Hebrews 2.14-18, Luke 2.22-40
Today Christmas officially comes to an end in the Church’s
year as we celebrate the feast of Candlemas. Christmas Day might seem a long
time ago, the cards long since recycled, and the decorations packed away, but
we need this time to ponder the story of Christ’s birth. It’s not something you
can do in a day, or even twelve days.
It’s not just inside the church that it can take a while to
come to terms with the impact of Christmas. Over this last month perhaps you
have been burning off the extra calories from all those mince pies or paying
off the credit card. Or perhaps you have needed to think about the delicate business
of deciding what to do with those gifts you received that, shall we say, didn’t
quite hit the spot. There are bound to be some. Gift giving and receiving can be a complicated
business. Should you pass on that
ghastly vase, give it to charity, or must you keep it on display in case the
giver calls around? There’s the problem of gift inequality too. You were sure
that a cheap box of chocolates from the petrol station would do for the aunt
you hardly ever see, but then she gives you something expensive and carefully
chosen and you look really mean. Gift giving is a guessing game which it is
almost impossible to get right. Philip told me a family story of two of his mother’s
uncles, who apparently hit on the perfect solution for them. They would each wrap
up a shilling (it was a while ago!) and solemnly give it to the other on
Christmas Day, every Christmas Day. It
worked for them, but I have a feeling it might not work for everyone!
Giving gifts ought to be straightforward, an uncomplicated
act of generosity. But somehow it often isn’t.
Our Gospel reading today is all tied up with gift giving
too, and the complexities that go with it. That might not be obvious at first
sight, but bear with me and I’ll explain. As you’ll see from your pew leaflets,
todays official title is the Presentation of Christ – Candlemas is the folk
name for it. A presentation is literally the giving of a present, a gift, but
just as with our Christmas gift giving, this presentation is not as simple as
it seems. What is going on here? Who is giving what to whom, and why, and what
does it all mean?
The only thing that actually changes hands in this story is
a pair of pigeons, the ritual sacrifice Mary and Joseph bring to the Temple, as
the law demands, forty days after Jesus’ birth. But those two pigeons are
actually substitute sacrifices, standing in for the child himself. It is Jesus
who is really being presented to God as every first born baby boy was. This
ritual had its roots in the story of the Exodus, when all the first born of
Egypt, animal and human, were killed in one last terrible plague. Only the children
of the Hebrews were spared. To remember that, forever afterwards all first born
males – animal and human – were to be “designated as holy” to God. That sounds
fine – who wouldn’t want to be designated as holy? Except that what it actually
means is “sacrificed.” Fortunately, since Judaism forbade human sacrifice a
substitute was prescribed – two pigeons
or a lamb if you could afford it. The principle was still important, though.
Life was a gift, this ritual reminded them. Your children were not your
children, any more than the sun was your sun, or the rain your rain.
These things – all things – came from God, and ultimately they are not ours to
own or control. We can only ever give back to God what he has first given to
us.
Sacrifice – animal or human – probably seems like a strange
idea to us, utterly alien. But for most people in most of the world for most of
human history, it has been at the heart of worship, crucial to their daily
lives, and perhaps it’s not so far from our thinking as we might suppose
either. That curious habit people have
of throwing coins into wells and fountains is a hangover from our ancestors’ beliefs in sacrifice. From the Trevi
fountain in Rome, to a water feature in a modern shopping mall, any body of
water is likely to have an assortment of small change at the bottom, once intended
as offerings to the water spirits. Who knows what people mean when they do this
now, but they still seem to feel the need to do it anyway.
The Old Testament was absolutely clear about the importance
and meaning of sacrifice in its world, though, and was very precise in its
instructions There were offerings of grain,
wine, incense, oil and animals. There were offerings which symbolised simple
gratitude and thanksgivings, and offerings which were designed in some way to
set right things that had gone wrong, repair relationships, restore purity,
draw people back into community with one another and with God.
