by
Damien F. Mackey
“For now in my old age, people—including the
evangelist St. Luke—describe me
as “righteous and devout” (v. 25)—a man who lived
a life that was oriented to God and in accordance with the will of God,
committed, in other words, to hearing
and obeying the word of the Lord”.
https://emmausinstitute.net/now-dismiss-nunc-dimittis-your-servant-in-peace-o-lord/
Adapted from
“Biblical Meditations for a Blessed Advent: The Nativity Hymns in Luke’s
Gospel”
Presented by
The Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies Faculty
December 7, 2019
~~~
Candlemas, 2021
Now Dismiss [Nunc
dimittis] Your Servant in Peace, O LORD
Greetings, Good Friends. Please allow me to introduce
myself.
My name is Šimʿôn. You
probably know me as Simeon, and you can read the story I am about to tell you
in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 22-35.
Like my namesake, Simeon in the Old Testament, my name
derives from šāmaʿ, meaning “to hear.”
His parents, Jacob and Leah, named him that because the LORD heard his mother’s
affliction and rewarded her with the gift of a son (Gen 29:33). In my case, I
have always wondered if my parents might have named me Šimʿôn in
hopes that I would grow up to be a man who hears the voice of the Lord. If so,
their hopes and aspirations for me were realized.
For now in my old age, people—including the evangelist
St. Luke—describe me as “righteous and devout” (v. 25)—a man who lived a life
that was oriented to God and in accordance with the will of God, committed, in
other words, to hearing and obeying the word of the Lord. In
fact, because I listened so closely to what God had said through his prophet
Isaiah, I was among the faithful who were “looking for the consolation of
Israel” (v. 25; cf. Isa 40:1; 49:13; 51:3; 61:1; 66:13)—waiting and longing for
the coming of the Messiah to bring salvation and peace to my people and to the
world. That was my consuming focus in life; everything else was secondary.
There’s one more thing you should know about me
personally, and then I will stop talking about myself and get on with my story.
I do not say this presumptuously or boastfully, but I
was a man deeply attuned to God’s presence—“the Holy Spirit was upon [me]” (v.
25), as he was earlier upon Mary (1:35). The Holy Spirit illumined my thoughts,
guided my actions, and inspired my words. And like Mary before, I heard when
the Spirit spoke, and I obeyed his voice.
And this is where my story begins to get interesting.
For you see, “it had been revealed to [me] by the Holy Spirit that I should not
see death before I had seen the Lord’s Christ” (v. 26), the promised Messiah,
for whose coming I had longed and waited. Mind you, the Spirit did not say
simply that I would not die before the Messiah had come, but that I would not
“see death” before I had actually seen the Messiah! In case you missed it,
that’s a lot of emphasis on seeing. You’ve probably heard it said that “seeing
is believing.” For me, it was precisely the other way around: I had long
believed in the Lord and in his Holy Word; and it was my believing that led to
my seeing—in a more profound way than you might imagine. Let me explain.
As I was introducing myself a few moments ago, I
failed to mention that I lived in Jerusalem, not far from the Temple. As you
know, that was the place where God was especially present. One day the Holy
Spirit directed me to go into the Temple. And so I did. Call it coincidence or
call it Providence—I prefer the latter—it just so happened to be the very day
when Jesus’ “parents” brought their infant to the Temple “to present him to the
Lord . . . according to the custom of the law” (vv. 22, 27). Let me fill in a
little of the background.
When Jesus was born to Mary, and Joseph her husband
became his foster father, he was born to parents who not only complied with the
law of the Lord concerning the rite of a mother’s purification after
childbirth, but who actually exceeded its strict requirements. After all, the
circumstances of Mary’s conception and Jesus’ birth had not rendered her
ritually unclean, as it did under normal conditions of pregnancy and birth.
Yet, she and her husband followed the legal regulations just the same,
voluntarily, as a model of humility and to avoid scandalizing others. And so
they brought to the Temple that day “a pair of turtledoves or two young
pigeons,” as permitted by the law in the case of the poor (v. 24; cf. Lev 12).
