This is Monsignor Roger Landry, National Director of the Metypical Mission Societies. It is a privilege for me to be with you as together. We enter into the consequential conversation, Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, when we will celebrate a great feast, one that's fixed 40 days after Christmas, so that it can fall on any day of the week. It's rare, then, that the presentation of the Lord falls on a Sunday, which is a pity because we're narrowly, only daily mask-overs have a chance to celebrate this feast, and all that it means in Jesus' life, and it's supposed to mean in your life and mine.
Those who pray the rosary meditate upon this mystery at least twice a week in the fourth joyful mystery. But it's great for the whole church to celebrate this feast together so that we can encourage each other to obtain in its fullness what this holy mystery contains. The point of this feast is summarized in the beautiful instructions and prayers that are said just before the beautiful procession that always begins the Mass on the presentation.
These instructions and prayers frame the presentation fundamentally as an encounter. The priest says today is the blessed day when Jesus was presented in the temple by Mary and Joseph. Outwardly he was fulfilling the law, but in reality he was coming to meet his believing people.
After describing Simeon and Anna how they met him in the temple, the priest continues. So let us also gather together by the Holy Spirit, proceed to the house of God to encounter Christ. There we shall find him and recognize him in the breaking of the bread until he comes again revealed in glory. This awareness of the presentation as an encounter with Christ continues throughout the Mass. In the Eucharistic preface we pray that we too will go forth rejoicing to encounter your salvation.
At the end of Mass we ask for the grace that we going forth to meet the Lord may obtain the gift of eternal life. All of these prayers convey that Jesus is constantly being presented to us and we are supposed to be constantly presenting ourselves to Him. The Christian life is meant to be a continuous mutual presentation, a lifetime encounter of love and life. The kindles we blessed at the beginning of Mass are supposed to symbolize our burning love for Jesus.
We ask God the Father to bless them precisely so that treading the path of virtue we pray, we may reach that light that never fails. Our encounter with the Lord and the Feast of the Presentation and then in the mutual encounter of virtuous Christian life is meant to lead to an eternal encounter in the heavenly temple. So that's what we're celebrating on the Feast of the Presentation and what that feast is meant to bring about in us.
Concretely, however, the celebration also contains many practical applications to help us keep that ongoing encounter with Christ throughout our life as children, as young parents, and as those advanced in years. Let's ponder together those applications.
We begin with seniors. How was it that Simeon and Anna, the two seniors in Sunday's gospel, recognized Jesus when he was brought to the temple? Among all the scores of babies brought to be presented in the temple that day according to the Law of Moses, how were they able to discern that the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and Mary's arms was the long-awaited one?
It's because they were present in the temple differently from everyone else. They were waiting for the Lord in the temple. They were longing for Him. They were expecting Him in holiness and prayer, having allowed the Lord to open their eyes to realities that can only be seen with faith-vision goggles. St. Luke describes them. Simeon was righteous and devout, guided by the Holy Spirit, and anxiously awaiting Israel's consolation in the coming of the Messiah.
Anna was a prophetess who once she became a widow at 27, essentially married herself to God, never leaving the temple, worshiping God there by prayer and fasting night and day for the previous 57 years.
Both lived looking toward God and awaiting His coming. They were both so in love with the Lord that they burst forth speaking of Him to others. Simeon took Jesus in His arms, praised God, and then presented Him not just to Israel as Her glory, but to all the nations as their light. Inna as soon as she saw Jesus began to praise God and begin to speak of Him to all who are looking for the redemption He had come to bring into the world.
They were both advanced in years but full of life because they were animated by the Holy Spirit and responsive to his action. Seniors or Christians of any age who likewise want to be full of life have much to learn from seeming inanna. Some can look at old age as a sad time, especially if one is a widower widower. Others can regard it as a time just to have fun, to play as much golf as possible, to spend time on games, television, old cowboy and Indian movies and inconsequential hobbies.