At their best , like any other ritual, sacrifices helped
people to go out and live differently afterwards, more thankfully, generously,
forgiving others as they had been forgiven. Sacrifice reminded them that they were part of
something bigger, bound up in the life of God , bound together with the world
he gave them and with one another. At their worst, though, sacrifices could
easily become no more than superstitions, magical procedures which turned their
relationships with God into a sort of bargaining game, a contract which said “if
you give God this lamb or pigeon or grain offering, he is then obligated to
sort out the problem, remove the guilt, or send the blessing you feel entitled
to.” That puts the power in entirely the wrong place, treating God like some sort
of hired workman whose services are ours to command so long as we are prepared
to pay for them.
Although Christianity is not a sacrificial religion like
first century Judaism, we can just as easily fall into that way of thinking.
The Medieval indulgences people earned through pilgrimage or prayer, or even
bought with cold hard cash, were meant to lessen the time they thought they
would spend in purgatory. They were sacrifices by another name. And after the
Reformation the desire to manipulate the forces of heaven didn’t go away. Instead
people simply looked for other ways of reassuring themselves that they had it
sorted. Believing the right doctrines, living according to a particular moral
pattern, or even just inviting Jesus into your heart as personal saviour are
really no better than bargaining chips if we think that by doing these things
we are earning the favour we feel we need. They still rely on the “quid pro quo”
attitude – I do this, and God will then do that. He must; it is in the
contract.
As well as making God
look like some kind of monster who would condemn those who got it wrong to
eternal damnation, this way of thinking turns Christian faith into an entirely individual
pursuit, a matter of gaining a ticket to heaven for yourself, rather than helping
to create heaven on earth for all. It leads
to an anxious, obsessive faith in which, depending on the sort of church,
people will either repeatedly need to come forward for the altar call, or light
yet another candle, or find ever more rules to keep and to make others keep
too. If you think it is all about having that heavenly admission ticket, then
you’d better make sure you keep it somewhere safe.
This Gospel story we heard today challenges that sort of
thinking though, just as much as it challenged the sacrificial thinking of
Jesus’ time. You see, Mary and Joseph, in some ways have cause for complaint under
the Sacrificial Sale of Goods act, if there were such a thing. They give their
two pigeons to redeem their child, so that he won’t have to be sacrificed but,
as Simeon points out, when he grows up they will lose him anyway – “a sword
shall pierce your own soul too” he says to Mary. He is going to die, sacrificing himself on the
cross anyway. The sacrificial system, which had become for so many an end in
itself, based on token gifts which really changed nothing much is going to be
swept away by the real gift of a real life, given in the real cause of bringing
real peace and justice.
Jesus’ death is not a trump card in a cosmic game played
with a wrathful God, whose honour can only be satisfied by the death of an
innocent victim; it is the inevitable
result of Jesus choosing freely to confront the powers of oppression in a world
where human greed and fear have taken hold. It is the costly, flesh and blood
gift of someone who is determined not to turn away from the path he knows he
needs to take for the sake of those around him. Christ does not die to satisfy
the honour of a God who is offended by sin, he dies to live out the generous
love of a God who will never give up on his creation, who comes alongside us as
we suffer and struggle in a world twisted with hatred, and suffers and
struggles too so that, as the letter to the Hebrews says, “he is able to help
those who are being tested”, giving us courage and hope to carry on with his
work in our own age.
I started by talking about gifts, and their unexpected
complexity. We often give them for reasons that are far more tangled than we
suppose; to create a sense of obligation, to curry favour, to show off our
power and wealth, to cement alliances, to distract from the real issues rather
than deal with them. My suspicion is that our attitude to the gift of Christ’s
life is sometimes just as tangled, tainted by the very fear he came to deliver
us from. We hoard it and guard it, rationing it to those we feel deserve it,
worry about losing it and try to control what happens to it and by doing so we
rob it of its power.
The gift of Christ is a gift given out of pure love, a gift
given freely to the whole world, not something that only the lucky few who
happen to be holding the parcel when the music stops can unwrap. The only
appropriate response to it is to rejoice in it and to share it with the same
generosity with which it came to us.
Amen
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