(Mal 3:1-4 Heb 2:14-18 Lk 2:22-40)
The Lk’s Gospel passage narrates the surprising response of the Father to the prophecy of the last of the minor prophets (Mal 3,1-4).
An eloquent and peremptory manifestation of the power of the Israel’s God and the submission of those who did not fulfill the Law was expected.
Everyone imagined witnessing the triumphal entry of a boss surrounded by military leaders or angelic hosts (Mal 3:1).
Commander who would subjugate the pagan peoples, brought their goods to the ‘holy city’, guaranteed many slaves, and imposed observance.
Jesus? Here he is yes in the Temple, but defenceless and accompanied by insignificant people.
No one notices them, although at all hours the sacred place was swarming with visitors.
So it’s not enough to be a devoted person to realize the presence of the Lord. But how to break through the wall of contrary appearances?
With the help of particularly sensitive people, who want to tell us something, because they are more able to understand the Unknown.
They are those who do not set their own intentions, current dreams, habitual expectations against the creative Design of the Most High - only demanding help from God to achieve them.
Here then rise Simeon and Anna, men and women from both inside and outside the Temple, who attempt to block the small domestic procession [Lk 2,28.38 Greek text].
The Holy Family must embark on a completely different Way - which will lead it to unforeseen growth.
Nobody should follow up legalist conventions based on culturally calibrated purisms and rites of social passage, which circumvent and block the evolutionary mechanisms brought about by surprises.
Women and men animated by the Spirit break in like ‘strangers’: they always try to prevent the "same" useless rite: it claimed to transform and reduce into son of Abraham the One who had been announced as the Son of God.
If the goal is the triumph of life, history must not prevail over Revelation. Uniqueness that manifests itself in what is happening and is proposed even dimly, now.
The ‘unveiling’ is here; not something to conquer, nor a race for “excellence”. It’s the Present that opens an arc of full existence.
Thus in Mary: the Mother, figure of that more sensitive and original remnant of Israel - compared to all the people of expectations, still sterile.
The repetitive world, therefore content with itself but now without new momentum, is challenged by a contrast (vv. 34-35).
It’s the reversal that shatters the outcome that everyone had in mind.
In the figure of «the innocent, glory of his people», resides a Light that illuminates everyone (v.32).
Spirit of childhood and simple immediacy that becomes the «redemption of Jerusalem» (v.38), that is, of the institution.
It’s another Story, an unsuspected ‘time of the soul’... that have turned the ancient root into a sapling. And the Jesse trunk in new sprout (Is 11: 1).
Young Gift, without our knowledge. But that recovers the great Desires of each - instead of the “compliant” and reduced ways, which even today in the time of the crisis lose us without posing.
To internalize and live the message:
Forty days after Christmas, how do you meet in you the Child Jesus again, who is questioning you?
Has the joy of that Feast of Light faded? Did other "stars" caught your attention?
[Presentation of the Lord, February 2]
