{"id":15000,"date":"2025-02-02T00:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T00:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=15000"},"modified":"2025-04-05T12:39:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T11:39:28","slug":"the-presentation-of-the-lord-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=15000","title":{"rendered":"The Presentation of the Lord"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of my friends waited for their first child for years. As I accompanied them spiritually, I witnessed how they swung between hope and disappointment, determination and desperation, trust and hopelessness. One thing was evident all along: their unbelievable, unquenchable longing for a child. Then, there was an explosion of great joy when the wife found out she was pregnant. The following months were filled with hope, expectations and excitement, mixed understandably with slight anxiety; those were weeks of great fragility for both the child and its mother. Eventually, the child was born in due course; its parents\u2019 long, long wait was rewarded with an indescribable sense of happiness and fulfilment. Never mind the sleepless nights and restless days that followed – they couldn\u2019t be happier with anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is one side of the story: cosy, beautiful and moving. There\u2019s the other side. I\u2019ve lost count of anecdotes and stories of a husband who got weak in the knees or passed out in the delivery room while accompanying his wife giving birth. Even when everything goes smoothly, it is quite messy in both metaphorical and literal senses. Such an unromantic aspect of giving birth was the backstory of Mary and Joseph\u2019s visit to the Jerusalem temple, as we heard in today\u2019s gospel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ritual purity was essential to the Law of Moses and, consequently, the lives of the ancient Israelites. Entire chapters in the biblical books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (parts of the Torah, the universally accepted Jewish Holy Scripture) were devoted to the purity laws and regulations in every aspect of religious, social and private lives. There were prescribed procedures in case of breaching those rules to restore one\u2019s ritual purity status; many of them included making a formal sacrifice. Childbirth was one such breach of purity, and a period of forty days was prescribed for purification. This is what the opening line in today\u2019s gospel refers to: <\/span>\u201cWhen the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, the parents of Jesus brought him up to Jerusalem.\u201d<\/span><\/i> Although St Luke used a plural pronoun, strictly speaking, the rule only applied to Mary. There was a second, significantly more important reason for their visit: <\/span>\u201cto offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord.\u201d<\/span><\/i> In light of what I said earlier, we might assume that that offering was part of Mary\u2019s purification ritual. It was not. It referred to a foundational event of the Jewish religious identity: the Exodus, the escape from the bondage of Egypt.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Bible tells us the story of the ruler of Egypt, who strongly opposed Moses\u2019 request to let the Israelites leave the land, despite being persecuted for their alleged disloyalty. The country was, in return, punished by the ten plagues, a series of increasingly biting natural disasters. The final and decisive one happened when <\/span>\u201cat midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the cattle.\u201d (Exodus 12:29)<\/span><\/i> However, the Israelites\u2019 firstborn were saved that night, following a prescription given by Moses. They sacrificed a lamb per household and marked their doors with its blood, so when <\/span>\u201cthe Lord passed through to slay the Egyptians and when he saw the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord passed over the door, and did not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to slay you.\u201d (see Exodus 12:23)<\/span><\/i> There was a price to pay in return: <\/span>\u201cConsecrate to me all the firstborn; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine. […] Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.\u201d (Exodus 13:2.13)<\/span><\/i> Usually, it was fulfilled by offering a lamb or, as in the case of the baby Jesus, two pigeons, a poor man\u2019s option. The firstborn\u2019s life was thus saved by<\/span> a substitution sacrifice<\/b>. Years later, Jesus himself, in his prime, became just such <\/span>a substitution sacrifice<\/b> when He redeemed us on the cross and made us God\u2019s firstborn children by adoption. That was the meaning of Simeon\u2019s prophetic pronouncement we heard in today\u2019s gospel: <\/span>\u201cThis child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed […] so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Jesus\u2019 redemptive, substitution sacrifice took effect in our own lives when we were baptised. Two powerful symbols always accompany the ritual. The newly baptised are dressed in white to symbolise the spiritual purification, the beginning of a new life of faith untainted by original sin. Then, a baptismal candle is lit from the paschal candle (the symbol of the life-giving Risen Lord), accompanied by these words addressed to the parents and godparents: <\/span>\u201cThis light is entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly. These children of yours have been enlightened by Christ. They are to walk always as children of the light. May they keep the flame of faith alive in their hearts. When the Lord comes, may they go out to meet him with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom.\u201d <\/span><\/i>Looking at you, I see that they fulfilled their obligation well. Now, it\u2019s our own responsibility to keep the faith alive in our lives. The candles lit and blessed at the beginning of Mass can serve as a reminder of that.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of my friends waited for their first child for years. As I accompanied them spiritually, I witnessed how they swung between hope and disappointment, determination and desperation, trust and hopelessness. One thing was evident all along: their unbelievable, unquenchable longing for a child. Then, there was an explosion of great joy when the wife found out she was pregnant. The following months were filled with hope, expectations and excitement, mixed understandably with slight anxiety; those were weeks of great fragility for both the child and its mother. Eventually, the child was born in due course; its parents\u2019 long, long wait was rewarded with an indescribable sense of happiness and fulfilment. Never mind the sleepless nights and restless days that followed – they couldn\u2019t be happier with anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/post-header-yellow.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15001,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15000\/revisions\/15001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}