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Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord
Malachi 3:1-4 + Luke 2:22-32
42 days ago today (40 days ago, counting from this past Monday, February 2nd), we celebrated Christmas. Why do we count off 40 days from December 25th to make a holy day out February 2nd? We do it, because Mary and Joseph did it; they counted off 40 days from the day of Jesus’ birth, and then they took Him up from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, to the very Temple of which God had spoken through the Prophet Malachi, “And the Lord, whom you seek, Will suddenly come to His temple, Even the Messenger of the covenant, In whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,” Says the LORD of hosts. And finally, after 400 years from the time Malachi wrote those words, He did come. The Lord finally came to His Temple, 40 days after His birth.
Why 40 days? Because Mary and Joseph were godly Jews who paid attention to God’s ceremonial laws for the Jewish people, and the Law of Moses required that they perform two ceremonies: Purification for Mary, and the Consecration of her firstborn son.
In Leviticus 12, Moses gave the Israelites God’s command about purification after childbirth. Just like eating pork or touching a corpse made someone unclean, so childbirth made a woman ceremonially unclean. She was unclean for 40 days after the birth of a son, 80 days after the birth of a daughter. On the 40th day after the birth of a boy, the mother was to take two offerings to the Temple to be sacrificed: either a lamb and a turtle dove, or, if she couldn’t afford a lamb, then two turtle doves, which is the offering Luke indicates that Mary brought.
Purification was commanded by God, because every time a child is born, there is a flow of blood—a sinner’s lifeblood. And in the Old Testament, God used lots of symbols. A sinner’s blood was a symbol of sin—sin that needed to be punished with death. That’s why God gave them so many animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, to teach them that blood needed to be shed in order for sinners to stand clean and pure before God. But even the animals were just symbols. What was really needed was the blood of a spotless, sinless human being, and not just any sinless human being, but the very Son of God, sent to earth for this very purpose. The ceremonies and the laws about clean and unclean were shadows pointing to the Christ who would bring real, spiritual purification to sinners. And the much shorter time of a woman’s uncleanness after giving birth to a boy pointed to the coming of a male Child who would redeem us all. Well, now, finally, the Christ had been born, the sinless Son of God who, by His death, would make atonement for the sins of all people. Finally, all the pictures of the Law of Moses and the Jewish ceremonies were being fulfilled. Finally, and for the first and only time in human history, a clean, sinless Son had been born of a woman. And right there in Mary’s own sacrificial offerings for her purification, the future sacrifice of her sinless Son was being foreshadowed.
The second ceremony that had to be fulfilled according to the Law of Moses was the Consecration of the firstborn son. That goes back to the Exodus, to the first Passover, to the tenth plague God sent against Egypt, the plague of the firstborn. You remember, God sent the destroying angel against all the firstborn sons of Egypt, but He spared the firstborn sons of Israel by telling them to take a lamb and slaughter it, to take its blood and paint the doorframes of their houses with it. When the destroying angel saw the blood of the lamb, he passed over their houses. Then God put a claim on every firstborn son who would be born in the future generations of Israel. Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the LORD. Now, what does that mean? It means that, as an Israelite, either you present your firstborn son to God in His Temple and leave him there to serve God for the rest of his life (as Old Testament Hannah did with her son Samuel), or, as was usually the case, you had to redeem or “buy back” your firstborn son from God, for the price of a lamb.
Did Mary and Joseph actually buy Jesus back from God with a lamb? Luke makes no mention of it here, and that makes sense, because of all the sons born to men, Jesus truly was holy to the Lord. Jesus was the Son of Man who belongs to God the Father and cannot be redeemed from Him, but would dedicate His life to God’s service and to being the Redeemer whose blood was the redemption price of the world. We hear at Jesus’ Baptism how God claimed Jesus as His own, beloved Son. So it makes sense that Luke doesn’t record Mary and Joseph offering a lamb to buy the Lamb of God back from God.
