Does following Jesus really mean going to church? This is a question posed to us consistently by the world around us. Can’t I love my neighbor as myself and love God, and even pray to Him and read the Bible, just as well at home on Sunday morning as I can at church? And if we do need to go to church, does it really have to be this stiff and formal?

          Last Sunday, we saw that Christ “went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day.” People in 2025 might be “spiritual but not religious,” but Christ Himself certainly wasn’t. Today, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, which we celebrate every year on February second, happily breaks into the progression of the “green Sundays” of the time in between Epiphany and Lent. We rejoice with Mary and Joseph as they not only thank God for the gift of their child, but bring the Lord of the Universe into His Temple for the first time and carefully “fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord.”

          We see three events in the Gospel today that fulfill those prescriptions: the purification of the mother, the redemption of the first-born son, and the presentation of Jesus. According to Leviticus chapter twelve, when a woman gives birth to a male child, she is ritually unclean (that is, she cannot participate in Temple worship) until a period of forty days had passed. (Unclean here is not meant to convey any moral fault.) Once the forty days were over, the Israelite mother would bring to a priest an offering of a lamb or a pair of pigeons, allowing her to reenter and participate in the Temple liturgy. The Blessed Mother, in her faithfulness to the law of God, obediently fulfills this obligation.

          Mary and Joseph go above and beyond their duty in fulfilling this prescription. They could have approached any priest to offer their sacrifice, but they choose to go all the way to Jerusalem to do it in the Temple. As the wife of a humble tradesman, our Lady presents the sacrifice of a simple person: “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,” instead of the lamb that more affluent Israelites would be expected to offer. This first event gives today’s feast the name by which it has been known for most of the Church’s history, “The Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin,” and its decidedly Marian character.

          The purification of the mother was to take place after the birth of any male child, but the first-born male required even more. The Old Law stipulated that the first born of man and beast belonged to the Lord, in recognition that everything we have is really a gift from Him. This “belonging to the Lord” was shown by sacrifice – either of animals or by burning the first and best portions of the crops. This held even in principle for the first-born son, so instead of being sacrificed, he had to be “redeemed,” purchased back from God. The price given by the Law was five shekels, according to the special currency of the Temple.

          Interestingly, though, St. Luke does not mention this “redemption” or buying back of Jesus. On the one hand, St. Luke is at pains to describe the Holy Family as extremely faithful to the requirements of Jewish law. But on the other hand, he leaves out the most important part: the five-shekel redemption price. This is a strange omission, when he otherwise seems so concerned to show us how the Holy Family “fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord,” even beyond the letter of those prescriptions.

          According to the book of Numbers, though, there are some animals that do not have to be redeemed and even cannot be redeemed. Most importantly, the first-born male of the sheep, the lamb, is not to be redeemed. It is to be sacrificed before the altar of God.

          The omission of the redemption of the first born, and the possible connection with the ritually sacrificed animals that are not redeemed, makes sense in light of the third event that St. Luke tells us about: the Presentation of Jesus. St. Luke tells us that, “Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord.” This is a very curious and even confusing statement, because there is nothing in the Law about presenting first born sons. How can they present Him just as it is written in the Law, when there is nothing written in the Law about “presenting” anyone or anything?

          St. Luke is no fool, and his Gospel is inspired by the Holy Spirit, so this is not a mistake or oversight. The word translated here as “present” also means “to offer.” It’s the word that St. Paul uses to encourage Christians to “present (parastésai) your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1) in the sense of a sacrificial offering.

The offering of the rich for the purification of the mother was a lamb, the sacrificial victim par excellence, the one whose flesh is to be eaten, and whose blood will deliver God’s people. Mary and Joseph cannot afford a lamb, so they offer two pigeons. Except that they do actually offer a lamb! They come to the Temple to offer and present the One of whom John will say, “behold the lamb of God!”, the sacrificial victim whose blood will redeem and whose flesh will be eaten as a pledge of salvation.

The entire life of Christ as presented in the Scriptures is understood in terms of Jewish ritual sacrifice. In every Gospel, operative in the background is the Jewish system of sacrificial redemption. To connect back to where we started: Following Jesus cannot be divorced from religious ritual, and, therefore, Christian worship ought to reflect the reality of sacrifice.

There is a persistent myth, in both non-Catholic and Catholic circles, that early Christian worship was extremely informal. We are given an image of the early Christians who gathered for a communal meal, in the context of which different men took turns offering the prayers, recounting the story of the Last Supper, and the ones who were the most eloquent and had the best prayers they decided to call “priests” and they wrote down their prayers and for a long time there were a lot of different prayers being used until some really stuffy people came along and said that everyone has to do everything the same way, which was pretty boring but maybe wasn’t so bad because it kept anything too crazy from happening.

Aside from having no basis whatsoever in any historical texts and being completely contradicted by the archeological record, this idea of the alleged “casualness” of early Christian worship is extremely unbiblical. The Holy Family went above and beyond the necessary prescriptions of the Law. They came to offer the True Lamb to the Father in His Temple. Authentic Christian worship does just this. Worshiping God without renewing the True Lamb’s sacrifice of Himself to the Father might be inspiring and uplifting, it might bring us to our knees or bring us to tears. It might teach us important truths. But at the end of the day, it’s just all those things. It’s inspiration, instruction, and community building. Without offering the Lamb back to the Father in an unbloody ritual sacrifice established by the Lamb Himself, it’s just not Christian worship. After all, the one presented in the Temple commanded us to do this.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, A.D. MMXXV

The central insights here are taken from Jesus of Nazareth: The infancy narratives by Pope Benedict XVI (New York: Image Books, 2012).