AND THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. CHAPTER VII
(St. Luke ii. 21-38.)
Foremost amongst those who, wondering, had heard what the shepherds told, was she whom most it concerned, who laid it up deepest in her heart, and brought to it treasured stores of memory. It was the Mother of Jesus. These many months, all connected with this Child could never have been far away form her thoughts. And now that He was hers, yet not hers, belonged, yet did not seem to belong, to her, He would be the more dear to her Mother-heart for what made Him so near, and yet parted Him so far from her. And upon all His history seemed to lie such wondrous light, that she could only see the path behindm, so far as she had trodden it,; while upon that on which she was to move, was such dazzling brightness, that she could scare look upon the present, and dared not gaze towards the future.
At the very outset of this history, and increasingly in its course, the question meets us, how, if the Angelic message to the Virgin was a reality, and her motherhood so supernatural, she could have been apparently so ignorant of what was to come, nay, so often have even misunderstood it? Strange, that she should have 'pondered in her heart' the shepherd's account; stranger, that afterwards she should have wondered at His lingering in the Temple among Israel's teachers; strangest, that, at the very first of His miracles, a mother's fond pride should have so harshly broken in upon the Divine melody of His work, by striking a keynote so different from that, to which His life had been set; or that afterwards, in the height of his activity, loving fears, if not doubts, should have prompted her to interrupt, what evidently she had not as yet comprehended in the fulness of its meaning. Might we not rather have expected, that the Virgin-Mother from the inception of this Child's life would have understood, that He was truly the Son of God? The
question, like so many others, requires only to be clearly stated, to find its emphatic answer. For. had it been so His history, His human life, of which every step is of such importance to mankind, would not have been possible. Apart from all thoughts of the deeper necessity, both as regarded His Mission and all the salvation of the world, of a true human development of gradual consciousness and personal life, Christ could not, in any true sense, have been subject to His Parents, if they had fully understood that He was Divine; nor could He, in that case, have been watched, as He 'grew in wisdon and in favour with God and men.' Such knowledge would have broken the bond of His Humanity to ours, by severing that which bound Him as a child to His mother. We could not have become His brethren, had He not been truly the Virgin's Son. The mystery of the Incarnation would have been needless and fruitless, had His humanity not been subject to all its right and ordinary conditions. And, applying the same principle more widely, we can thus, in some measure, understand why the mystery of His Divinity had to be kept while He was on earth. Had it been otherwise, the thought of His Divinity would have proved so all-absorbing, as to render impossible tthat of His Humanity, with all its lessons. The Son of God Most High, Whom they worshipped, could never have been the loving Man, with Whom they could hold such close converse. The bond which bound the Master to His disciples, the Son of Man to humanity, would have been dissolved; His teaching as a Man, the Inearnation, and the Tabernacling among men, in place of the former Old Testament Revelation from heaven, would have become wholly impossible. In short, one, and that the distinctive New Testament, element in our salvation would have been taken away. At the beginning of His life He would have anticipated the lessons of its end, nay, not those of His Death only, but of His Resurrection and Ascension, and of the coming of the Holy Ghost.
In all this we have only been taking the subjective, not the objective, view of the question; considered the eartward, not the heavenward, aspect of His life. The latter, though very real, lies beyond our present horizon. Not so the question as to the development of the Virgin-Mother's spiritual knowledge. Assuming her to have occupied, in the fullest sense, the standpoint of Jewish Messianic expectancy, and remembering, also, that she was so 'highly favoured' of God, still, there was not as yet anything, nor could there be for many years, to lead her beyond what might be called the utmost height of Jewish belief. On the contrary, there was much connected with His true Humanity to keep her back. For narrow as, to our retrospective thinking, the boundary-line seems between Jewish belief and that in the hypostatic union of the two Natures, the passage from the one to the other represented such tremendous mental revolution, as to imply direct Divine teaching, [a 1 Cor. xii. 3] An illustrative instance willprove this better than argument. We read, in a commentary on the opening words of Gen. xv. 18, [b Ber. R. 44, ed. Warsh. p. 81 b] that when God made the covenant with Abram, He 'revealed to him both this 01am (dispensation) and the 01am to come,' which latter expression is correctly explained as referring to the days of the Messiah. Jewish tradition, therefore, here asserts exactly what Jesus stated in these words: 'Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day; and he saw it, and was glad.' [e St. John viii. 56] Yet we know what storm of indignation the enunciation of it called forth among the Jews!
