Tuesday, February 06, 2018

What We Can Learn From Jesus' Nativity: Anna Ratifies Jesus (Luke 2:36-38)


There was a prophetess, too, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was well on in years. Her days of girlhood over, she had been married for seven years 37before becoming a widow. She was now eighty-four years old and never left the Temple, serving God night and day with fasting and prayer. 38She came up just at that moment and began to praise God; and she spoke of the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem.

1.    Anna shows that God works through folks that society marginalizes. She was a woman, and women had low status in that day. See Three Blessings: Why does the daily liturgy thank God for not making you a Gentile, slave, or a woman?  She does not appear to have had children, and “barren” women had lower status than women generally. She was a widow, one of the most vulnerable of women. See Wisdom Principles: Caring for the Weak & Vulnerable. She was old. See Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 . She came from the tribe of Asher, a tribe that was not particularly prominent in its prime, and that had been decimated by the Assyrian exile. Yet God used her powerfully, both at that time (to encourage Mary & Joseph) and in the millennia since then (to encourage those who have read/heard of her actions). 

2.    Although Anna performed an extraordinary service, it came out of her faithfulness in the ordinary.
A.   She was a very credible witness—the core of what she was called to do here—because of her ongoing, long running, devotion to God. That was her “ordinary.” That dynamic is further explored in Preliminary Work: What we can learn from Joseph and Daniel.
B.    She was in a position to do this particular service, the extraordinary thing we remember her for, because she was faithfully going about her ordinary vocation on this particular day.
C.    I doubt that Anna knew this extraordinary event was going to happen on this particular day. Yet God broke into what she probably expected to be an ordinary day to bring about the extraordinary event described here.
D.   The ordinariness that this extraordinary event came out of becomes more apparent when we consider it in the context of our own lives. Given what Luke 2:25-35 tells us about Simeon, and Anna’s own devotion, it’s likely that they knew each other, just like we know folks “from church.”   The language of verses 36 and 38 indicate that Anna was going about her normal routine when she came upon Simeon’s interaction with the holy family. That lead to her extraordinary interaction with them. In sum, the events we read about here are the result of what we might describe as “bumping into someone at church.” It doesn’t get much more ordinary than that.
3.    This passage illustrates two other principles that appear elsewhere in scripture:
A.    Genesis 50:20  and Romans 8:28  tell us that God is able to being good out of otherwise difficult situations. As discussed in point 1 above, Anna faced multiple difficulties, but those difficulties likely produced her devotion to God and hence her being in the position to deliver the blessings described in that point.

B.    Scripture tells us that a fact can be reliably established by the testimony of two witnesses. See e.g.  Deuteronomy 17:6, Deuteronomy 19:15, Matthew 18:6. Verses 36 and 38 tell us that Anna was independently testifying to Jesus’ status at the same time Simeon was, providing that evidentiary support for that status.

Other meditations on Jesus’ nativity are collected at What We Can Learn from Jesus' Nativity: The Annunciation through Simeon & Anna 

No comments: