers, and christenings were molded by it. Nevertheless, the passage, hastily considered, leaves us with the misimpression that one fine day almost six weeks after Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary dutifully followed a certain biblical law and had to present Jesus in the Temple…. And by the way, at the same time they had to obediently “purify” themselves. Trouble is, and St. Luke undoubtedly knew this, no such law or custom existed whereby all these elements came together; and the holy family was in any case not obliged to go to the Temple, per se, for any so-called Presentation of Jesus. St Luke is provoking the reader to study the story more closely! First of all, St. Luke mixes two different rituals together so off-handedly (deftly) that few Gentile readers ever notice what happened. Second, the evangelist places events in the Temple that are not usually there. Third, he twice conjoins the Mother and Son so profoundly that the significance of the two characters overlap in a manner quite remarkable. These three elements of the gospel story are filled with consequence. Two Old Testament Rituals for One: Purification and Firstborn Redemption 1. Two liturgical acts, different in purpose and time, are compressed together in the event we call The Presentation. One of the rituals described by the gospel is the purification. The other is the redemption of the first born son. Now rituals of purification have numerous biblical applications, but the purification spoken of in this reading is specifically the purification of a mother, which according to the code of Levitical Law, takes place 40 days after a son is born. Contemporary believers understand little and appreciate less about Old Testament injunctions of ritual uncleanness. A host of regular hygienic activities and intimate bodily moments, not to mention certain edible animals) are regarded as somehow unclean by the Law of Moses, and a Hebrew who came into contact with the unclean had to seek to be ritually purified; usually by some kind of priestly prescribed watery ablution and sacrifice; or he could not reenter the communal prayer. This cultural shaming of bodily function is difficult for us to appreciate because no particular moral fault need be in play for the uncleanness to take effect. Worse, in the popular imagination, then and now, feelings about ritual uncleanness blurs into feelings about moral impurity or spiritual “pollution”, which blurs into feelings about sinfulness itself. One feels dirty! St. Paul clearly feels the association of ritual impurity with moral sin, for instance, when he says, “Mortify your earthen members, immorality, uncleanness, lust…” (Colossians 3.5) Uncleanness as he lists it here is the word reserved for Jewish ritual impurity, but there it is, just as we always were afraid it would be, connected to voluntary sins and sinful lifestyles. One always has that nagging feeling that Moses suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder about bodily functions and fluids and so he read it into moral law! The psychology of Moses notwithstanding, the rituals of purification are not really so strange to people outside the ancient Semitic world. Bodily humors that are no longer in their proper encasements are a cause of great emotional dis-ease for all peoples in all generations. Blood in the blue vein upon the surface of the skin may be a sign of good vascular health, but red blood in a plastic bag can bring a football player to faint in a blood drive. It’s outside its place, and the way the human viscera is constructed, stuff that normally resides inside our bodies is physically revulsive, dangerous, “unclean” if you will, when it appears on or outside our bodies. In a way, the laws about ritual purity oblige the Israelite to respect these feelings in themselves; even the culturally specific variations of these feelings of their particular Semitic heritage (unclean foods that made Hebrews repulsed in 1000 BC, may not repel contemporary Gentiles at all). A contemporary television show attempts to make entertainment and competition multiple acts of revulsion: eating abhorrent things; letting vermin craw all over oneself; immersing oneself in vile fluids, etc. These sorts of offenses against the natural and cultural boundaries of the body are precisely the sort of things Leviticus prescribes. Parents must sometimes raise their voices to their child: Don’t put that in your mouth! So the parent teaches universal hygiene and culturally specific prescriptions alike in one tone of voice. The Law of Moses, similarly, commands bodily self-respect on both levels with one voice of command! What Moses did not explicitly foresee is that the culturally charged boundaries of the body or foods are somewhat variable from society to society. So culturally specific Jewish revulsion at clams and pigs is not shared by Greeks. While blood-outside-the-body is terrible to behold for all peoples (seeing red), the “purification” required for those who are touched by blood-outside-the-body is accorded differently from place to place. In our culture one purchases a detergent or bleach