Father Stephen De Young: And when we start here in just a minute, we’re going to pick up where we left off last time, which is Luke 2, verse eight.

And my nonintroduction-introduction is going to be quick this week because we haven’t gotten that far into Luke, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. So, again, as I usually note, if you listen to the first Bible study on Luke, you could go back and listen to my big, long introduction. If you have insomnia that needs curing or something.

For now, though, I’m just going to, as I said, get us caught up real quick. We left off sort of right in the middle of the story of Jesus’s birth. Jesus was just born, and we had leading up to that, we met the parents of St. John the Baptist, St. John the Forerunner. We met Mary, Jesus’s mother and found out that Elizabeth, St. John the Forerunner’s mother, and Mary were cousins.

And we saw the two of them meet each other. And we’ve heard a lot of prophecies about who Jesus is going to be and what he’s going to do.

And then right before we left off last time, we read about the decree that went out from Caesar Augustus to get a census to have a headcount for taxes for the entire Roman Empire. And because of that, because it’s difficult to get a head count when you have migratory workers, you have peasants who move from place to place following jobs and following the harvest, and so the order went out that they had to return to their familial place of birth. And that way they could sort of get a snapshot of everyone at that one point in time.

And so, having gone back from Nazareth in Galilee, having traveled down to Bethlehem and Judea, taking this long trip, by the time they got there, Mary was ready to have her baby. There were a large number of people there because of the census. And so Mary ended up giving birth in a cave that they used as a stable for animals and laying Jesus in the food trough.

And we talked about last time how this was not an auspicious beginning in the ancient world. So there’s kind of this juxtaposition here. We’ve heard all these prophecies about how Jesus is going to be the Messiah. He’s going to be this great king. He’s going to represent God returning to his people. And now he’s born in a food trough with a bunch of animals in a cave in the middle of the night in Bethlehem.

And so that’s where we’re about to pick up in chapter two, verse eight was there any questions anybody had left over or anything? Okay, so, Luke, chapter two, verse eight.

Now, there were in the same country, shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.

Now, part of the issue with Luke 2 is that it’s so familiar, we sort of skim over this stuff. So, for example, what does it mean “in the same country”? In the Roman Empire? In the province of Judea? What’s translated there as “in the same country”? The word in Greek is actually chóra, and it refers to the farmland surrounding a city. You would have a city that’s a permanent settlement, then you would have farms surrounding that city, the fields that were farmed for the various crops. So when it says in that chóra what it’s referring to, it means out in the area, in that land surrounding Bethlehem, that’s what it’s referring to.

So, out in that area, there are shepherds. And shepherds, being peasants, again, are kind of migratory. They don’t necessarily have a base of operations. We think about a cattle farm or a sheep farm now, and it’s sort of a big, industrialized establishment, right?

Herdsmen at this time were basically nomadic because they had to be able to go with their flock wherever they were going to be able to graze their flock, which they couldn’t count on being any particular piece of land. So, like most peasants, as we were just saying in terms of the census, they had to move around. So this is what it means when it says that they were living out in the fields, they’re sleeping out in the open with their sheep, these shepherds. And so even though it’s the middle of the night, they’re out there with their sheep in the fields.

And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid.

This is another part of the story where we jump really fast. At this point, it’s one angel, right? One angel of the Lord appears to these shepherds with an announcement. And I like the old King James, of course, where they were sore afraid. I don’t know if that meant they were so afraid they were sore, so afraid it hurt. [Laughter]

But as you might imagine, if you were out in the middle of the night watching your flocks and all of a sudden an angel appeared in front of you, you might be startled. You might be somewhat dismazed [sic] by the experience.

Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths lying in a manger.”

Again, this is something we run over real quick. It’s like “Oh, yeah….

angel went and told the shepherds.”

Now, once again, though, if Jesus is the Messiah, that’s the announcement we just heard. He’s the King, He’s the one who’s going to rule over Israel. He’s come from God, He’s going to be this powerful leader, He’s just been born.

