The Venerable Bede: Luke 2:22-35: Feast of the Purification

The Venerable Bede: Luke 2:22-35: Feast of the Purification

The sacred reading of the gospel tells us about the solemnity we celebrate today. We venerate it with proper offices on the fortieth day after the Lord's birth. It is dedicated especially to the humility of our Lord and Savior, along with that of his inviolate mother. [The reading] explains that they who owed nothing to the law made themselves subject to the fulfillment of its legal decrees in everything. For, as we have just heard when [the lesson] was read, After the days of his or her (either the Lord's or his mother's) purification were fulfilled according to the law of Moses, they took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, as is written in the law of the Lord: every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.

Dearly-beloved brothers, let us look more carefully at the words of the law which we have set before you, and we will see most clearly how Mary, God's blessed mother and a perpetual virgin, was, along with the Son she bore, most free from all subjection to the law. Since the law says that  a woman who 'had received seed' and given birth was to be judged unclean, and that after a long period she, along with the offspring she had borne, were to be cleansed by victims offered to God, it is evident that [the law] does not describe as unclean that woman who, without receiving man's seed, gave birth as a virgin, [nor does it so describe] the Son who was born to her; nor does it teach that she had to be cleansed by saving sacrificial offerings. But as our Lord and Savior, who in his divinity was the one who gave the law, when he appeared as a human being, ‘willed to be under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons’— so too his blessed mother, who by a singular privilege was above the low, nevertheless did not shun being made subject to the principles of the law for the sake of showing [us] an example humility, according to that [saying] of the wise man, ‘the greater you  are, the more [you should] humble yourself in all thing’.

‘And let them give a sacrificial offering according to what is written in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons’. This was the sacrificial offering of poor people. The Lord commanded in the law that th0se who could were able to offer a lamb for a son or a daughter, along with a turtledove or a pigeon, but one who did not have sufficient wealth to offer a lamb should offer two turtledoves or two young pigeons.  Therefore, the Lord, mindful in everything of our salvation, not only deigned for our sake to become a human being, though he was God, but he also deigned to become poor for us, though he was rich, so that by his poverty along with his humanity he might grant us to become sharers in his riches and his divinity.