Written about three to four hundred years before Christ in a
period where there were sorcerers, adulterers and perjurer, corrupt employers
and landowners, Malachi 3: 1-5 is God’s response to those who think that God is
either powerless or unwilling to do anything about the situation.
God will send a messenger or Angel – it is the same word in
Hebrew – to warn people of the impending Judgement.
And this divine message or coming will be painful for those who
experience it.
The judgement will start with the temple and its worship –
with the place which supposedly exists to glorify God, which supposedly has
experts in prayer, sacrifice and holiness, but had become corrupt, hypocritical
and empty.
Religion had become corrupt. The temple is first in the
firing line and will be purged and refined until their worship is worthy of God
.
Once religion has been purged, God will then move on to the
social sphere to judge and minister justice because a religion that is pure but
accepts and even condones and perpetuates
social injustice is an abomination to the prophets.
Although this Old Testament reading is put with the
presentation of Christ in the Temple it probably is much better suited to Jesus
cleansing the Temple, unless we see Jesus’ presentation as a foretelling of
that event.
Now no writing in the entire New Testament is more concerned
with the Temple and Jesus’ relationship with it than the letter to the Hebrews.
In this short extract Hebrews emphasises again that Jesus
humanity was all important. While He had the character and nature of God, he
was indeed a full human being, who because he suffered was able to completely
identify with us.
Hebrews asserts that before the resurrection of Jesus that our whole lives were held in slavery by
the fear of death.
In Jesus’ glorious resurrection we were given assurance
that, on the contrary, our lives are written against an infinite horizon and we
can be released from that fear when we believe and put our hope and trust in
the resurrection of Jesus.
In the gospel passage itself today Luke tells us of the
cause of that hope, Jesus, being recognised while being presented in the Temple.
Luke writes in the manner of Old Israel.
It is the atmosphere and link with old Israel that is much
more important to Luke than the actual details as the actual religious duty he
is describing is not the presentation of a first born son which carried no obligation
to bring Jesus to the Temple, he is describing the purification of Mary, which
carries much more accurately the theme of judgement and cleansing introduced by
Malachi.
We are being transported back to the days of the sages and
prophets of old who find their embodiment in Jesus’ time in Simeon and
Anna. Why? Because Luke is desperate to
convey that while Jesus is indeed a new thing, he is no boly from the blue but
is inseparable from the story of Israel and is indeed its fulfilment.
Simeon and Anna fit the mould preferred by God exactly. They
are obscure but devout figures which fits with God’s preference for using the
lowly and they are led by the Holy Spirit.
And it is by the Spirit that they recognise Jesus
immediately. And they prophesy that he will be the cause and the object of
people’s hope for their salvation.
The lessons we can draw for our own journey it seems to me,
is that we should never forget that we are all part of something much greater
than ourselves, a story that started thousands of years ago with Abraham and we are integral to that story.
We are led to Jesus by the Holy Spirit and we recognise his
significanace by the same Spirit just like Simeon and Anna.
And when we put our faith and trust in Jesus, we are set
free from the fear of death for in Jesus Christ we know our Salvation is
secure.
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