Who do you send the birth announcement to? It’s not Caesar, it’s not Herod, right? It’s not anybody wealthy. Angel doesn’t appear to the priest at the temple in Jerusalem. Doesn’t announce, “O people of Israel, your King has come.” He appears to a bunch of homeless peasant shepherds who just happened to be in the field nearby where Jesus was born. These are the people.

And this is something we’re going to see throughout the Gospel According to St. Luke. Is that St. Luke, we talked a little bit in Matthew where Matthew talks about wealth and poverty, and he usually not always, but usually is talking about it spiritually.

With St. Luke, he usually means it literally. St. Luke is very much about showing us the sort of juxtaposition with the people who are wealthy, the people who are powerful, the people who have everything in this world, as opposed to the people who find Christ and accept Christ.

And so we’re going to see over and over again. We’ve already seen it a few times, but we’re going to see it over and over and over again that God is seemingly more interested in people like these homeless shepherds, in these peasants, than he is in, say, Caesar, or the wealthy, the powerful, the military generals, the chief priests.

Interlocutor: Luke was a physician before he followed Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, Luke was a physician. So Luke is a highly educated person. So, yes, that is a good point. And we’ll see even going into Acts, he talks about that, remember in the Book of Acts on the Day of Pentecost when St. Peter stands up and starts preaching and everyone hears them in their own language, right. Everyone marvels because they say, “This guy is illiterate.” That’s what it literally says in the Greek, “This guy is illiterate; he’s a fisherman from Galilee, how is he speaking in all these languages?”

So, St. Luke continues even there. But he isn’t one of the peasants. He himself was not a Galilean peasant. So we shouldn’t take it just because he often talks literally about wealth and poverty and political power and that kind of thing, we shouldn’t take this as sort of some kind of subversive liberation Marxist kind of thing, right? This is the peasant underclass rising up against their overlords or something, because St. Luke was not part of that peasant underclass. He’s someone who accepted Christ but who was well educated and probably fairly well off. I mean, he’s got a Roman name, Lucas, so he was doing some business in the Roman Empire. So, yes, even though he’s going to make a point of that, it’s not a political point that he’s making, ultimately, it’s a spiritual point about material wealth and poverty and those kind of things.

Interlocutor: Do you think the events of why Jesus was born the way he was, in poverty, in a manger, so that nobody could make a claim to his heritage? It’s almost to me like [inaudible] you don’t know who he is, where came from, but yet here’s Jesus in a manger, on a field someplace?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it is clear and it’s reemphasized here again, that he’s descended from David, that he’s Jewish, that he’s from the tribe of Judah. So, I mean, it’s not true—and we’re going to get to there’s going to be a genealogy here in a little bit. So, I mean, I don’t think we could go quite that far.

But I think the point that Luke is emphasizing more is, again, to make this juxtaposition because we have to remember, he’s writing to this broad audience. He’s not just writing to a Jewish audience. He knows that a lot of people reading this are going to be people of maybe a pagan background, or at least of a Greek or Roman background and not a Jewish background. And their religion was all about worshipping power and wealth.

You look at the gods, Zeus is the God of the thunderstorm. He’s got a power. It’s interesting, the statues of Zeus, he’s always depicted facially like an old man. But you look at his body, he doesn’t have an old man body. He’s got this huge, powerful, vigorous, youthful body. And you look at Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And there’s all sort of these idealized physical forms. And even Pluto is the God of death and wealth. So these are the things they worship. They worship wealth, strength, courage.

The idea that the actual God, the one true God, who created the universe, who’s now just chosen to come into his world and come into his creation, come into the universe that he made, is going to do it as a peasant in a cave, in a manger, and the first people to hear the news and to come celebrate are going to be a bunch of basically homeless other peasants, shepherds, migrant workers. There’s a huge difference there, right?

Interlocutor: Nobody could lay claim like he was born at the Holiday Inn

Fr. Stephen: Right. And also related to the difference in the view of God. The whole concept here, remember, as we saw in the prophecies in Luke, chapter one, is in Christ, God is returning to his people. This is God coming to us. This is God lowering himself to our level, humiliating himself to come down to our level. This is not what the Jews were expecting then. They would have assumed that the Messiah had to be born. But they’re expecting him to come riding in on a white horse and be the strong, vigorous type and overthrow the Romans.

