For the Sunday after Christmas, January 1, 2006, we read in Luke of two prophets, Simeon and Anna. In these persons we again are reminded of the roots of our Christian story in the ancient story of the Hebrews. The Holy Family goes up to Jerusalem to make the sacrifice in the Temple specified in the law of Moses for poor persons.
The Temple plays a prominent role in Luke, not only in the Gospel, but also in Acts, even though, by the time Luke is writing, the Temple has been recently destroyed. Anna receives only brief mention, and her words are not quoted directly. She is very old--at least 84, but depending on whether 84 is the number of years she has been widowed, maybe she is 105. In any case it strikes me that she is old enough to remember the Roman general Pompey's seige of Jerusalem and desecration of the Temple in 63 B.C.E. Does Luke have this in mind?
Could it be that Anna's husband was one of the Jewish defenders who were slain in the Temple as Pompey's soldiers broke in? Could this explain Anna's devoted attention to the Temple and her "looking for the redemption of Jerusalem"? Perhaps the evidence for this is a little thin, but it would explain Luke's close attention to the specifics of Anna's age, and especially the explicit reference to her age at the time of her husband's death. This, of course, would not be the first reference in this nativity story to Roman occupation--the birth narrative itself is dated by a Roman census and a reference to the Emperor.
Luke does not place his story in a mythic place or a mythic time, but in a time and place that seems to be real, and for his readers, relatively recent. As with the birth narrative, this story places Jesus in the midst of our messy, suffering world. Where does Christ appear in our world today?
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1 comment:
Where indeed?
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