(It’s important to note, parenthetically, that he who
would one day minister to the poor “came by it naturally,” as we might say. He
was born into poverty.)
There was a second reason for Joseph and Mary’s coming
to the Temple that day—not only for purification, unnecessary as it
was, but also for presentation—to hand over their newborn Son to
the Lord, to offer him up completely in the service of God, his Father (v. 22).
This too not only accorded with the law of the Lord, but exceeded what was
stipulated there (cf. Exod 13). For rather than “redeeming” or “buying back”
their Son, so to speak, by paying a small monetary offering to support the
Levitical priests in their duties at the Temple—a provision entirely
permissible by law—they had brought their Son to the Temple as an act of pure
and complete devotion. Although Jesus would return to Nazareth with his parents
(v. 39), he would remain wholly and permanently dedicated to God (cf. 1 Sam
2:35; Heb 2:17).
You’re probably getting the impression by now that I
was not the only one “righteous and devout” and well-versed in God’s word.
Jesus’ parents were carefully devoted to living in full accordance with
whatever pleased the Lord, even surpassing the strict requirements of the
law—all as an expression of their great love for and desire to please God.
“Just the bare minimum” was not a category known to them. They loved the Lord
their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with everything they
had, including their newborn Son.
Returning then to my story, so there we were in the
Temple—the five of us: Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus, myself, and the Holy
Spirit who was upon me and who had guided me to the Temple that day.
And now for the moment to which all of this has been
building. It was there, in the Temple, that my eyes first fell on “the Lord’s
Christ” (v. 26); and receiving him into my arms, knowing him to be the One for
whom I had been longing, I offered my song of blessing to God:
“[Nunc dimittis] Now
dismiss your servant in peace, O Lord,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation
which you have prepared in the presence of all
the peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and the glory of your people Israel” (vv.
29-32).
I uttered these words because I knew that when my eyes
fell upon the child Jesus, I had seen the salvation of the
Lord—exactly as it had been revealed to me by the Holy Spirit, that I would not
see death until I had seen the Lord’s Christ. I knew in that moment that the
Child now cradled in my arms was not only a future Savior-Deliverer of my
people, but the One who embodied salvation itself. To see him was to see
salvation. Salvation, in other words, was not just an event or an experience;
it was a Person (cf. Lk 3:4-6). And having seen salvation, nothing else
mattered. I was prepared to depart in peace—the very peace about which the
angels had sung: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men
with whom he is pleased” (Lk 2:14). Humbly, I knew myself to be such a man.
There was more to the words I uttered in blessing to
the Lord that day. In fact, every line in my song was pregnant with meaning
drawn from the prophecies of Isaiah. My mention of peace, of salvation for all
peoples, a light shining on the Gentiles and the glory of Israel—all of these
lines and images were drawn from the pages of Isaiah over which I had pored
(e.g., Isa 40:3-5; 42:5-6; 46:13; 49:6; 52:9-10; 56:1; 60:1).
True to my name, as I previously explained, I
had heard the word of the Lord, the Scriptures; and it
informed my understanding of the One whose coming I had long anticipated. I had
seen the imprint of the Messiah in the words of God’s prophet.
So there we were in the Temple—the Holy Spirit upon
me, the Child Jesus in my arms, his parents standing nearby. In that moment, it
was clear that heaven had come to earth. What creation longed for was coming to
fulfillment. The glorious purposes for which God had called Israel into
existence as his covenant people had been realized in their bringing forth the
Lord’s Messiah. God had heard the prayerful cries of his people, and light had
come to dispel the darkness in which the nations had wandered. In the infant
Jesus the glory of the Lord was at long last returning to the Temple in
fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy (cf. Ezek 43).
It was a moment like no other—little wonder that
Jesus’ father and mother “marveled at what was said about him” (v. 33) in the
words of my blessing-song to the Lord.
This article will conclude
with the remainder of Simeon’s wonderful ‘autobiography’.
But, now, I want to set
the whole incident in a greatly revised historical context.
Tracing back the priest
Simeon’s
exceptionally long life,
and Anna
Whereas the
Maccabean age - when the pious Jews fought against the Seleucid Greek invader,
to protect the Temple in Jerusalem - is customarily dated to about two
centuries before the Birth of Jesus Christ, I have collapsed this era, in part,
right into the time of the Nativity.