And it’s even less what the Greeks or the Romans would expect, if you’re going to talk about God coming to Earth. The sky rips open and they’re expecting this kind of full-blown thing.

But this is God lowering himself to our level. That’s going to say something as we go forward about especially when we get into the Book of Acts and we start looking at the way Luke presents the preaching of the Apostles and Acts in terms of our salvation.

That it’s very much not, again, like those Greco-Roman religions where the idea is that human beings sort of work their way up and ascend right to godhood by being incredibly heroic and virtuous. But it’s quite the opposite, God comes to us and lifts us up out of our mess.

The shepherds receive this announcement, and again, we see this pattern that we’ve already seen in St. Luke’s Gospel, where there’s a prophecy and this is a sign, right? So they come to announce, “Hey, the Messiah’s been born, deliverance is coming to the people of Israel.”

So if the shepherds were to ask, “Well, okay, how do we know this is true? How do we know we’re not just hallucinating because it’s really cold and we’re getting hypothermic right out here at night? How do we know this is true?”

“Well, this is the sign. You could go right now, go over to this cave, and you’ll find a baby there laying in a food trough wrapped in swaddling cloths.”

That’s not something you expect to find if you go into a cave where they keep animals, is a baby laying in the food trough. So they’re saying when you go, you will see this. And then you’ll know, because that’s true. That the rest of what I told you is true. That’s who this baby is.

And swaddling cloths, when a baby was born culturally at this time in history, when the baby was born, what they would do is essentially wrap the baby extremely tightly. And I guess there’s sort of a fad of doing this now, too. Some people do this, but they’d wrap up the baby in cloths extremely tightly so that, first of all, keep the baby warm. And second of all, the baby couldn’t poke, punch, flail, do anything else. They were sort of snug. And apparently, I am told this has a calming effect on the baby, too, because they feel sort of secure.

I can only go by, one of our dogs has a thunder shirt, which is basically a little Velcro thing that you wrap around their chest, really snugly. And I don’t know how or why it works, but when the thunder starts and he starts getting scared, you wrap that thing around him and all of a sudden he’s fine because I guess he feels like somebody’s holding him or something. I don’t know.

So I guess it’s the same kind of idea with an infant, right. That they feel like they’re being held, they feel secure. And so it has this calming effect.

So as if they weren’t startled enough, verse 13:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth, peace, goodwill toward men.”

Now it’s not just one angel. Now we get the whole choir, now we get the whole crew in the sky, all singing, and they’re singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth, peace, goodwill toward men.”

We move over that really quickly too, of course. “Glory to God in the highest.” They’re worshipping God, as we would expect the angels to be doing.

But on Earth, peace and goodwill toward men. For the first part of that, “peace” is an important word at this point in history. Caesar Augustus is Caesar at this point. He’s the first actual Emperor of Rome. And one of the first things he did was proclaim the pax romana, the Roman peace.

And the Roman peace was the nice way of saying it, peace through strength, the less nice way of saying it was this means they execute troublemakers. This means they brutally put down border skirmishes. This means they maintain the social order, on pain of death. But from Augustus’s perspective, when he proclaimed the pax romana, he viewed that as his gift to the world. That’s how he addressed it.

“I am giving you peace, there’s now going to be peace on Earth because I am in charge. I rule most of the known world in the Roman Empire. I am going to ensure that we are at peace and that there is no more civil war.”

Because remember, Octavian, before he became Caesar Augustus, won a civil war against Mark Antony. So there were years of civil war. He says, “No more civil war. We have peace. You’re welcome.”

And he also at the same time gave himself the title Savior of the World. So not a very modest guy.

This is what has been proclaimed to the people. And on Earth, peace, right? This is a very different kind of peace. This is a peace proclaimed by God upon the Earth, because God, of course, is the one who actually rules the entire Earth, not just most of the known world, like Caesar.

And he’s the one who’s going to give actual peace. And how is he going to give peace? We know what’s going to happen, that through Christ, Christ is going to bring peace, where?

Interlocutor [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen But peace between who?

Interlocutor God and man.

