Text study on Luke 2:22-40
Lectionary texts for the First Sunday of Christmas, Jan. 1, 2012
The wait is over. The baby has arrived.
I am five months pregnant with our first child, and I long for this moment. I wonder what it will be like to hold this baby and see his face for the first time. I wonder what it will be like to watch him grow day by day and year after year.
I can only imagine how the fulfillment of Simeon and Anna’s expectations must have felt after years of waiting for the Messiah, after years of expectant worship, fasting and prayer.
Their spiritual journey was joyfully complete as they took the Christ child in their arms, and they praised God for a revelation fulfilled, a revelation they could touch and see. What a moment of liturgical delight, of promises met, of faith made sure, of redemption given!
These moments of expectant fulfillment and hoped for redemption are marvelous. They offer such joy. They embody God’s great, impenetrable love for us. And they give us a glimpse of what eternal salvation may be.
Have you known this joy? Have you ever embraced the very one you have been longing to see? Has God fulfilled a promise to you, to those you love or to your community? Have you seen God’s salvation?
Joy and sorrow
The ways that God’s servant Simeon and the prophet Anna receive the Christ child exemplify the great joy, as well as the great sorrow that this life can hold.
We cannot, after all, overlook Simeon’s prophetic words to Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed — and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
In a 1944 letter to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge, Lutheran pastor, theologian and eventual martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
“Christianity puts us into many different dimensions of life at the same time; we make room in ourselves, to some extent, for God and for the whole world. We rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep; we are anxious about our life, but at the same time we must think about things much more important to us than life itself, life isn’t pushed back into a single dimension, but is kept multi-dimensional.”
Just as Anna and Simeon’s delight in embracing the Christ child recalls the joy of Christian life, Simeon’s agonizing words to Mary remind us of the sorrow that will also pierce our souls during this life.
Simeon’s song captures our multi-dimensional life in Christ. It is this interweaving of our weeping and rejoicing that makes our fulfilled longing and promised redemption so astonishingly joyous.
Talkback:
- When have you seen, touched, tasted or even smelled God’s salvation?
- Like Simeon, have you been dismissed in peace after a time of service? Or like Anna, has a spiritual journey you have been on been fulfilled? How did these moments feel?
Cora Lazor Weiland is the director of Christian education and youth ministry at First English Evangelical Lutheran Church an ELCA congregation in Pittsburgh.
You might also like to read:
Goodbye as a spiritual practice
Faith, flesh and blood
God in the present tense
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