The evil
Seleucid persecutor, king Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’, now becomes the Census emperor
of Luke 2:1, “Caesar Augustus” (actually a Greek, not a Roman), who is also the
Grecophile emperor, Hadrian:
Time
to consider Hadrian, that ‘mirror-image’ of Antiochus Epiphanes, as also the
census emperor Augustus
Now, all of
a sudden, with Augustus Hadrian ruling during the Infancy of Jesus Christ, it
becomes possible that some of the Maccabeans had actually seen – had
certainly heard about – the Advent of the Christ Child.
And so I
have suggested, for instance, that the widow with seven sons, traditionally
known as Hannah (one version, at least), was none other than the aged
prophetess, Anna, who had, with the priest Simeon, actually laid eyes on the
baby Jesus:
Hadrianic
patterns of martyrdom
(3) Hadrianic
patterns of martyrdom
“Nameless in 4 Maccabees,
the mother is dubbed … Hannah …
in the rabbinic tradition
…. The tyrant in the rabbinic versions, however,
is not Antiochus
Epiphanes but Hadrian:
“Hadrian came and seized
upon a widow …”.”
Stephen D. Moore
If this be
the case, then Anna (Hannah) must have been so greatly strengthened by having
seen and proclaimed the Messiah, that she was able to face martyrdom, and also to
urge her seven sons to do the same (Luke 2:36-38):
There was also a
prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very
old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and
then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but
worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. Coming up to them at that
very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were
looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.
Might not
also our priest, Simeon, who was there in the Temple with Anna at the time of
the Presentation, re-emerge in the tales of the Maccabees? Let us see.
The former High Priest, Jesus
(Joshua)
Two themes
will enable me to condense the long life of our NT priest, Simeon - both of
these themes being rather singular.
-
The
first will be the utterly singular fact of having been in a fire.
-
The
second will be his reputation as a Father of the Jews.
It is not every day that someone is in the heart of a
fire yet emerges therefrom unharmed.
That I believe to have been the situation with the young (i)
Azariah of Daniel 3; with (ii) the high priest, Jesus (Joshua), “plucked out of
the fire” (Zechariah 3:2); and with (iii) Jesus ben Sirach (Sirach 51).
Thus I have merged all three (i-iii) of these as one in my
article:
High
Priest, Jesus (Joshua), brand plucked out of the fire
(3) High Priest,
Jesus (Joshua), brand plucked out of the fire
This means a dramatic shortening of the Chaldean era
(Azariah); the Medo-Persian period (Jesus/Joshua); and the Hellenistic period
(Jesus ben Sirach).
Now, the life of the long-lived Ezra (120 years, according
to tradition), priest-scribe, also spanned the Chaldean to Medo-Persian eras,
and we find him still publicly proclaiming the Torah even in Maccabean times.
For Ezra (Esdras) was the same as the Maccabean priest, Esdrias,
and also Razis, with whom Ezra shares the epithet, “Father of the Jews”:
Ezra
‘Father of the Jews’ dying the death of Razis
(4) Ezra 'Father
of the Jews' dying the death of Razis
He, too, as Razis will, like Hannah and her sons, die a most
violent death.
Whereas Hannah’s persecutor was the king himself, Antiochus
‘Epiphanes’ (Hadrian), the persecutor of Razis was the king’s general, Nicanor.
In these articles I have put it all together as follows:
Ezra
(Azariah) was son of Jehozadak, son of Seraiah.
The
high priest, Jesus, was son of Jehozadak, son of Seraiah.
Jesus
(author of Sirach), was son of Eleazer, son of Sira[ch].
As
Azariah, Ezra was in the Burning Fiery Furnace.
As
the high priest, Jesus, he was “plucked out of the fire”.
And
so, apparently, as Jesus ben Sirach, was he “in the heart of a fire”
(Sirach
51:1, 2, 4):
‘I
will give thanks to you, Lord and King … for you have been protector and
support
to me, and redeemed my body from destruction … from the stifling
heat
which hemmed me in, from the heart of a fire which I had not kindled’.