Fr. Stephen Right. And that’s why it’s followed by “goodwill toward men”, because Christ’s birth is an expression of God’s love for mankind. God’s good will for human beings. God didn’t declare war on human beings. Human beings declared war on God, in Genesis, right? Repeatedly. Starting with Adam and Eve, right? They go through Cain, Lamech before the flood, the Tower of Babel. We could go on and on. Pharaoh beginning of Exodus, human beings declared war on God.

God comes forward and declares peace with human beings and

then through Christ, establishes that peace with human beings.

This is why St. Paul’s going to say in Romans at just the right time, “While we were still sinners, God died for us.” We didn’t lay down our arms. God proactively made peace and forgive us.

So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven,

So, the image here is that the shepherds are all just kind of standing there staring, [Laughter] as one might imagine, if this happened to you in the middle of the night. And so that after the angels disappear, they kind of look at each other and say:

“Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.”

They say, “Well, I guess we should go check out this baby. I guess we should go find out what’s going on.”

And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the Babe lying in a manger. Now, when they had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told to them by the shepherds.

But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them.

So another note on St. Luke, notice again, why does he make this point that the shepherds went and told everybody?

Interlocutor: Because Saint Luke checked it out.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he talked to some of the people who talked to them, right? This is St. Luke again, tipping his hat. “This isn’t a story I made up. People told me that this is what the shepherds came and told them all the way back when it happened.”

St. Luke again is writing as a historian. He’s trying to give an account of what happened. So, this isn’t mythology.

Occasionally some of our biblical scholar friends try to make the case that this is interesting because, of course, we, as people who believe that the Scriptures are true, would say, “Well, look, there’s all these prophecies from the Old Testament that are fulfilled in the New Testament.”

And they will try to turn that around on us and say, “Well, yeah, see, they fit too well. Prophecies all work out too well. So, see, this stuff of the New Testament is just made up. They just made something up to match the prophecies, right? They went back and looked at the Psalms and they said, ‘Oh, okay, well, we’ll say this happened to Jesus. And then we’ll say, oh, look, see, the Psalm was fulfilled.’”

Well, with St. Luke’s gospel, it’s almost impossible to make that case because of the way he writes this, because again and again and again, And we’re going to see this continues all the way through, he keeps pointing us to witnesses, to testimony, to people he talked to, to accounts he read, to say, “This isn’t fiction, this isn’t creative, this is me putting together all the information I could get on Jesus and telling you, telling you His story.” So it’s very important that he characterizes it in this way.

And when eight days were completed for the circumcision of the Child, His name was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

So we see that again, just like with St. John the Baptist’s parents, remember, his father was told what to name him and everybody was sort of dubious, “You don’t have any relatives named John? Why are you going to name him John? Why aren’t you naming him Zacharias after his dad?” But they were obedient and did it.

You see the same thing here. They give Him the name Jesus, and we, of course in English still use the Latin version Jesus, and we use it just for Jesus. That was a stylistic decision that was made when they translated the King James Version and is still with us to this day.

They decided to leave the name Jesus in Latin to distinguish Him from the other people, like Joshua in the Old Testament, who had the same name, his name in Greek, it’s transliterated as “Iesu”, which is the same name as Joshua in the Old Testament, which would have been “Yeshua”, in Hebrew or Aramaic, which means salvation, is what it means.

And I like that the Orthodox study Bible even has the name Jesus in all caps, like it’s the name of God from the Old Testament. But of course, they only do that here, the rest of the time, they just have Jesus. So I don’t know why they decided to only do it once, but they did it once.

So we’ve now moved ahead eight days. And so Jesus has been circumcised and given His name.

Now we’re going to move a little bit forward to the end of 40 days.

And when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male who opens the womb shall be called Holy to the Lord”), and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, “A pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.”

So a couple of points here. Notice, St. Luke isn’t pointing this out as a prophecy, right. He’s not saying “thus was the prophecy fulfilled”. Now, we may see it as a fulfillment in the sense that the law says you take the first born and that included animals, that wasn’t just people. You take your firstborn and you go and you dedicate it to the Lord.

