A homily for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, February 2, 2025
Malachi 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40 or 2:22-32
In the brilliant and sorely missed comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” the imp and his stuffed tiger who comes to life often play Calvinball.
There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: players cannot play it the same way twice.
That either confirms or directly conflicts with a child psychologist’s observation that, quite often, kids spend so much time picking teams and hashing out the rules of whatever game they’re about to play that they wind up not having time to play it.
There’s no doubt, however, that we live in a world of rules and rulers. Humankind always has.
Obey the rules or else.
Rules are made to be broken.
Laws protect good people from bad people and bad people from themselves.
The spirit of the law outweighs the letter of the law.
Rules, laws, contracts, pacts, covenants … however they’re defined and elaborated, they represent expectations. They represent what we expect all parties in a relationship to share with each other, in words and deeds.
Rules list the who, what, when, where and how of those expected words and deeds. The relationship, and by extension, the existence of the rule, is the why.
Sometimes, following the letter of the law also fulfills the spirit of the law. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Today’s Feast of the Presentation of the Lord — Candlemas, 40 days after the Feast of the Nativity — celebrates the recognition of Jesus as the Christ by holy seers in the Temple. But it also marks the ritual purification, under Jewish law, of a woman who gave birth — Mary, the Blessed Mother.
Total obedience to letter and spirit.
Total obedience to the Covenant between Almighty God and the Chosen People of Israel. The Ten Commandments. The Law of Moses.
But, as we will see through Scripture in the coming weeks, Jesus never delivered blind obedience. And he expected all his followers, everyone who claimed a relationship with him, to shun blind obedience likewise.
As quoted in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus declares his mission:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
In other words, Jesus was here to provide more spirit and less letter in the scrolls upon scrolls of laws.
Quite the boat-rocker. Thank his heavenly Father that Jesus could walk on water.
The powers-that-be of his time didn’t accept or even acknowledge Jesus’s fulfillment of the law and the prophets as the evolution and revolution that it was … and still is. Guided — or, more likely, driven and herded — by the hour-by-hour mandates about every human action and even every bodily function, the religious and civic leaders of the first century could not and would not step outside their comfort zones.
No, not only would those Scribes and Pharisees and Herodial monarchs not think or act outside the box, they wouldn’t even get close to the sides of the box. The rules say that’s the way we do it, because that’s the way we’ve always done it, and so that’s the way we’ll always do it.
It surely saddened Jesus to see supposedly learned people checking their brains and hearts at the door.
Those same leaders ever-so-desperately feared what Jesus condemned about blindly following the rules that they had him hung on a tree, with his lifeless body tossed into a borrowed hole in the ground.
Now, to be clear, the family of Jesus, the 6-week-old firstborn son, did indeed play by the rules as they presented him in the Temple. And though the history of the Nazarene’s early life is skimpy, we have every reason to believe the Holy Family continued to play by the rules every day of their lives.
They gave Jesus a great foundation.
And he built on that foundation by simplifying the rules. Simplifying them into the 2½-part Law of Love. Again, from Matthew:
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
We in the 21st century continue to depend on those two commandments.
We depend on the grace and love that those two greatest commandments embody to do what is right and just, even when our social norms — let alone laws or other government actions — try to steer us toward injustice and hatred.
Jesus challenges us to stand up under the weight of the crosses we call rules, any time and every time those rules deserve to be broken.
God’s Wisdom is available to point them out. God supplies us with the courage to smash through.
