Today is Holy Family Sunday and the assigned Gospel passage is Luke 2:22-40, which introduces us to Simeon and Anna who were at the Temple when the Holy Family arrived for the presentation of Jesus.

We meet ANNA who is a prophet and missionary. A Prophet is one who proclaims a divinely-inspired message, and through a prophet, God speaks to us. 

Anna is one of 7 female prophets named in the Bible, and may well be the oldest. Throughout the Bible, we read about women and men announcing the coming of the messiah.  Like John the Baptist did.  As a widow, Anna spent all of her time in the Temple, worshiping day and night,  fasting and praying.

A Missionary is one sent on a mission. Anna had been waiting for this mission all her life. After hearing Simeon’s declaration that he had seen salvation in Jesus, Anna was sent by the Spirit to share the good news about Jesus to all who  anticipated the deliverance of Jerusalem, to all who were waiting for the Messiah.  They were waiting for deliverance from the oppression of Rome.

Anna’s mission was universal – she spoke of Jesus to all who were awaiting the deliverance of Israel.  The text says she spoke to all, because salvation is intended for all.

To understand what this idea of salvation meant to those who heard Anna’s message, let’s listen to Simeon. The passage tells us that Simeon was a just and devout man who was prompted by the Holy Spirit to go to the Temple. On seeing Jesus, he took the baby in his arms and declared:  “my eyes have seen the salvation you have  prepared for all the people to see .…”

What does “salvation” mean to you?  

Is salvation your ticket into heaven? 

Or is it an invitation to create heaven here on earth?

According to Marcus Borg and John Crossan in The First Christmas, the term “salvation” as used in the Bible supports a broad meaning, one that captures the idea of deliverance, as Anna proclaimed. 

For many Christians today, salvation is closely connected with their post-death existence, with “going to heaven.”  But when the word is so narrowly understood, Jesus is nothing more than God’s means of “getting into heaven.” According to Borg and Crossan, the word salvation in the Bible has much more “this-worldly, here-and-now” meaning. When we hear this word “salvation,” we should hear “rescue, deliverance, liberation, protection, healing and being made whole.”   

Jesus as our salvation reveals and incarnates the passion of God. Jesus embodies the promise and hope for a very different kind of world than existed at the time of his birth, and sadly, different from the one that still exists today. 

To call Jesus our savior is to commit to act as Jesus did towards those in your midst: towards your family, and towards the family of all humanity. If we understand Jesus as our salvation in the “here and now” sense of the word, how are we invited to respond in the present moment, in our “here and now?”

The answer is simple but not always easy to do. Frankly, Sunday’s readings would have been more appropriately placed in a liturgy before we spent the last week feasting with our families.