During their visit to the Temple, Mary and Joseph encountered two other devout Jews. Simeon and Anna. For many years both had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah and now they are in his presence. What a very joyful moment for both of these senior citizens. Realizing his good fortune, Simeon burst into song with these words:
Now, Master, you may let your servant go
in peace, according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you prepared in sight of all the peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and glory for your people Israel."
The Simeon spoke directly to Mary:
Behold this child is destined for theWe can be sure that Mary and Joseph left that encounter wondering what Simeon could have meant about Jesus being a "sign that will contradicted". They must also have wondered what Simeon meant when he said that because of Jesus "a sword would pierce her heart".
fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted-
And you yourself a sword will pierce-
so that the thoughts of many
hearts will be revealed.
Pierced with a Sword
Commentating on Simeon's reference to a sword piercing Mary's heart, scripture scholar, Patricia Sanchez writes the following:
Why a sword? A weapon that is referenced over 400 times in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the sword variously symbolized aggression (Jeremiah 2:30; Matthew 26:52), disharmony (2 Samuel 2:26; Matthew 10:34), divine assistance (Ezekiel 30:21-25), God's word (Ephesians 6:17; Hebrews 4:12), and divine judgment (Jeremiah 47:6; Ezekiel 21:3-5, 28-30). In the context of today's feast, the sword might best be understood as a symbol of the discriminating judgment and division (Ezekiel 14:17) that Jesus' presence would provoke in the world. Like a sword that would cleave father from son and mother from daughter, the presence of Jesus would demand a choice. For those who would choose Jesus, in faith, a new bond would be forged, a bond more binding even than that of familial love. Raymond E. Brown (The Birth of the Messiah) has suggested that the sword that would pierce Mary's heart was the realization that the claims of God on her Son were greater than any other human claim or attachment. Piercing would be the pain that her motherly love would have to be surrendered and subordinated to her faith. However, and therein lies the blessedness of believing, Mary would also come to realize that although as his mother, she was united to Jesus by maternal loving and caring, it would be through her faith and acquiescence to God's will that she would enjoy an even more intimate and eternally binding union with her son. That more intimate and binding union enabled her to withstand and survive the piercing sword of Jesus' rejection by his contemporaries, his abandonment by his friends, his condemnation by the authorities, his suffering and his death.
In a homily delivered on this feast at the University of Louvain, the late Karl Rahner (The Great Church Year) suggested that all who read this gospel or hear it proclaimed should identify with Mary and see her life as a pattern for their own. Rahner also said of the piercing sword that this is the way of faith. Faith is like a sword that pierces and divides as it penetrates to the center of the believer's heart. Faith is the enduring of this sword. Faith is the readiness to live on in hope when conflict threatens and allows us to entrust ourselves unconditionally to God. It is faith, said Rahner, when we accept the blow of the sword in our existence, the sword of the question that finds no answer; the sword that all life in pain ends in death; the sword that not even love dissolves all contradictions in this life; the sword of the leave-takings, disappointments, sickness and isolation. All these swords pierce our hearts but in this piercing and in the pain we become more open to the mystery of healing and caring and mercy who is God.
According to the author of Revelation (1:16), the two-edged sword goes forth from the Son of God, who was himself pierced in his dying for our sins (John 19:34; Revelation 1:7). If Jesus is the pierced one and if Mary, in faith, also surrendered to be pierced by the sword, then our faith demands that we be similarly surrendered to the suffering, rejection, contradiction and struggle of believing in Jesus and living as his disciples in the world. Only a fool or a masochist would surrender himself/herself to suffering for its own sake, but it requires the "foolishness" of a believer to accept suffering as an inevitable "by-product" of discipleship. Those who do so, for the sake of Christ and the gospel, become healers, as it were, who can reveal the fullest meaning of life to others.
As Walter R. Bowie ("Luke," The Interpreter's Bible) has explained, the sword of affliction that pierces the human heart may some times seem to be only a disaster, but, by some strange paradox, the wound it makes may so enlarge the heart with sympathy and understanding that others, in their need, will turn to the wounded one for support and inspiration. Therefore, in any place and in any century, the piercing sword of sorrow and faith keeps us mindful of whose we are and of whose message and mission we are to continue to teach and to live until his return. In the words of William R. Inge, British author and theologian (1860-1954), "A generation that wishes for a religion without tears (or without a piercing sword) must find it difficult to adjust its beliefs to the teachings of the New Testament (of Jesus) and to the facts of life" (Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion). Nearer to our times, Henri Nouwen (The Wounded Healer, Ministry in Contemporary Society) has reminded all would-be disciples that when the piercing sword of struggle and faith is embraced, the disciple becomes a "wounded healer" whose wounds enable him/her to tend more carefully, lovingly and generously to the needs and wounds of other.