It seems that they planned to, they planned to redeem the Redeemer—to, as Luke says, do for Him according to the custom of the law. But they were interrupted by divine intervention. It was at that moment that God’s Spirit brought old Simeon over to Mary and Joseph.
Simeon was one of those Jews—one of the relatively few, it seems—who understood, by the gracious working of the Holy Spirit, that the Law of Moses was pointing ahead to someone, pointing to the coming of the Messiah. He was “waiting for the Consolation of Israel,” the consolation or comfort that Isaiah had promised long ago. Not the comfort of a cushy life on earth, but the comfort of the forgiveness of sins and peace with God. As Isaiah said, “Comfort, yes, comfort My people!” Says your God. “Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her, That her warfare is ended, That her iniquity is pardoned; For she has received from the LORD’s hand Double for all her sins.”
God’s Spirit revealed in the prophecies of Scripture that the Messiah had to be born right around that time, and God’s Spirit revealed to Simeon that he wouldn’t see death until He saw the Lord’s Christ with his own eyes. So at just the right moment, on just the right day, God’s Spirit brought Simeon to the Temple and brought him right up to the right family. And he took Jesus up in his arms and blessed the Lord with those Spirit-inspired words that we sing every Sunday and on many Wednesdays: Lord, now You let Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word. For my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a Light for enlightening the Gentiles, and for glory to Your people Israel.
Let’s take a brief look at this Nunc Dimittis. First, Simeon announces that he is ready to depart—to be dismissed from the Lord’s earthly service, to die, in peace. You hear some people say, “I’m ready to die, whenever.” Some of them even mean it! Some of them aren’t actually ready, though, even if they think they are. They delude themselves into thinking they’ve lived such a good life that God will surely let them through the “pearly gates.” Others think that death just has to be better than what they’re suffering here, as if hell didn’t exist. Still others delude themselves into thinking that God is so “nice” that He’ll just let everybody into heaven. But, no. Simeon’s readiness came from only one place—from faith in the God of Israel who had promised to send a Savior to Israel—the very Child whom he held in his arms.
For My eyes have seen Your salvation. This is such a basic truth: Sinners need salvation, an offering, a sacrifice that atones for their sins and rescues them from eternal condemnation in hell. And Simeon tells us that this salvation of God is found nowhere but in one place—in the Child whom he held in his arms. St. Peter says the same thing, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Only by the name of Jesus, the Son of God, true God and true Man, who would give His life on the cross as the redemption price.
The price for whom? “Prepared before the face of all peoples, a Light for enlightening the Gentiles and for glory to Your people Israel.” No one on earth, Jew or Gentile, no matter how sincere or religious they may be, will be saved, unless they believe in this Child, held by Simeon, in Jesus, the Christ, the Savior sent by God to save all men from their sins. God sent Him to bring the light of the knowledge of God to all the Gentiles. And He also sent Him to bring glory to Israel, the only nation on earth that already had the light of God’s salvation shining from the Old Testament promises of God, promises which centered on the coming Redeemer. The Lord Jesus was offered into death for all men on earth, and He is offered now as the One who defeated death—offered to all men on earth in the preaching of this Gospel, so that all might hear, and repent, and believe in Him, both Jew and Gentile.
So again today, on this Feast of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Jesus, we celebrate the revelation of God’s salvation to us sinners in the Person of Jesus. And again today, we celebrate the great Sacraments that God has given us, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. Why? Because Holy Baptism is our purification ceremony by which God washed us clean, through faith in Mary’s firstborn Son. And why Holy Communion? Because Holy Communion brings the Lamb of God to us with consolation, with salvation, with the promise of forgiveness, so that, just like Simeon, our eyes can see the very bread and wine to which Jesus has attached His promise, This is My body; This is My blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. As truly as Simeon saw with his eyes the Lord’s salvation, so we see Him with the eyes of faith every time we receive the Sacrament of the Altar, so that we, too, may depart in peace, at any moment, whenever the Lord is ready to dismiss us from His earthly service and bring us into heavenly glory. Amen.
