Candlemas

"And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord." (Luke 2:22)

Our mid-week Eucharist at St. Francis is celebrated on Wednesday nights and sometimes I play with the calendar in one direction or another. Although my liturgical calendar says that Feb 3 is the Feast of Anskar, a ninth century Archbishop and Missionary to Sweden, we are going with the readings for February 2 tonight: The Feast of the Presentation (a.k.a. Candlemas).

This feast provides a nice segue from my trip to Jerualem and back to parish ministry, for I find myself pondering with a renewed imagination what it would be like for Jesus' family to make the 65 mile pilgrim's journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem (a bit further than the trek from Holden to Boston) by foot. In my mind's eye, I can see them entering into the holy city dominated by the Herodian Temple, offering their sacrifice and being blessed by Simeon and Anna. Luke is the only one who tells us of this event but he seems to want the point out that this ritual cleansing, forty days after Jesus' birth, makes it clear that his family were devout Jews.

While it is tempting for an Episcopalian to jump right to the Nunc Dimittis, instead I find myself drawn this afternoon into Leviticus 12. My Jewish Study Bible insists that first-century Jews didn't think of a new mother as "dirty" but as ritually impure--and those aren't synonyms! As someone on my recent trip said, that the discharge of blood didn't make one unclean because blood was seen as "bad," but because it was good, because it represented the source and flow of life itself. But in the priestly view of the world, everything has it's place and the messiness of birth required ritual cleansing and sacrifice in order to welcome a new mother back into the community.

I don't pretend to grasp that completely, or agree completely with that which I grasp. But I have a deeper appreciation, I think, for what it suggests about the desire to encounter the Holy One at the Holy of Holies in the Holy City of Jerusalem. The "otherness" of God as mysterium tremendum juxtaposed with the Jewishness and humanity of the holy family making their way back home, where Jesus will "grow in wisdom and grace" invites me into a renewed appreciation and wonder for the mystery of the Incarnation.