Friday of the 33rd Week Integral: Presentation of Mary
Today we have a rare case of serendipity (or perhaps Divine Providence) that gives us two Scripture readings “starring” the Temple at Jerusalem along with a kind of festival celebrating the presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in that Temple. We know that the true Temple of God on earth was and is the Virgin Mary in the nine months of her pregnancy carrying Our Lord Jesus before His birth in Bethlehem. Mary as Ark of the Covenant is a very ancient theme that appears in the Book of Revelation. She is the Theotokos, the God-bearer for us sin-bearing humans.
The story of Mary’s presentation in the Temple is meant to parallel the Biblical story from St. Luke’s Gospel of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple not quite twenty years later. The Marian tale is taken from the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James from the second century. Beginning about the sixth century we can find illustrations and art work showing the moment Mary is introduced, usually to the Jewish High Priest, and climbing the steps to the Holy of Holies, which is where the Ark of the Covenant should have been kept, even though it disappeared about the time the Temple was destroyed by Babylon the first time. So no matter what the historical truth of the incident is, Mary going to that holiest place was seen as the restoration of the Ark to the place of its rest.
Today’s first reading is from the first Book of Maccabees and depicts the time in the midst of the war between the Jews and the Syrian king Antiochus when Jerusalem had been liberated and the Temple had been cleansed of Gentile defilement. This is the origin of the celebration called Hannukah. The Jerusalem Temple, the central place of Jewish worship, was in a real sense prepared sacramentally for the entrance of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a couple of hundred years later, and the cleansing effected by Jesus during His public ministry.
Our psalm today is from the historical book kept by the Temple priests, which we call First Chronicles. It is a prayer of praise and blessing of Adonai-God, and acknowledgement of His sovereignty over the whole world, and of God as the source of all grandeur and strength.
The prophet Isaiah declared several centuries before Christ that the Temple at Jerusalem was supposed to be a central place of worship for all humankind: “My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.” Therefore, there was a special court in the outer precincts of the building, open to the sky and open to all, even the goyim, the Gentiles. But over the years the priests responsible for the Temple began to earn revenue by renting stalls in that court to vendors of pigeons, sheep, and other agricultural produce for sale to those worshiping there. Jesus, perhaps every year of His ministry, came to his Father’s House, the Temple, and passed judgement on this misuse of the Court of the Gentiles. It upset all those who ran those businesses or leased out the stalls. Jesus was a prophet, and indeed the greatest of the prophets. Prophets are tasked by God to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable. We weak and sinful humans always need to be open to the Spirit of God judging us, and be ready to change our behavior and amend our lives.
