1-27-20 - The Temple, Take 1

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)

This week we may get “lectionary whiplash.” We expect our Sunday gospel snippets to present the story of Jesus in a more or less linear way. Sure, we jump in a week from Jesus as a toddler visited by magi to his baptism at the age of 30 – but then we go on from there, right?

Yes, unless a church Feast Day happens to fall on a Sunday. Then it takes precedence over the ordinary sequence of readings. Next Sunday we mark the Feast of the Presentation, when Jesus' parents take him to the temple forty days after his birth, as was done for all Jewish firstborn boys. 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 often when Jesus showed up in the temple he upset something or somebody – his mother, when she found him there at age 12, calmly disputing with rabbis much older than he; the tables of money changers and pigeon sellers when he did some “house-cleaning"; the Pharisees and scribes whenever he showed his face. Even here, on his first visit as a babe in arms, he will cause a stir, as we will see.

What are some of the institutions in your life into which you’d like to see Jesus enter and “cause a stir?” 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, right? 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. May that be true for us this week.

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