The best use of our later years is shown by Simeon and Anna. They use them to grow closer to the Lord by encountering Him in prayer and time spent worshipping the Lord in this holy temple. They used those years to reflect on their death and to live a life in loving expectation of the Lord's coming.
Simeon's words, now, O Lord, let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation. Each of us should want to say at the end of our life when the Lord Jesus comes for us. The vespers of our life are also at time to speak of God to others, to pass on real wisdom, to present the Lord to those who don't see His presence, to show how He is the light shining in the midst of darkness, to manifest that loving and serving Him is our greatest glory.
I'd encourage those who are retired who wish to live life to the full in this world and the next to do all they can to imitate simmians and anise examples seeking to intensify their encounter with the Lord, responding to the Holy Spirit's promptings, drawing people to the temple, perhaps by starting to come each day for daily mass or regular adoration. Next we turn to what this feast teaches young couples and young adults, especially those with young children.
Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple to present him to God. In the law of Moses, every firstborn child had to be given over to God in place in the Lord's service. This is a show that every gift comes from God needs to be offered back to him, if he wills it, for his glory. Every firstborn animal was actually sacrificed in the temple. Firstborn children obviously would never be killed, but a lamb, or for poor families like the Holy Family, a peer of pigeons or turtle doves, would be offered in places of a child.
Mary and Joseph, fulfilling perfectly the law of Moses, came to offer the Son of God in the flesh back to God the Father, thereby showing that fulfilling the law of the Lord and consecrating our loved ones to Him is a path of life.
For Christian couples, this starts when they bring their newly born child to be baptized. The child is, in a certain sense, sacrificed. The child dies in Christ in the sacrament of baptism, and Christ rises within to new life. The old Adam with original sin dies, and the new Adam Christ was full of grace rises. In baptism, a child is not merely presented in the temple, but marvelously becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit, spotless and immaculate on the inside, like a tabernacle holding the presence of God within.
Parents are called to help their child become aware of this beautiful reality and structure his or her life in accordance with that blessing, helping their son or daughter view his or her life within God's light, discovering the vocation God has given and saying yes to it. At the end of the gospel passage, we read that Mary and Joseph, when they had finished everything required by the Mosaic Law, returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth, where Jesus grew in wisdom and strength and in the favor of the Lord.
Couples are called to take their children with them from the temple back home to their domestic church, and their help their offspring to grow in wisdom, strength, and favor of the Lord, assisting them to live according to their consecration. That's what Mary and Joseph are interceding for all parents to do for their children.
Finally, we turned to what all of us can learn from this feast today. Each of us has been presented in the temple by our parents and Godparents, and we were consecrated. We're called to renew that consecration regularly. We're first called to do it in our encounters with God in prayer and the sacrament. When we enter the church as we dip our fingers into the Holy Water font, we renew our baptism and the consecration of our lives to God.
When we pray the Mass, we encounter the Lord anew, unite ourselves to Him again, and present ourselves together with Him as body and head bride and bridegroom to the Father and joint consecration.
This Sunday we give thanks to God for the feast of the presentation as we come to a culmination so much greater than what Simeon and Anna received that day in the temple. Simeon was able to hold Jesus in his arms as he praised God and prophesied that the child was destined to be the ruin and the resurrection of many in Israel and assigned to be contradicted. Sunday we will have the chance to do far more than hold Jesus in our hands.
will have a chance to receive Him within and become one with Him in an encounter of loving communion as Jesus seeks to unite us to Him as a sign of contradiction to the ways of the world.
He is the glory of Israel in the light of revelation to all peoples. He seeks to make us and communion with Him that light and that glory, symbolized by the candles we will bless and carry at the beginning of the Mass. The Mass is the place where Jesus wants to work that transformation. At Mass He also gives us a foretaste of the eternal temple where we with Simeonanna and all the saints
Want one day to behold and encounter him forever, but as as the Holy Spirit to move each of us as he moves him in Anna to come to the temple on Sunday to recognize Jesus to rejoice in Jesus to receive Jesus and transformed by Jesus To leave to reveal his light and his love to all people Happy feasts to the presentation. God bless you