Year 7, Day 211: Luke 2

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Before I truly shift the focus onto Jesus for the remainder of Luke’s story, I’d like to spend one more day stringing along this common thread I’ve been weaving.  Once more, we have normal and regular people involved.

For example, we return to Mary and Joseph.  They go up to Jerusalem to be counted.  While there, Mary gives birth.  Since this was her first son, she then needed to pay the sacrifice required by the Law.  She chooses the option for the doves, which was the option given in the Law for the poorest people who could make no other sacrifice.  This tells us that Mary did not come to Joseph with any kind of large dowry.  It also tells us that Joseph may have been a fine craftsman, but he certainly was not living in the lap of luxury, either.  Here we have two common people – and by common, of course, in those days I mean poor.  God has come to these common and ordinary people and used them to be the vessel through whom He imparts his grace.

Additionally, look at the shepherds.  Here are flock tenders.  These people likely spend more evenings out sleeping with the animals than they spend sleeping with families.  They likely carry the scent of sheep and goat wherever they go.  Again, they are fine people.  They are good, hard-working, down-to-earth people.  They are the ones who hear from the angels.  They are the ones who go to see the baby.  They are the ones who go out and tell people what it is that they have seen.  God is using more good, ordinary people to reach other good and ordinary people.

Of course, we have the story of Simeon and Anna.  Simeon was righteous and devout.  However, note that we aren’t told anything else about him.  He wasn’t extraordinary in any other means besides his righteousness.  He wasn’t a priest.  Yet, he was the one who had been told that he wouldn’t die until he saw the Christ.  More ordinary people at God’s work.

Take Anna.  Here is another devout woman.  She’s even a widow, unattached to a man as her husband had died!  We are told that she was a prophetess.  Therefore, she’s not exactly ordinary.  However, she isn’t exactly a person of grand standing, either.  She’d only lived with her husband for seven years before becoming a widow.  We know from the Old Testament how easy it was for the orphans and the widows to be forgotten, unprotected, and cast aside.  Yet here is this widow, who seldom leaves the temple, who is a part of god’s plan.

God uses ordinary normal people.  Even when he picks a priest, like Zechariah, or a prophetess, like Anna, they aren’t well known or powerful or wealthy.  God’s Word goes through the world on the backs of common people doing common things in the name of a most uncommon God.  He is the one who is great.

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