This reflection was written by the College’s principal, the Rev. Dr. Jesse Zink, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

Today is 40 days since Christmas and many churches have historically marked this day as Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation. It commemorates the moment recorded in the Gospel of Luke (2:27-38) when Mary and Joseph take the infant Jesus to the temple “for their purification according to the law of Moses,” which seems to be a reference to Leviticus 12 and the requirement for a woman’s purification after childbirth.

What I like about this story is the way it shows us events from multiple different perspectives. First, there is Mary and Joseph, the no-doubt exhausted parents of a newborn who have nonetheless dutifully got themselves to the temple in Jerusalem to fulfill their religious devotion. But they must also have been embarrassed or ashamed. Leviticus 12 tells us that the appropriate sacrifice should be a lamb. But Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph offer a pair of birds. This, according to Leviticus, is the sacrifice to be made if the mother “cannot afford a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons.”

The other perspective is that of Simeon and Anna, two elderly people who have worked in the temple for a long time. Simeon has been told he won’t die until he sees the messiah but he surely can’t be thinking this will be it. I like to imagine him coming out for Joseph and Mary. “Ho hum, just another two-pigeon couple,” he must have thought, “no messiah here.” He would have been stunned to realize that in this poor couple’s arms is the long-awaited messiah. He offers a song that proclaims Christ is a “light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel.” (Known by its Latin title Nunc dimittis, this is now one of the canticles in the Anglican tradition of daily prayer.) We are not given Anna’s words but she is depicted as equally expectant and hopeful.

Candlemas is marked in many ways around the world and in different Christian traditions. What I am remembering this year is this lesson about the necessity of maintaining different perspectives on the same situation, to hear and respond to experiences mindful of the different ways in which the people involved are approaching the same event. At the centre of all these perspectives is the infant Jesus, the embodiment of God’s transforming love for the world and a light for all people. May we too keep Jesus at the centre of the many perspectives that animate, shape, and enrich our life together in this college and in the wider church, and prepare ourselves for the unexpected and surprising revelation of God even in the equivalent of the “two-pigeon couples” who come before us.

Faithfully yours,
Jesse Zink
Principal