Luke 2:22-40
Let us speak of the precipice of death and the hope of the coming of God to abide with the poor.
Poverty is a difficult concept. In fact it may not be a concept at all, since it gestures toward a lack, an absence. That absence, however, is also difficult to specify. Since we have all been trained to imagine wealth and poverty in terms of money, we are inclined to think of poverty as having too little money. But poverty is not about money, not really. It is about goods: food, shelter, medicine, work, rest, companions, children, grandchildren, friends, all those things and persons without which we cannot live. The poor are those who lack such things, those in fact who, because of this lack, are having life drained out of them by the principalities and powers of this present evil age. It is true that some of the poor, some of those being robbed of life, have an abundance of money, but they are not the ones the gospel asks us first to imagine. The gospel asks us to imagine widows and orphans and strangers and the very old.
Luke 2 tells us just a little of the stories of two persons whom we may understand as “poor,” one of these persons, because she is a widow when and where widowhood was the most precarious of lives, both of these persons, because they are very old, that is, they cannot expect much time ahead of them before they die. What they receive at the temple, when Jesus is delivered to be ritually consecrated to God, is the confirmation, however vaguely they understood it, that their coming death and the coming death of all would not have the last word. They have seen their “salvation” in the warm body of a squirming, vulnerable child, a child, like all children, easily killed, by disease, famine, drought, or the violence of a cruel king’s murder squads.
Another gift is given to Simeon and Anna, however, as they received this child. Salvation not only signifies that death will not have the last word to their long lives. It also signifies that the lives they have lived have not been in vain.
The “salvation” that is depicted in the gospel of Luke is not just any salvation. We have been animal trained to think of salvation as the departure of a ghostlike soul from a perishing body, an ascent into an invisible heaven by an invisible personal spirit. But this is not what stirred in the imagination of the people of Judea and Galilee at the time of Jesus. These people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, knew in their bones that we are nothing without our bodies. That is, “salvation” was in the gospel and among those who flocked to it “the resurrection of the body,” that is, the transformation of “me,” of “you,” of “us” from lifeless, necrotic tissue to an eternally enlivened lifetime of the work and play of muscles and blood and skin and bones, enlivened as it is saturated by the holiness of the Holy God.
The gift received by Anna and Simeon is the gift of the promise that their lives have not been in vain, have not been a series of meaningless moments, each lost in an infinite sea of a time without beginning or end. God, the one who holds all of history in an open hand, says, “Yes!,” to every moment of their lives and thereby says, “Yes!,” to them. No cut, no bruise, no sorrow, no loss, no night of good rest, no day of good work, no moment of the breaking of a fever by a sickbed, no wedding day, no birthday, no death day, nothing and nowhere will be lost. God’s salvation is not the salvation merely of a ghost or merely of the tissue marking the space occupied by a dead body on burial day. God’s salvation is the salvation of a lifetime. Because a lifetime is a human being. You are your lifetime, from the moment your mother caught your father’s eye, to the moment you were lowered into your grave—and every moment into which these moments are forever entangled.
When Jesus walks out of his tomb, like and unlike other living bodies, alive with a life that has no opposite in death, alive with the Holy Spirit into whose glory he has moved, in that moment, God says, “Yes!,” to every moment of his life, among them the moment when Simeon, and the moment when Anna, beheld him in the temple. And since his body, saturated by God’s glory, is not intact, but torn open to every outside, they, too, are gathered into that glory—that is their salvation has come, come on the Easter Sunday that will not be pried away from Good Friday or Holy Saturday or any moment of any day in the history of God’s good creation.