And in the case of animals, of course that meant sacrificing them. In the case of a human, God didn’t want human sacrifice, right? And so, you bring a substitute instead, you bring the child to be dedicated. But then in this case, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. Now if you actually go back and look at the law, that wasn’t the first pick. The first pick was that you bring sort of a choice lamb from the flock or a choice calf from the herd. And then it sort of works its way down to, well, if you’re really, really, really dirt poor, you could bring a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. That was sort of the… “Well, okay, if you don’t have anything.”

Interlocutor: You’d probably take out an unlucky pigeon in the court.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, well, wherever you could get one. So the point here being St. Luke is, again, sort of subtly for those who knew the Jewish law, indicating again the poverty of Christ’s family; they’re in this lowest tier, where this is all they have, this is all they can afford to sacrifice when they bring Christ and dedicate him.

So, they’re literally following the law, which is important because, again, they remain obedient. And we talked when we talked about Mary and the announcement from the Archangel Gabriel to her, that sort of her obedience was contrasted with Eve’s disobedience. We see that their obedience to the law continues. But also, there is a sense in which Christ fulfills this in that Christ is described elsewhere as the firstborn of all creation, right?

I mean, he’s the only begotten Son of God. That makes him the Firstborn with a capital F when he’s taken and presented in the temple. There is sort of an extra fulfillment beyond just literally keeping the commands of the law.

And you may have already made this connection, but this is something we still do in the Church today. It’s important, and we’ve talked about this several times before, but we do not view the Old Testament law that we spent so much time on four years ago when we were going through the first five books of the Bible as something that just sort of gets wadded up and thrown away because Christ has come. So now, “Okay, we get rid of all that stuff. Now it’s just love your neighbor and be cool and we’re all good, right?” [Laughter]

I mean, there are obvious examples, like we still talk about the Ten Commandments an awful lot, but even elements like this, even elements like the feast days. These things aren’t done away with, but they’re transformed through Christ. Right? They’re transformed through Christ. So, for example, the Greek word Pascha means Passover. So we as Christians still celebrate Passover. But when we celebrate Passover, we’re not celebrating Israel being delivered from Egypt, we’re celebrating Christ delivering us from our sins and his resurrection.

We still celebrate the feast, but now we celebrate it differently because we’ve seen its fulfillment. Over and over again we see this and we’ll see more examples, especially once we get into Acts.

Once we get into the Book of Acts, St. Luke is going to be dealing with this a lot, because it was one of the first issues in the early Church was how does the law apply now, and who does it apply to? Does it still apply to the Jews? Does it now apply to the Gentiles, too, who become Christians, who has to follow it? And how do we follow it? So we’ll get into that more in the book of Acts.

But of course, St. Luke wrote both books. So we get a telegraph here that St. Luke and then by extension, St. Paul, who stands behind him, is not an adversary of the law, is not anti-law.

And the way we continue to practice this, the way it’s been transformed in the Church, in the same way that we no longer offer sort of bits and pieces, or at least we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be offering bits and pieces of our lives to God.

We should be offering the whole thing, our whole selves, our whole life to God. In the same way we no longer just offer our firstborn child to God, we offer all of our children back to God.

And so, just like in the law of Moses, on the 40th day after the conclusion of that 40-day period, we have what we now call a churching of the mother and the child. So just like Mary brought Jesus, we bring our children, traditionally after 40 days, to the Church, and those babies are taken where? Up to the altar, because the same idea there. We’re not literally going to sacrifice them, but we’re symbolically offering them back to God. Symbolically offering them back to God.

And so, if we understand, why now we do all children instead of just the first and just the firstborn male, for that matter, it will go a long way toward understanding a lot of these other things, in that principle that we no longer offer part, we no longer offer pieces, but we’re to offer everything in our whole selves back to God who gave those things to us in the first place.

So they’ve now gone to the temple in order to dedicate Christ and to sacrifice the two birds.

And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the Consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

So we have a picture here of this righteous, elderly man. Why is this important? We haven’t really gotten into it yet, nut as we get deeper into the gospel of Luke, we’re going to see there’s a whole lot of corruption. We’ve got Herod, we’ve got political corruption, the Romans, violence, political corruption. We’ve got spiritual corruption and the chief priests and the elders of the people. It’s going to look pretty bleak.