Thus it was, that every event connected with the Messianic manifestation of Jesus would come to the Virgin-Mother as a fresh discovery and a new surprise. Each event, as it took place, stood isolated in her mind; not as part of a whole which she would anticipate, nor as only one link in a chain; but as something quite by itself. She knew the beginning, and she knew the end; but she knew not the path which led from the one to the other; and each step in it was a new revelation.
Henceit was, tht she so carefully treasured in her heart every new fact, [d St. Luke ii. 19, 51] piecing each to the other, till she could read from it the great mystery that He, Whom Incarnate she had borne, was, indeed, the Son of the living God. And as it was natural, so it was well that it should be so. For, thus only could she truly, because self-unconsciously, as a Jewish woman and mother, fulfil all the requirements of the Law, alike as regarded herself and her Child The first of these was Circumcision, representing voluntary subjection to the conditions of the Law, and acceptance of the obligations, but also of the privileges, of the Covenant between God and Abraham and his seed. Any attempt to show the deep siginificance of such a rite in the case of Jesus, could only weaken the impression which the fact itself conveys. The ceremony took place, as in all ordinary circumstances, on the eight day, when the Child received the Angel-given name Jeshua (Jesus). Two other legal ordinances still remained to be observed. The firstbnorn son of every household was, according to the Law, to be 'redeemed' of the priest at the price of five shekels of the Sanctuary, [e Numb, xviii. 16] Rabbinic casuistry here added many needless, and even repulsive, details. The following, however, are of practical interest. The earliest period of presentation was thirty- one days after birth so as to make the legal month quite complete. The child must have been the firstborn of his mother (according to some writers, of his father also); [1 So Lundius, Jud. Alterth. p.621, and Buxtorf, Lex. Talmud, p. 1699. But I am bound to say, that this seems contrary to the sayings of the Rabbis.] neither father nor mother [2 This disposes of the idea, that the Virgin-Mother was of direct Aaronic or Levitic descent.] must be of Levitic descent; and the child must be free from all such bodily blemishes as would have disqualified him for the priesthood, or, as it was expressed: 'the firstborn for the priesthood.' It was a thing much dreaded, that the child should die before his redemption; but if his father died in the interval, the child had to redeem himself when of age. As the Rabbinic law expressly states, that the shekels were to be of 'Tyrian weight,' [a Bechor viii. 7] the value of the 'redemption money' would amount to about ten or twelve shillings. The redemption could be made from any priest, and attendance in the Temple was not requisite. It was otherwise with the 'purification' of the mother, [b Lev. xii.] The Rabbinicd law fixed this at forty-one days after the birth of a son, and eighty-one after that of a daughter, [3 Archdeacon Farrar is mistaken in supposing, that the 'thirty-three days' were counted 'after the circumcision.' The idea must have arisen from a misunderstanding of the English version of Lev. xii. 4. There was no connection between the time of the circumcision of the child, and that of the purification of his mother. In certain circumstances circumcision might have to be delayed for days, in case of sickness, till recovery. It is equally a mistake to suppose, that a Jewish mother could not leave the house till after the forty days of her purification.] so as to make the Biblical terms quite complete, [c Comp. Sifra, ed. Weiss, p. 59 a and b; Maimonides, Yad haChaz. Hal.Mechusre Capp., ed. Amst, vol. iii. p. 255 a and b.] But it might take place any time later, notably, when attendance on any of the great feasts brought a family to Jerusalem. Thus, we read of cases when a mother would offer several sacrifices of purification at the same time. [4 Comp. Kerith. i. 7.] But, indeed, the woman was not required to be personally present at all, when her offering was presented, or, rather (as we shall see), provided for, say, by the representatives of the laity, who daily took part in the services for the various districts from which they came. This also is specially provided for in the Tulmud. [5 Jer. Sheq. 50 b.] But mothers who were within convenient distanceof the Temple, and especially the more earnest among them, would naturally attend personally in the Temple; [6 There is no ground whatever for the objection which Rabbi Low (Lebensalter, p. 112) raises against the account of St. Luke. Jewish documents only prove, that a mother need not personally attend in the Temple; not tht they did not do so, when attendance was possible. The contrary impression is conveyed to us by Jewish notices.] and in such cases,
