To listen to this homily, click here.
If you don’t remember celebrating the feast of the Presentation, there is a good reason for that! In the past 20 years, this is only the 4th time it has fallen on a Sunday. This holy day is rich in symbolism and theology but in order to keep this homily reasonably brief, let’s just focus on two of the characters in our gospel, Simeon and Anna. We encounter Simeon and Anna on the best day of their lives; the day God’s promise was fulfilled for them. It might be easy for us to simply stay on this happy day but there is value in looking at the lessons we learn from the unremarkable, ordinary days and years leading up to the Presentation, the days that scripture does not record, the days which seem to blur into one big blob.
St. Luke tells us that Simeon was a righteous and devout man who received a promise from God that he would not die before he had the chance to meet the messiah. As far as we know, that’s all he knew. How many years had passed since that Divine Promise? How difficult some days must have been for Simeon to pray, to trust, to show up at the temple, not quite sure what the fulfillment would look like, wondering if he somehow missed it. And yet he remained faithful, hopeful, watchful, and ready. Trusting that God would keep his promise! Don’t you wonder what he thought when he first saw Jesus, just over a month old and realized that this is who he had been waiting for all these years?! He was so thrilled that he sung a canticle of praise that priests and religious say each night before we go to bed. It is a hymn of contentment, fulfillment, and peace that he must have been composing in the years of faithful waiting. Would we would have the same reaction? Would we look at the baby Jesus, the surprising answer of God to the question of sin and death, and say, “yeah, that seems right.” Or might we be skeptical, dismayed, or disappointed? Because of his great faith and trust in God, Simeon was able to look at the baby Jesus and know, this is what salvation looks like when it is 40 days old!
Alongside Simeon we have the amazing Anna. Her life started out so wonderfully. She was married at the appropriate time and for 7 years enjoyed marital bliss. After those 7 years, she became a widow and lived a life of hardship, uncertainty, and obscurity. From what Luke tells us, she had been a widow for 63 years until the moment of the Presentation. How easy it could have been for her to harden her heart, to grow bitter with her lot in life, to blame God for her sufferings. What an extraordinary woman she must have been to not be consumed by loneliness, sadness, or despair. The example of Anna is a lesson for us; the emptiness created by loss, she filled with the things of God. Luke tells us at this point of her life, she never left the temple and praised the Lord day and night. As this life claimed more and more of her, she steadily grew in her faith and worship. One more amazing detail that St. Luke shares with us: Anna was the daughter of Phanuel. Do you know what her dad’s name means? It is Hebrew for the “The face of God”. As she grew up, Anna would have learned about love and faith by watching her dad, who reflected the face of God. Isn’t it beautiful that this faith-filled, joyful woman who never left the temple, knew as soon as she saw the infant Jesus, that this was the perfect face of God that had been foreshadowed by her father?! How many days, how many years she prayed in the temple, seeking the face of God and did not find it? How easy it would have been, after more than 6 decades, to stop seeking, to become complacent, to lose the fire that clearly made her into a spiritual powerhouse. In the person of Anna, we have an inspiration for prayer, praise, perseverance, and hope!
If there was one thing we could take away from the Presentation, it would be this: there are many parts of our life, countless meals, appointments, routines, and moments, there are so many days, months, and even years that seem unremarkable. But that does not mean that they are unimportant! The glory and grace of the Presentation for Anna and Simeon was made possible by their faith-filled choices each day in the ordinary events of daily life. Most of our life plays out in the same way. We will each have relatively few mountain-top moments. But we prepare for them and are sustained in between them by how we approach the daily grind.
To close, I would offer the three things that Simeon and Anna did that made them ready to greet Jesus at the moment of the Presentation:
- They showed up. Day after day they went were they needed to be. Even if they didn’t get much out it, even if today felt pretty much the same as yesterday. It didn’t matter, they put themselves in the place God wanted them to be and we would be wise to start with that simple but crucial first step.
- They were present. We all know what it is like to be physically somewhere but mentally, spiritually, or emotionally checked out. This is so easy to do these days with our screens and other technologies that keep us perpetually distracted. It can even happen here at Mass where we attend the Eucharist but our hearts and minds fly away to other concerns. Anna and Simeon weren’t just checking the boxes in their daily routines.
- They did what they knew rather than dwelling on all they did not. Sometimes we can be consumed by the unknowns in life. There is far more we don’t know or understand and we can spend so much time and energy fretting over those things. Simeon didn’t know when the time of fulfillment would come for him. Anna didn’t know what the face of God would look like. But they did know that they should be in the temple praying, praising, worshipping, and trusting God. They did what they knew and that is what revealed what was unknown. Every parent here knows this too. You did not take your baby home with all the knowledge of every parenting requirement. You knew the basics of feeding your baby, keeping them safe, warm, and healthy and each day you did this, you understood a little more. The same is true with our relationship with God!
May we rejoice like Simeon and Anna, as we celebrate the Presentation. Let us imitate them in living well the unremarkable moments of everyday life so we are ready to recognize Jesus in the extraordinary occasions where we meet him face to face!