But part of what St. Luke is telling us here with the example of St. Simeon is just as God promised in the prophets, they’re still a remnant. There are still faithful people in Israel, despite all of the corruption and all of the darkness.

Interlocutor: Zacchaeus was an example, he was a priest surrounded by…

Fr. Stephen: You mean Zacharias? Zacchaeus was a little different, but yes Zacharias, we’ve seen, and Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph and now Simeon. And we’re going to meet another person here pretty quickly, right?

Interlocutor: What does that heading mean, at verse 29?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, well, we’ll see in a second, so just push pause on that and I’ll tell you in just a second when we get to it.

Okay, so this is not only a righteous and wise man, but the Holy Spirit is upon him, which means what, as we’ve seen so far in St. Luke? It means he’s a prophet, right? So, don’t get the idea from all this talk of God returning to his people that he’s completely abandoned them, because he hasn’t.

And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. So he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the Child Jesus to do for Him according to the custom of the law, he took Him up in his arms and blessed God and said:

Before we read what he said, this is another place where people in St. Luke’s Gospel burst into song. I said, last time, we’re all used to seeing that in musicals. But this happens in St. Luke’s Gospel.

So he had revealed to him that he’s not going to die. Before he dies, he will see the Messiah. So he came by the Spirit into the temple. What does that mean, right? He wasn’t just hanging around the temple waiting for the Messiah, right? But he was going to the temple, he’s coming to the temple to worship. As he comes to the temple to worship on that particular day, he sees Jesus, right? He sees Jesus.

And he didn’t just run up and do this with every baby, right? I figured, “One of these times I’ll get lucky and it’ll be the Messiah”, right? He sees Him and he knows who He is. He sees Him and he knows who He is.

This is going to be important as we go forward, because they are going to be a whole lot of people who meet Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel who don’t recognize who he is, who don’t recognize that this is the Messiah, this is the Christ, that this is the Holy Son of God.

But St. Simeon does immediately. Why?

Interlocutor: He’s a man of God.

Fr. Stephehn: Right? He’s righteous, he’s a man of God, he has the Holy Spirit. And these people who don’t recognize them are going to be people who are otherwise inclined.

That’s the difference. The people who are righteous, the people who are following God, they recognize Jesus instantly. And this is somewhat miraculous, this recognition, because this was every firstborn baby that gets brought into the temple along with sacrifices. There’s people coming and going every day, thousands of them, but he sees this baby out of the whole crowd and instantly knows who it is.

So he takes Him in his arms, he blesses God and he sings this song:

“Lord, now You are letting your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; for my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people, Israel.”

So, he sings this song. Now that heading there where it says the nunc dimittis. That’s the Latin for the first two words, “now depart” in Latin.

And that’s the way traditionally that hymn, because, of course, we sing that at every Vespers service, the Hymn of St. Simeon, that’s how it’s referred to typically, by the first two words. So that’s what it refers to.

That “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace.” We sing that it’s sort of the end of Vespers, so we think, “Oh, okay, we’re leaving Vespers.” But that’s not what Saint Simeon means by it. St. Simeon means, “Okay, now I can die.”

Not because he’s tired of living, “Oh finally, I can die…”, but now he can die in peace. Now he can die in peace, why? Why does he not have to be afraid of dying now? Because he’s seen the salvation of God. He knows now that it’s going to happen, and so he doesn’t have to fear now going to his death.

He says:

“For my eyes have seen your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all peoples.”

Notice this is a theme right here from the beginning of St. Luke’s Gospel in terms of his audience, we saw some other things in Matthew and Mark, remember, at one point in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I came only to the lost sheep of the tribes of Israel.”

But St. Luke is looking at this bigger picture. We already saw the angels saying, “goodwill toward men”, humanity. He’s talking about all humanity. Now, St. Simeon is saying “all peoples”; he’s going to bring the revelation of God to the Gentiles, because he doesn’t need to bring the revelation of God to the Jews.

