Today is a special Sunday called the Presentation of Our Lord. And if it’s not familiar to you, that’s okay, because it’s actually always February 2nd, which doesn’t fall very often on a Sunday.
It’s important because today is forty days after Christmas Eve. In other words, it’s forty days after Jesus’ birth, and in Jesus’ time, a Jewish mother would go to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after her baby was born to be purified from birth and receive a blessing. And, as the Gospel reading tells us today, to present her baby, in this case her firstborn who was a male, to God in the Temple. Because Mary was a good Jewish mother, and Jesus was a little Jewish baby. He was circumcised according to the covenant God with Abraham, eight days after he was born, as a sign that he was one of God’s children of Israel.
The Gospel of Luke makes a big deal of this––that Jesus was Jewish. More so than the other Gospels. Luke is the only Gospel that tells the story of Jesus being brought to the Temple after forty days, and the only one that tells the story of Jesus going to the Temple when he was twelve years old, and having discussions with the leaders there about the nature of God. It’s also the only Gospel to tell of the birth of John the Baptist, which highlights that John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest in the Temple, to whom the angel Gabriel appeared and delivered a message that his not-yet-born son would prepare Israel for the coming of the Lord.
But why? Why should the original audience of Luke’s Gospel care? More to the point, why should we care, beyond historical interest? Shouldn’t Jesus’ Jewishness be the topic of a Bible study rather than a sermon? What does Jesus’ Jewishness have to do with our relationship with God? We know that his humanness is important, that, as our reading from Hebrews says, he became flesh and blood, “so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death ... and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” We know that us being saved and redeemed is absolutely dependent on the Son of God being human, but what does being Jewish have to do with it?
Well, to understand why Jesus’ Jewishness is important to our relationship with God––or God’s relationship with us, if we’re going to be Lutheran about it, which of course, we want to be––we need to back up a bit. Actually, we need to back up about 4,000 years to when God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God would be their God, and they would be God’s people, and the males would be circumcised as a sign of that relationship. And over the next 2,000 years, as the Old Testament tells us, God developed and deepened that relationship, through Abraham’s son, Isaac, through Isaac’s son Jacob, who was named Israel, through Jacob’s son Joseph, (are your Sunday School memories starting to come back to you?) And then God made a new covenant at Sinai, with Moses and the people of Israel (Christians weren’t the first to have a new covenant, as you see.) And in this covenant, God renewed God’s commitment to the children of Israel and gave them the Commandments to help them live together. And this would be for them, and their children, and their children’s children, and so on. To describe their relationship using familiar language, the Jews were and are saved and redeemed by God through these covenants and particularly through what we call the Mosaic covenant.
Now it’s important to know that that covenant, and that relationship with God, was for the people of Israel alone. Only them. Not us. And by that I mean, that relationship was not for Gentiles, which means non-Jews, which means us. We are not Jewish. We are not in that covenant, we are not in that relationship. Jesus was. And Paul, and all the apostles, and the first disciples, but not us.
Sounds a bit harsh, right? We’re outsiders. We’re Jenny-come-latelies. We are the stranger, the foreigner, the “Other.” God didn’t choose us first. It’s kind of uncomfortable to think about, because we’re not used to thinking that way. Centuries of being the Christian majority have led us to feel “special,” superior, on the religious world stage, to feel as if we are God’s firstborn, most beloved people. But that’s not what the Bible says.
Now, before you get too discouraged––or convert to Judaism––here’s what the Bible does say. There is a small but persistent voice throughout the Old Testament that proclaims that, while God made several covenants with the people of Israel, God also had plans for us. That is, God also had plans for the Gentiles, for what is described as “the nations.” We see those words from time-to-time, “the nations.” They mean the world that is not Jewish. A few weeks ago, we heard from Isaiah, that God says to him, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation will reach the end of the earth.” And we hear it again in our Gospel reading, when Simeon, whose name means God hears, proclaims that now he has seen the salvation, which God has “prepared in the presence of the nations (which is how the Greek is better translated), a light for revelation to the Gentiles.” Simeon has been waiting and waiting for God to bring the Gentiles, us, into a relationship, as he has heard in his Scriptures, and now he is so blessed as to actually see it happen.
You see, God’s love and mercy and goodness and care has always been for the entire world, for Jews and for non-Jews. It’s just that God had to start somewhere, and maybe the people of Israel were the first to accept God as their God. I don’t know. The point, though, is that God had, from the beginning, an intention to make us part of God’s own people.
Which is where Jesus comes in. Finally. Jesus was the Word of God who became flesh and blood, born of Jewish parents, circumcised on the eight day, a full member of God’s covenant with the chosen people of Israel, a Jew. As a Jew, he was part of that special, redemptive, saving relationship that God has with Israel. And, and this is the important part, as a Jew he knew that God intended for Gentiles, for all the nations, for us to have a relationship with God, too. And so he set about reminding his fellow Jews that God cares for the Samaritan, for the Roman soldier, for those on the margins, for the “Other.” He set about reminding them that God was calling them into relationship with non-Jews so that non-Jews would know that God was saving them, too.
And, to make sure that everybody, Jew and Gentile, knew that this was indeed God’s plan, Jesus put his own life on the line and died. This is why he sacrificed himself. Not for the Jews, but for the Gentiles. For us. To bring us into a saving and redeeming relationship with the great God of Israel. And he was raised as proof, if you will, that God had actually intended this for us, that the Scriptures that said that God would give Israel as “a light to the nations, that God’s salvation will reach the end of the earth,” were correct, and were fulfilled.
So, you see, Jesus being Jewish is more than just historically interesting. Jesus being Jewish is absolutely critical to our relationship with God. Because we come to the God of Israel through Christ. We come to God through someone who was and is a stranger to us. Jesus was human, yes, but Jesus was not like us. Jesus, as he lived on earth, did not have the same relationship with God that we do. And yet Jesus had the same love for us that God does. Jesus knew that God’s love and mercy and goodness were so abundant, so wide, so much the essence of God, that Jesus specifically reached out to those on the margins. To the non-Jews. To us. Through Jesus, God established another new covenant, new because this time, it was with people who were not the children of Israel.
Which is weird. It’s weird to think that we’re add-ons in God’s relationship with the world, rather than central to it. For one thing, it runs against almost two thousand years of Christian understanding. For another, nobody likes to think of themselves as an add-on. It’s weird.
But it’s also wonderful. It’s wonderful because it shows us the depth and breadth of God’s love. It shows us that God truly is an awesome God, who also cares for those who do not even know who God is. It shows us that God does not love us because we’ve somehow earned it or checked off all the right religious boxes, but because God is love––steadfast love. God is gracious, and merciful, and inclusive, and embracing. And God also wants us, and welcomes us.
This is why we gather, as Christians, to worship and give praise and thanks to God. Because we are living proof of God’s love for everyone. Because we are recipients of God’s grace and mercy. Because God became flesh-and-blood in Jesus Christ the Jew to live––and die––to show us that. And so we remember, and so we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.
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