Save as PDFIn the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
Today is the feast of the Meeting of the Lord. This feast doesn’t only complete the history of the Old Testament and begins the New Testament, but it has also one deeper sense because it teaches us obedience.
“When the day came for them to be purified in keeping with the Law of Moses, they took Him up to the Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord”. The Mother of God didn’t need the days of purification when a woman couldn’t enter the temple, because Her Son was miraculously born, but despite this fact, she for the obedience to God, fulfilled the law of her people of that time.
According to the law each first born infant was consecrated to God. The meeting of the Lord is the Day when on the fortieth day after His birth, the Infant Christ was carried to the temple to be consecrated to God.
Thank offering to God was the sign of purification. Thanksgiving usually means that a man takes something away from himself and gives it to another one. And when an infant was carried to the temple a sacrifice was also brought. At that time very few people had money and sacrifice was in the form of sacrificial animals and birds which were used as meal for priests and people helping in the temple.
But the spiritual sense of the fact that God’s Mother came to the Temple isn’t in these sacrifices and the purification which she didn’t need because she was the Ever-Virgin but in the consecration to God. This tradition has come to the Lord’s Church: to baptize a child on the fortieth day after his birth in memory of the Meeting of the Lord so that from the early infancy a child should be consecrated to God. Though an infant is faithless yet and can’t differ the truth from a lie, isn’t literate, but his parents carrying him to the temple answer for him before God that he will be brought up in adoration of God, in love to God and Scripture.
Nowadays parents carrying a child for baptism, often doesn’t even think that they consecrate him to God, in this respect they have some other understanding and sometimes no understanding at all, they simply do it according to tradition. In fact when parents carry an infant to the temple, they in this way witness before God – O, Lord, what you have given to us, we are giving to You. And each of us who is present here was once baptized, that is was blessed and consecrated to God. Each of us has been given grace; each has become a son or a daughter for God. Though we were born in flesh from sinful parents, but our baptism is the sign of the select ones, the sign of communion to the new people of God, to God’s sons. In baptism each man is adopted to God. As the son of the Great King can’t behave improperly, neither can the Christian. Nobody is surprised if grandfather was a drunkard, father is drinking and the son is in prison – it is naturally. But when it is said that father is a writer, he writes wonderful books and his son is a drug addict or in the prison then there is some dissonance. Why can it be so? Unfortunately, we being the children of the Great King of Heaven often behave absolutely improperly as if He is not our Father of Heaven, as if it wasn’t He whom we were devoted to in baptism, as if our parents or we didn’t consecrate ourselves before God in order to give all our life to Him.
The Lord says “Let your light shine before people so that they see your good deeds and glorify your Father of Heaven” because kind children glorify their parents and the parents are glad looking at the obedient children.
The Lord is yet more glad when we fulfil His commands. The Lord is ever present and wherever we are, we are always before His eyes, though because of our sickness we forget about it. We forget that God is in the shop, at the bus stop, at our work. So we must constantly return in our thoughts to God, constantly try to have memory about God, constantly remember that we are children of the Heavenly King and are devoted to God. And this memory about God will help us not to commit a lot of sins, because we will be guarded by a sense of great responsibility, conscience that we aren’t simply people, but the children of the Heavenly King.
Let this feast be imprinted on our memory that we are the children of God and must try to make Him glad. For this cause we are consecrated and blessed by God and get help from the Lord. Amen.