God has already revealed Himself to the Jews at Mount Sinai. They already have the Torah, they already have the Scriptures. Most of them are not interpreting them properly, but He’s revealed himself to them, but He hasn’t revealed himself to the Gentiles. But through Christ, He’s going to, through Christ, He’s going to reveal Himself to the Gentiles and the glory of your people, Israel, and He’s the fulfillment of all those promises that were made in the Old Covenant to Israel. Christ is both here right from the beginning.

And this is important because, of course, in the Book of Acts, the second volume of this for St. Luke, we’re going to see the gospel go out to the Gentiles and this isn’t sort of an afterthought. “Well, maybe some Gentiles might want in on this, too.”

And it’s not as it is sometimes portrayed. “Well, none of the Jews seem to want to be part of our religion, so let’s see if some of these Gentiles want in.” Like, “I got all the doors slammed in my face in this neighborhood, so I’m going to go to the next neighborhood over. Maybe they’ll buy something.” That’s not it.

This is the plan from the very beginning. The plan from the very beginning, from the point of Christ’s birth, is that He’s a gift to the Jews and to the Gentiles. Part of the plan is that all the nations of the world would now come to worship the God of Israel.

And Joseph and His mother marveled at those things which were spoken of Him. Then Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary, His mother,

We got to pause for a second because this part gets left off a lot. The part we just read, especially amongst our Protestant brothers and sisters, that gets read a lot. This great prophecy of Jesus and who he’s going to be, right? Of course, as we might imagine, Joseph and Mary are somewhat astonished at this. This old man just runs over and grabs their baby and sings this song, saying these profound things.

But now he’s going to speak directly to Mary, not to His parents, Mary and Joseph, not to His parents, not to any other family members who might be around them, he speaks specifically to Mary, His mother.

“Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

This is the less happy prophecy. That first one is great. “Now I can die in peace because the Lord is saving His people.  Israel, the Gentiles, all coming together, everything’s wonderful, oh by the way…”

What is the fall and the rising of many in Israel? Last shall be first and the first shall be last. This theme again. People who are powerful, wealthy in spiritual authority now: they’re going to be lay low through what He’s going to do.

Whereas those now who are the downtrodden, the poor, the oppressed, they’re going to find new freedom and victory in Christ.

And notice this special message. It literally says, “A sword will pierce your life also.”

This is him telling her, you’re going to suffer also. This is the first real prophecy in St. Luke’s Gospel of the crucifixion, because this is precisely what he’s prophesying.

He’s prophesying that moment. Well, not moment, those hours when Mary, Christ’s mother, was standing there watching Him die a slow and agonizing death on the cross.

This is the other side of “blessed are you among women”. We sometimes forget that Mary, yes, does have this great privilege, this great privilege of being the mother of the Lord, of God. But at the same time, that privilege had a responsibility attached to it and a very difficult road, a very difficult life attached to it.

And that wasn’t only the circumstances, we already talked about the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth. The other people in Nazareth were not buying a virgin birth, “yeah, sure”, right? The social stigma and all that, but this continued throughout her life, because what did she end up having to go through alongside her son, and watch her son go through?

And this is part of why, again, we as Orthodox Christians see that the Theotokos, see Mary, as such an important saint in terms of as a model for Christian life, because she went through profound sufferings along with Christ to remain faithful to her son from beginning to end.

And so she’s a role model to all of us who face sufferings in this world, who face social stigma, face social rejection, face sorrow as we go through it as well. And this is why we also commemorate her falling asleep on August 15, because right up to the day of her death, she was following and was loyal to her son.

Interlocutor: Why the parentheses?

Fr. Stephen: You have to ask the person who translated it. There are no parentheses in the original. You’d have to ask the person who translated it, because, of course, in the Greek there’s no punctuation whatsoever. And in the earliest manuscripts, it’s written in all capitals with no spaces between words.

We read left to right, and you probably know there are some languages like Semitic languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, go right to left. Well, Greek at this time in history was written both ways. You started at the top left corner, you went to the end of the line, and then you came down on the second line and went back the other way.

So, you went like this down the page, in all caps with no punctuation and no spaces between the words. Whenever I see pictures of these early Greek manuscripts, you think, wow. And then you try to read it and it’s like, “I thought I knew Greek. Maybe not, maybe I don’t.”