that gets out blood stains; in ancient Israel one sacrifices a turtledove to cleanse oneself of contact with such blood. Now the physical process of birthing a baby is invariably (the Nativity a separate case) a moment of great blood loss. Blood outside the body, is an engagement with life and death beyond human controlling, an engagement with blessings and curses greater than polite society or fragile souls can comfortably bear. Whoever the woman who births a child, she requires to be “purified” therefore said Moses. The unwieldy and potentially deadly power of the very exposure to so much blood must be removed (Leviticus 12). Even today, only accredited hospitals are utilized; special staff employed; rooms sanitized; medical accoutrements sterilized, etc. when blood is regularly encountered outside bodies. Medical waste disposal is a serious issue; and look, we still use a word, waste, to name the blood (or any tissue) as though it was still regarded as unclean or polluted! In earlier times, midwives and matrons presided over new mother during their appropriately entitled “confinement”, a time of separation from the rest of us commoners of life. If the Old Testament connected these physically challenging and emotionally stressful experiences with the sinful side of fallen nature, well, why not? All men have sinned, anyway, the Bible reminds us, and everyday observation confirms. Why not employ all moments of the human drama to invoke the universally obligatory penance? After all, given the gravity of fallen human nature, the more intense the bodily human moment (good or bad), the more likely some moral failure will occur, in any case! From the stressed bodies of honeymoons to emergency rooms, people lapse into selfishness, fear, insecurity, manipulation, etc. Such is the homespun logic of a folk organic moral living. It may not make good canon law but it all works together. Given this cultural background the Church faces an anomaly in today’s Feast: Mary is regarded by the Catholic faithful as sinless; AND, she gave birth to Jesus while remaining a virgin. In no way then does Mary need to be “purified”, either of blood or sin. But just as Jesus did not need to be baptized, (as John recognized), but did so for a higher mysterious reason, so Mary presents herself in the Temple to be purified. And there is evidence in the Gospel account that St. Luke already thought this way. He writes: When the days were completed for their purification… (emphasis, Luke’s!) There is no way St. Luke misstated this accidently. By all ordinary lights he should have written, “When the days were completed for HER purification…” Leviticus speaks only of the individual mother’s purification after childbirth. But Luke makes it a plural possessive pronoun: their purification. Perhaps the evangelist means that St. Joseph also presented himself for purification? Maybe this is an oblique reference to the anomaly of him not being the physical father of Jesus, a problem of legitimacy needing to be cleansed? This seems unlikely since Joseph would be not be at fault; and indeed, he was gallant to maintain his espousal to Mary after she was found to be with child, not his. On the other hand Joseph stepped outside the strict prescription of the Law of Moses when he hid Mary’s apparent shame from public and therefore legal exposure. Joseph was termed righteous; and one view of righteousness, a narrow legalist view, would oblige Joseph to honor the Law of Moses by outing the lawlessness of a woman in Mary’s precarious situation. Joseph anticipates the higher law of charity that would one day be taught by his foster son; but in his day, perhaps a little legal purification was also due for him. Catholics of a sort could understand this kind of legalistic clemency seeking. There are still many who feel they must confess missing a Sunday Mass, even in cases when they were entirely unable to attend. The possessive pronoun “their” may refer to someone else along with Mary; it may refer to Jesus. Although the newborn child is not ritually purified according to the Mosaic Law, neither is the father, and the plural their must refer to… a them. Jesus shares his mother’s ritual purification in such a case, although he needs it less than he needs John’s baptism. He shares it because in love he shares (what the New Testament calls) the “likeness of sinful flesh”. What purification and penance we needed in our fallen sinful flesh, he received in its likeness. Jesus may be conjoined to his mother so closely in his mission of solidarity with fallen (corrupt, sinful, unclean; so many word choices) flesh that they are purified together, as it were, when she is purified. Mary of course does come into the contagion of blood. When Jesus is crucified, his blood (her bodily gift to him) pours out on them under the Cross. Mary suffers only then the so-called “travail” of the woman bearing a child. (See Genesis 3:16 and Rev 12:1ff) Then her heart is pierced through as Simeon today foresees. So Mary’s purification in the Temple really anticipates that blood outpoured. That is the miraculous blood of the Lamb which the Apocalypse