Game over - we won!
It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Tonight the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers will play for the NFL championship. They will be watched by millions and for good reason. These are two excellent teams, but their styles and strengths are different.
Nevertheless, I am prepared to make a few bold predictions about the game, and I am confident that each will prove to be accurate.
After the game they will fire confetti cannons and fireworks. They will present the winner with the Lombardi trophy and one player, probably the quarterback of the winning team, will win Most Valuable Player. Grown men will weep for joy. Grown men will weep with sorrow. There will be commercials that make us laugh and at least one that will make us wonder what they were advertising.
And there is another curious dynamic that will happen. Whoever wins and whoever loses will radically shape the way we remember every play in this game. Even if the game is won on a last-second touchdown or field goal, even if the winner wins by just one point, every play by the winner will be seen in light of leading to that precious win.
The mistakes (missed assignments, dropped passes, penalties, even turnovers) won’t matter very much to the winners.
But the mistakes will to the loser – a lot. Every mistake will be magnified. And every good play by the losing team, no matter how spectacular, will at best be seen as insufficient, as not enough.
Once the winner is known, when the highlights roll, we know what really mattered and what didn’t. And as long as people remember that game, the winners and losers will be interpreted as such.
This is a very important point to remember about Christian faith. Our faith is rooted primarily in the Apostles’ witness to the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Everything else about Jesus’ earthly life is remembered and interpreted in light of those moments. His teachings are explanations of his victory and his healings are demonstrations of life in his Kingdom.
We understand everything about Jesus in light of the fact that he won. Game over!
And that is happening for Simeon and Hannah is these precious moments.
Under Jewish law, a male baby is to be circumcised on his eighth day. Thirty-three days later, the baby’s parents were to present the child to God at the Temple, as a step to ritually purify the mother. If it was her first son, he was presented as an offering to God. Once presented, the mother would redeem or buy back her firstborn son with a sacrifice of a lamb or, if they were poor, two pigeons or turtle doves.
This was an echo of Abraham’s obedience. As you may recall, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham was prepared to do it, but God told him to stop, and God provided a lamb to put in Isaac’s place.
Once Mary offers Jesus to God and redeems him with two birds, they run into this curious fellow Simeon. What do we know about Simeon?
1. We know his name. This implies that he was a known and respected figure around the Temple. It’s a granular detail, a personality people would remember.
2. Simeon was looking for the consolation of Israel. The word translated as “consolation” is paraklesis, which is from the same root as Paraklete which Jesus used when he told the disciples about the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Comforter. The Advocate. The Guide.
3. Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit already rested on Simeon and had let him know that he would see the Messiah before he died. The Holy Spirit guided Simeon to the Temple at the right moment to meet Jesus.
Taking Jesus into his arms he says what will become known as The Song of Simeon. You may recognize it from Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer or Compline:
Lord, you now have set your servant free *
to go in peace as you have promised;
For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, *
whom you have prepared for all the world to see:
A Light to enlighten the nations, *
and the glory of your people Israel.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: *
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
For Simeon, meeting Jesus is game over. Everything else that ever happened in his life up to that point and everything that would ever happen to him afterward is shaped by that meeting.
The same is true for Hannah. She was 84, widowed for something like 60 years or so, and also a well-known, exceedingly faithful figure around the Temple. She affirms and shares Simeon’s joy.
We come into God’s house, bringing all of who and what we are, our best and our worst. That’s why we do a confession, because we want to be as right with him as we can be. It is Christ himself who presents us to God, and it is Christ himself who redeems us. We accept the atonement Christ made for us on the cross.
You have been redeemed by Christ’s own blood. GAME OVER! Everything else in our lives, the highlights, the lowlights, the mistakes, the dropped passes, the turnovers, they matter, but following Jesus means they don’t decide the game. We have much to celebrate and much to repent. But always remember that that you have been presented to God.
AMEN!