(2 February for 4th Sunday of the Year A, 2014; Malachi 3:1–4;
Hebrews 2:14–18; Luke 2:22–40).
Our reading from Luke’s Gospel portrays Mary and Joseph going to the temple to do what the law required every Jewish couple who had a son as first born to do, namely, to consecrate or dedicate him to God and then to ‘receive’ him back from God via a sacrificial offering. In the case of Mary and Joseph who were poor people, a pair of birds sufficed. Such simple rit- uals, like our own, would have been a common sight in Jerusalem and no doubt, like us, the people of those days tended to take them for granted. But this ritual celebrated a massively important aspect of Israelite tradi- tion, and, in the way Luke presents them, the arrival of Mary and Joseph with their little baby foreshadowed a massively important future for Israel and all the nations.
Why was this ritual dedication so important? Because, as the book of Exodus tells us, Pharaoh and the Egyptians refused to let God’s ‘first born son’ (Israel) go free, dooming it to the death of slavery; hence God vowed to destroy Egypt’s first born (Exodus 4:22–23) and rescue Israel. In the story of the exodus this is recounted as the tenth or last plague that afflicts Egypt while the Israelites are eating the Passover. A simple meal by slaves in the ghettoes of Egypt becomes the moment of their deliverance, their new life, but it is the moment of death for the Egyptians. From one point of view the biblical text paints a disturbing picture of God but I think our appreciation of it can be helped if we consider that this is Israel’s paradigm story about overcoming the monster or evil. All cultures have versions of this kind of story, our cinemas, TV’s and computer games are full of them. A common feature is that the monster (whether animal, human or alien/ divine) is destroyed and the good escape the threat of death. Whatever may have happened historically in Egypt can no longer be recovered to
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the satisfaction of scientific analysis. The book of Exodus proclaims in dramatic story form Israel’s faith that God is its deliverer from the threat of ultimate destruction. Hence it is crucial that each generation be re- minded of this faith and confess it; a ritual way of doing this was to offer one’s first born son to God, as well as the first born males of flocks and herds. It enabled the faithful to acknowledge their complete dependence on God and their conviction that God will deliver them at any time as God did in the exodus story—as long as one has faith.
Our reading from Luke’s Gospel acknowledges the faith proclaimed by the exodus story but at the same time transforms its Old Testament horizons. The child who is presented or dedicated in the temple ritual is God’s first born son in a unique way that was in due course expressed in church teaching via the doctrine of the Trinity. Moreover, Luke claims there is something much more going on here than completing a treasured ritual and then getting on with the normal routines of life, as we tend to do after our rituals. Mary and Joseph ‘receive’ Jesus back from God to un- dertake his Father’s business—as the next account of him teaching in the temple while still a boy signals. Finally, while the book of Exodus is, in my view, a dramatic proclamation of faith in God as the one who overcomes the monster, Jesus sets out to overcome the real monster that threatens us all. And the monster in his ‘story’ is not a highly mythologised portrait of Pharaoh and Egypt but you and me, or rather the sins that afflict you and me and everyone—as Israel itself came to realise and expressed in the stories of its rebellious journey with God to the promised land (book of Numbers).
The other readings for the feast allow us to pursue this a little further. The passage from the letter to the Hebrews tells how Jesus rewrites the pervasive human view of how the monster is to be overcome—not by an act of violence against others in whom we identify sin and evil (playing the blame game), but by suffering violence without retaliating, and dying so that all might live. The reading from Malachi, the last prophetic book in the Old Testament proclaims the hope that God will eventually cleanse all evil from our lives. In the vision of this book the last, but in its view the most important, place that needs to be cleansed by God is the temple itself. Evil can enter even into temple worship, as it can enter the inner sanctum of our hearts. We may be too afraid to enter there or may reject any suggestion that evil is there but our faith teaches that Jesus is able to enter and begs us to let him do so, because it will only be for our benefit, to remake us in his image as first born sons and daughters of God.
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