says will wash robes white! So Mary is in fact purified in advance by His Blood; this reminds Catholics of the teaching of the Immaculate Conception. When Jesus gives away his mother upon his crucifixion, St. John observes at that moment that now Jesus saw that all was complete. That is to say, the mission of Christ, from its epiphany origins to its paschal climactic end was wrapped up in his bond to the woman who shared humanity with God. Jesus and Mary: a New Passover 2. The other ritual act observed in the Temple that day of the Presentation is a liturgy that is not prescribed to that architectural setting: the redemption of the firstborn son. Again, to assume that Luke did not know that firstborn sons were not redeemed in the Temple seems unlikely. Even if Luke forgot, nobody told him? The evangelist knew that Firstborn Redemptions were not maternal purifications, and he knew that the two rituals were entirely separate affairs. So the combination of the two in one moment, and in the Temple itself, compels us to wonder about the depths of their inexhaustible significances. All believers recall that the last great plague of the Passover Exodus story is the death of the firstborn sons of Egypt. When the angel came down over Egypt it simply claimed in one night one generational slice of life; the Firstborn Sons who opened their mother’s womb. Ever since Abraham the Hebrew people realized that all such sons and all the hope-filled futures they represented already belonged to God… always. The Egyptian and Hebrew firstborn also belonged to God at the Passover, but God gave Moses a ritual act whereby Israel could buy back (redeem) from God that generation God was about to claim. “May we keep them a little while here whom You will one day claim as all things, Your own?” Ever since, faithful children of Abraham redeem their firstborn sons as Moses advised that solemn night. That ritual act is not Temple bound but St. Luke places it there at the Presentation nevertheless. Somehow, the redemption of Jesus in the Temple per se reveals that it is not just Mary and Joseph who “buy back” their child, but that all Israel, and indeed, through Mary’s sharing of humanity with Christ, Jesus is retrieved for all the world. Our Redeemer was redeemed himself; just as the One in whom we were baptized was baptized himself; so as to engage all the processes and transformations we engage. In a similar manner, the God who gave us all the gifts of creation waits for us to bring Him the gifts of creation to bless. At the offertory of the Mass God shows how exquisitely kind He is by allowing us the almost illusory opportunity of giving Him gifts as if He did not already own. But love consists of gracious exchanges; and the poorest of God’s beloved He affords gifts… to offer Him. So we take hold of Jesus at the Presentation; redeemed Him; so that we can then offer Him to the Father as our only worthy prayer, the Passover Eucharist. And in the latter offering, we add ourselves to the gift as members of His Body. Now the Body and Blood themselves purify rather than rendering them who are encountering them unclean. Hearts Sacred and Immaculate at Once Transpierced 3. Finally, the mother and Son are presented today to us poignantly united in heart and mission. Aside from the forgoing, the prophet Simeon links Mary to Jesus by these words: “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted —and you yourself a sword will pierce— so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” St. Luke tells us that Simeon tells these words specifically to Mary, almost as if it to say because Joseph would not have to face the historic execution of Jesus, but Mary would. But the image of Mary’s (Immaculate) heart pierced is the most iconographic moment of Marian spirituality. As Jesus is lanced and his (Sacred) Heart sends forth the mystical spring of salvation, Mary’s heart is analogously transpierced as she shares in Christ’s sacrificial gift in a mode utterly unique. She gave Him his bodily nature which is now the one medium for all of divine mercy; she agreed without reservation to his incarnation by her fiat; she endured abandonment and forsakenness to give Him birth who had no human father, and she beholds His immolation and forsakenness with a mother’s compassion. Stabat Mater Dolorosa “…so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” The deepest truths are usually hidden from view. They are secrets because they require the greatest investments of honesty to excavate. The deepest truths are not available in a supermarket or online. They are only revealed when the illusory controls of our lives are stripped away and we find ourselves in the face of love or grief unimaginable. The Cross lays bare all the secrets of life; it is God’s judgment exposing all. Mary’s heart transpierced gives this exposition a maternal kindness. God unveils all, not to condemn any, but that as many as are willing to live out their lives at last from their depth (in His Image) may be redeemed by His Gift, and in the gift exchange His Mercy affords.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:35:31 +0000