Right, because it’s written that way. So, yeah, there’s definitely no parentheses in the original. So that’s just an interpretation by a translator to make that parenthetical.

Interlocutor: This particular prophecy of Simeon directly to Mary is a reflection right back to her hymn, when she met Elizabeth, when she basically said, “Put down the mighty from their throne, exalt the lowly, fill the hungry with good things and the rich will be sent away.”

Fr. Stephen: The fall and rising, yes. The tables were going to be turned. When we talk about the “last shall be first and the first shall be last”, all these metaphors, “the fallen rising, put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and meek.”

All these metaphors. Again, this is not sort of a political liberation thing. This is not a class warfare thing. This is not “All poor people are noble and good and all rich people are bad and evil.” It’s interpreted that way sometimes, especially in our modern culture, unfortunately. That’s not what it’s saying. What it’s talking about is from the Old Testament that we saw in the wisdom literature and the prophets, it’s talking about justice.

How many of the Psalms are saying, “Lord, how long will the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?” The way in the law of God, the way things are supposed to work is that if you’re righteous and you’re following God and doing the right things, you should be prosperous and receive blessings. And if you’re wicked and evil rebelling against God, you’re under the curse and you should receive bad things. But because of the sinful world we’re in, that’s not the case a lot of the time.

We talked about this when we started reading the Psalms, because remember Psalm 1 is talking about how “the righteous man is like a tree planted beside the flowing river and the wicked man is like dust blown in the wind.” And you say, “Yeah, that’s right.”

And then you get to Psalm 2. And Psalm 2 starts out with, “Lord, how long will my enemies prosper against me?” Apparently, things are out of whack. They’re not the way they’re supposed to be.

And so these prophecies and these images are not just hatred toward the rich and love toward the poor. They’re saying those scales are going to be balanced.

Those people who are wealthy and who have gotten wealthy by exploiting the poor, by doing wickedness, by theft, by graft, by violence, those people are the mighty who are going to be thrown down from their seats, those are the ones who are going to fall.

Not a righteous man like St. Simeon. We’re going to see again in St. Luke’s Gospel, St. Joseph of Arimathea was a very wealthy man. St. Nicodemus, who are going to meet in St. John’s Gospel is a very wealthy man, right? They’re not thrown down from their seat by Christ, because they’re righteous and they’re following God. Abraham was a very wealthy man; God didn’t take away all his possessions.

And again, it’s not lionizing all of the poor. If you’re poor and you’re wicked, the fact that you’re poor isn’t going to somehow do you some good by the fact that you suffered.

This is talking about the poor who are righteous, the people who despite their poverty, despite oppression, despite suffering, all these things remain true and faithful to God. They’re going to be rewarded the way they should be, the way they should be, in the grand scheme of things.

So that’s what it’s talking about. This is talking about justice finally coming. To put it the way we sometimes put it in a modern sense, everybody gets what they deserve when justice comes, everybody gets what they deserve.

For most of us, for people like me, that means immediately I’m going to get what I deserve, I better start asking for mercy right now, which is why we pray “Lord have mercy” so much because we know that when Christ returns, He’s going to establish justice, right? He’s going to establish justice.

To quote Hamlet, “If everyone was treated as he deserved, who would escape whipping?” We pretty much all have punishment coming if we got what we deserve.

So that’s what’s being prophesied here, this situation right now where everything seems turned upside down and wrong that all these wicked people seem to be doing so well and prospering and the people who are trying to do right are being oppressed.

That situation is about to end. That situation is about to end. And this is why the conclusion of that prophecy by the saying of Simeon to Mary, is that “The thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

That’s the ultimate image of judgment we’re going to see; we’ve already seen a little at the end of St. Matthew’s gospel, but that’s the ultimate image of the judgment that’s going to come when Christ returns is that the thoughts of our hearts, the things we did in secret, those are all going to be revealed. Those are going to be revealed and that’s going to constitute judgment. To give a really modern example, everybody’s going to know your internet history [Laughter], be able to read all your emails, and your Facebook feed, the whole thing.