The Presentation February 2, 2025
Malachi 3:1-4 Ps.84:1-6
Heb. 2:14-18 Luke 2:22-40
In the theology of Paul, Jesus was the emptying of the divine into human. In John, Jesus was the Word made flesh. The Gospel writers in Matthew and Luke borrowed from Isaiah to name Jesus as Immanuel, meaning God with us.
How could God the great one know how we as humans feel if God did not have a showing of some actual identity with the human situation?
The writer of Hebrews wrote, "Jesus was tested by what he suffered, so that he might help those who are being tested."
Jesus Christ is one who Christians believed to be bi-lingual; speaking divinity and humanity equally well.
The Word who is from the beginning, the Christ who is all in all becomes made flesh in peoples of all cultures but the image of God upon all people was lost in generality; there needed to be a particular exemplar as a showing within a particular family.
The Gospels present Jesus as being God with us as his community is presented as learning to be with each other. How does human community learn and practice being with each other? We do it as being ritually inclined.
The Jewish people, like all people are ritually inclined. We have real life theater events of ceremony and rituals. Rituals are community celebrations of belonging together with common identity.
Today is the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord, and so occurring on Sunday, it takes liturgical precedence over what would have otherwise been the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany.
The writer of Luke Gospel is keen to present Jesus as being ritualized into his Jewish faith and culture. And we might assume the liturgical nature of the entire Infancy narratives in Luke because they are interspersed with songs. The Canticles of our liturgy come from the Lucan Canticles, the Gloria or song of the angels, songs of impending birth by Mary and Zachariah, the Song of Simeon on the occasion of the Presentation of Jesus to the priests.
This Presentation event is the pidyon ha-ben ceremony, which literally means the redeeming of the son, and derives from a pillar event of community identity for Jews, the events which comprise Passover. The oldest male child after a month of life is presented to the priest in this ceremony as a remembrance of how the lives of the first born males were spared through the act of obedience in the offering of the Passover lamb. This salvation event for the Jews is dynamically remembered in this redemption ceremony.
Jesus is proclaimed as God with us, and he is one with us in our ritual behaviors, in our ceremonies of how we observe our belonging behaviors with each other.
The conception of Jesus was announced, and Mary composes a song. Mary and Elizabeth perhaps had a baby shower event together. Jesus was circumcised, Jesus was presented to the priest after thirty days, Jesus was found in the temple at the age of 12 perhaps instantiating a "coming into adulthood" occasion. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and the words of John commissioned his ministry, his vocation. And Jesus died and was given the proper ritual burial.
Jesus as God with us, was also Jesus with us in the burial rite of passage which his friends observed for him.
There is an interesting appendix to the burial ritual of Jesus. It is an innovating rite of passage, called the resurrection: The belief that there is the preserving grace of God in our afterlives.
If the Passover event was a redemption event which became a ritual for the Jewish people, and one which Jesus took part in; the addition of the ultimate redemption event which we call the resurrection is the rite of passage which we observe in our Annual Easter liturgy, and in our Sunday Masses.
Let us be grateful for the emptying of the life of God into Jesus who came to belong with us within a specific community which had specific rituals of belonging. Let also be grateful for the Easter Ritual of belonging which was initiated because of the afterlife of the Risen Christ, who became known widely by those who knew his mystical re-appearances in manifold ways tailored to the specifics of each person.
Jesus was God with us going through all the life rituals including death and burial, so that he might add the great Easter Ritual to help us belong forever in the preserving grace of God. Amen.
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