This week, you may get a case of “lectionary whiplash.” That’s because we expect the story of Jesus to unfold in our Sunday gospel snippets in a more or less linear way. Sure, we jump in a week from Christmas to Jesus’ baptism at 30 – but then we continue in that era. Right?
Yes, unless an appointed church Feast Day happens to fall on a Sunday. Then it takes precedence over the ordinary set of readings. And so next Sunday we mark the Feast of the Presentation, when Jesus' parents take him to the temple forty days after this birth, as was done for all Jewish firstborn boys of a certain age. We are back at Jesus’ infancy.
"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 (as it is written in the law of the Lord, ‘Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord’), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons.’"
It seems that pretty much every time Jesus showed up in the temple he upset something or somebody – his mother, when she finds him there at age 12, calmly disputing with rabbis much older than he; the tables of money changers and pigeon sellers when he does some “house-cleaning"; the scribes and Pharisees whenever he showed his face there. And even here, on his first visit, as a babe in arms, he will cause a stir, as we will see when we meet some of the most remarkable characters in the Gospels.
What are some of the institutions in your life into which you’d like to see Jesus enter and “cause a stir?”
You might make that a prayer today, asking him to bring light and truth…
Are there people and places you might carry him, like Mary and Joseph did? Not visibly, of course, but with intention? What if we all went around mentally carrying Jesus into situations that needed transforming? Including our own lives?
The story of the Presentation interrupts the flow of our Sunday readings – which is kind of like life, when you think about it. We think our story is moving one way, and suddenly something takes us back to an earlier time. Maybe because that story still has something to teach us. I pray that will be true for us this week.
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