From all of
this we learn that Ezra had been the High Priest, and, most surprisingly, that
he died violently under persecution from the Greeks.
Judas
Maccabeus would later order the beheading of Nicanor (2 Maccabees 15:30).
Ok, so the
great Ezra began as young Azariah in Babylonian Captivity, and later, in the
Medo-Persian period, returned to officiate as High Priest when the Second
Temple was completed.
As a wise
and learned sage and scribe, he wrote the wisdom Book of Sirach
(Ecclesiasticus), and fought and preached during the Maccabean wars.
But what has
any of this to do with Luke’s priest, Simeon?
Well,
chronologically, a connection of Ezra with Simeon has become possible, now,
with my folding of the Maccabean era, when Ezra was still alive, with the Infancy
period of Jesus Christ.
And, while
we do not wish to multiply names – we already have Ezra (Azariah, Esdrias,
Razis - good fits) and Jesus (Joshua, Jesus ben Sirach - good fits) – how does the
name Simeon become relevant.
The name
gets mixed into the pure sequence of Jesus ben Sirach’s genealogy, “Jesus, son
of Eliezer, son of Sira,” where the name Simeon intrudes as the son of Jesus:
"Shimʽon, son of Yeshuaʽ, son of Elʽazar ben Siraʼ" (Hebrew: שמעון בן ישוע בן אלעזר בן סירא) …”.
If we
combine Simeon here with Jesus, then this enables for our long-lived priest to
be also Simeon, and, perhaps, even the Simeon of Luke 2.
Would it be
pushing matters too far to say that the righteous Simeon of Luke was the famous
Simeon (or Simon) the Just?
Now, finally, we can let
old Simeon finish his story:
And so I blessed them as well, with an oracle directed
specifically to Mary, his mother—a second stanza to my song. Unlike the first
stanza, however, this one sounded its ominous notes in a minor key, casting a
shadow over the Child’s future. For at the climax of his life, this baby, come
of age, would reenter the Temple, this time for the purpose of passing judgment
on it and declaring his own body as the new Temple. And shortly thereafter, on
the Cross, he would offer that body to the Father in a final Temple sacrifice.
And so, the joy of stanza 1 turned to sorrow in stanza
2, as I warned the infant’s mother of the difficult path that lay ahead for
both him and her:
Behold, this child is
appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel,
and for a sign that is spoken against;
(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also),
in order that the thoughts of many hearts may be
revealed (vv. 34-35).
Here, too, I drew on what I had read and heard from
Isaiah, who prophesied that the Lord would exalt the lowly and bring down the
proud (Isa 2:11, 17; cf. Lk 1:52-53), “as a stone of offense, and a rock of
stumbling to . . . Israel” (Isa 8:14). Alongside the social upheaval the
Messiah would bring, truly his Cross would be a “sign of contradiction”—a sign
that works precisely against the mindset and methods of the world, that
realizes its objective not through power over, but through power under, and accordingly
is opposed, spoken against, contradicted. The Messiah will draw a line in the
sand of Israel, causing a division between those who accept him and those who
reject him, between those who take the side of God’s mission in the world and
those who oppose it, between those who choose and those who refuse the gift of
salvation. Such is the scandal of the Cross.
And offering a prophecy, with the Holy Spirit upon me,
I warned Mary of what she might already have suspected, that suffering lay
ahead for her as well—“a sword will pierce through your own soul also.” The
Cross of radical contradiction against the Son would be directed against his
mother as well, and it would cut to the heart. And like her Son, who came to
his own and his own received him not (Jn 1:11), and who agonized over their
refusal to be gathered together, united in him (Lk 13:34-35).
If it seems like a strange and unlikely way to “bless”
Jesus’ parents, it would be precisely by means of the sword of pain and
anguish, in which Jesus’ mother participated with her Son, that the inmost
thoughts of many hearts would be exposed—some accepting, others rejecting.
Jesus must suffer, and with him Our Lady of Sorrows, in order that others might
see themselves in the light of infinite love and open their hearts to the
salvation that comes by way of the Cross.
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