The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 31st January 2021- online
Let us imagine that we are there in the Temple, ordinary inhabitants of Jerusalem, hanging around for evening prayer, or to meet friends, or whatever. It is just an ordinary day, not a major feast. The Temple is a big and imposing building with its series of courts; there are a variety of sacrifices going on at altars up in front of us, priests doing their stuff with impressive seriousness, other priest-like figures scurrying hither and thither looking as though they know what they are doing, temple guards standing on quite relaxed duty at the various entrances and exits. There are money-changing tables, booths for selling the various animals for sacrifice, and inevitably, a fair smattering of adolescent boys running here and there as messengers, carriers, pick-pockets and so forth.
There is smoke, there is incense, and there are the smells and the background sounds of cattle, sheep and caged birds. In different places, there are people involved in prayer, by themselves, or in groups, some attending the sacrifices, others apparently making deals with the Almighty with much bobbing and bowing. Over all this, there presides the Holy of Holies. The veil is in place, and all that is going on is going on with some, but not too much, reference to the apparently indifferent gaze of the One who dwells there.
Someone tugs your sleeve, and points to a small gathering which is happening just out of the corner of your eye. Nothing special. A couple with a baby come in for the rite of Purification. And who’s that coming up now? Oh, that’s old man Simeon – older than Methuselah! He looks so old that he might very well be the High Priest Simeon himself from three hundred years ago – one of the last decent High Priests in Jerusalem. In fact he probably is a real descendant of his. Funny to think that someone like him would be High Priest today if it hadn’t been for the various bits of skulduggery by which the current bunch had co-opted, bought and stolen their hold on office. Anyhow, the couple have got someone proper to do their rite for them. Old Simeon will take the thing seriously.
Now watch out, crazy Anna has spotted them and is rushing up! Didn’t anyone warn them? She’s older than God and has been around the Temple since before time began. Actually, she’s a survivor from one of those tribes which went into the desert generations ago and didn’t go along with the whole return from Babylon and second Temple project; She thinks that if she stays here day and night, fasting and praying, then God will bring the first Temple back, Ark, Mercy Seat, Fire, Wisdom and all. She makes it clear that she considers the current priestly families to be little more than pretenders, – well she isn’t unique in thinking that, but she has the courage of her convictions, since she actually stays in the Temple to try to make it holy. Good luck to her, and to all whom she pesters!
Ah, now the Evening Sacrifice is about to start up, let’s turn towards the Holy Place, the dwelling of the Most High, and get on with it. Curious though that as the couple are leaving with their child, both Simeon and Anna, normally a mixture of the cranky, the zealous and the infuriating, look suddenly peaceful, as though something had happened to them. Oh well, funny things go on in the Temple! Maybe they got given a bigger than usual tip for their services. Let’s press forward and join in the chanting which is starting up: “I will gaze on the Lord in the Sanctuary to see His strength and his glory”.
Well, of course this is not the version of the story we hear in St Luke’s Gospel, and which we call The Presentation of Christ in the Temple. My version is the majority report – what a normal passer-by would have noticed that day. We celebrate the minority report: for Luke, anything else that was going on in the Temple on that date was quite irrelevant. We get no mention of it, so we have to supply with our imagination. What we remember is that on that day, Malachi 3 verse 1 was fulfilled: “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”. Yes, that day God suddenly came into his Temple. But he came in almost offstage, and was noticed only by a couple of eccentrics who had been hoping for him in quite specific ways as fitting in with their expectations for how God would show himself to his people, to Jerusalem and to the Temple; expectations which were regarded as indecent pieces of folk-culture by the people who ran the show in the Temple.
In other words, the shape of the arrival of God on the scene, the God to whose worship the Temple was dedicated, was that of a tiny offstage interruption, scarcely to be noticed. Not even enough for us to talk about the Temple authorities having been blindsided by God, since they remained unaware of what had happened. Only much later would it become clear how completely blindsided they had been. [1]
So today we give thanks for those things which God does offstage. The almost unnoticed intrusions into our daily lives, which we may realise in time, change everything.
And we give thanks for those eccentric and stubborn enough to hold on to their hopes in a world which has forgotten how to imagine a different future. [2]
We give thanks for the old ones who stubbornly insist that despite all evidence to the contrary, God is coming to make things well again… and so spend their days in faithful prayer.
And we give thanks for the young ones who, despite living in a world whose future seems to have been cancelled, a world of extinguished dreams, nevertheless insist on bringing their newborns to their Temples as a sign of hope in the persistence of God. [3]
Notes
[1] James Alison, Blindsided by God: Reconciliation from the underside. Presentation for “Anatomy of Reconciliation” Conference, Trinity Institute, New York City, 30 January - 1 Feb 2006. As cited by Paul Nuechterlein in Girardian Lectionary, Christmas 1B, Resources on Luke 2:22-40. Edited.
[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. p.2: he takes capitalist realism to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."
[3] Mark Fisher on hauntology in eg. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Hauntology, Depression and Lost Futures. p.8: ‘The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.’
Comments