Baby Jesus and the Old Folks

As promised, here is my Christmas edition of Bible Stories You’ve Never Heard. This story begins, not with the birth of Christ, but many generations before, with a king named Jereboam. It’s a story about faithfulness through many generations, but it begins with an act of unfaithfulness to God.

Jereboam was not born of David’s line. He was the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel after it broke off from Judah, David’s tribe. Rehoboam, David’s grandson and rightful king, was only able to hold on to one other tribe, ironically, Benjamin. This was ironic because Benjamin was King Saul’s tribe. Apparently they had become so convinced that David’s kingdom was of God that they were willing to forgo what could have been a point of contention between them. They didn’t have to be the family of the king, even though they had had that honor once. They were willing to allow Judah to have that honor.

But the rest of the tribes followed Jereboam, a punishment God put on the kingdom of Israel because the effect of Solomon taking so many pagan wives was to alienate him from the true God. Following Jereboam proved to be a spiritual disaster.

One of the first things Jereboam did as king was to set up idols. He got to thinking that if people kept taking trips to Jerusalem to worship God, something that God had actually commanded that they do three times a year, they might, simply by familiarity, decide that Rehoboam wouldn’t be such a terrible king after all—very dangerous for Jereboam. So he told the people that it was such an inconvenience to take all these long trips to Jerusalem. They could just worship his gods instead.

The result of this was three-fold. First of all, Israelites left the worship of God in droves. This put a lot of Levitical priests out of business, so they moved back to the kingdom of Judah so they could continue to offer service to God.

They didn’t go alone. They were followed by “those from every tribe of Israel who set their hearts on seeking the LORD (2 Chronicles 11:16).” So there were Israelites from every tribe living in Judah. They must have had descendants living in Judah when the entire nation of Judah went into captivity in Babylon, and still had descendents when they returned to the land, which by New Testament times was called Judea.

One of those other tribes was Asher. And one of those loyal people from the tribe of Asher who had emigrated to Judah had many, many years later descendant named Phanuel.

I’ve just panned thousands of years of history, but I still haven’t come up to the birth of Christ. The time I now have in mind is eighty-four years earlier. Now, in the 400 years between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, God wasn’t inspiring anyone to write Scripture. The event I’m referring to is barely hinted at in Scripture. But because of what we actually are told, this had to have taken place.

The event was not a joyful one. It was a funeral, and Phanuel, if he was still living, would have certainly been in attendance at this funeral. This was not a funeral of an elderly person who had lived a long, full life, so it must have been a particularly sad funeral. This was Phanuel’s son-in-law, who only seven years earlier had married Phanuel’s daughter, Anna. We don’t know how he died. Perhaps it was an illness. Perhaps he lost his life on a Roman cross, or fighting the Romans in some way. There is no way to know.

Anna could not have been older than her mid-twenties. We are not told if she had any children. If she did, the oldest could not have been more than six years old, or perhaps may have barely passed his or her seventh birthday. If she had children, they grew up without a father. None are mentioned in Scripture. What we are told is what Anna was doing eighty-four years later, when she, like a few other women in history and modern times, but like very few men, had left her hundredth birthday in the dust. She spent her time praying, worshipping God at the temple, and even fasting. And as she came to do that one day, she saw an unusual sight. Simeon, an old man (at least, Scripture hints that he was old) with whom she was surely acquainted, held a baby in his arms, a look of unparalleled joy on his face as he spoke to the young couple who had to be the parents of the child. Joseph was not really a parent to Jesus, but a casual observer would not have known that. Anna was not, by any means, a casual observer.

Two of the commentaries I looked at had an interesting theory as to who Simeon was, though neither of the writers was sure of it. Both gave evidence for and against the idea, only quoting what some said of Simeon: that he was a “president of the Sanhedrim.” I thought that was a typographical error for “Sanhedrin,” which is talked about in the four Gospels a lot. But if it was, the mistake was in both commentaries. If this was something different, I don’t know what it was. Anyway, whatever he was supposed to be president of, he was, if this theory is correct, far more important as a father. If the Simeon Anna saw holding a baby was the man the theory says he was, then he was the father of Gamaliel, a man who was to become a very important teacher in Jerusalem. Paul later boasted of having been his student. Gamaliel is also mentioned in Scripture, very early in the book of Acts, as a member of the Sanhedrin who talked the rest of the Sanhedrin out of some of the persecution they wanted to dish out to the apostles. He did this not because he believed the apostles’ teaching about Jesus was of God, but because, Gamaliel contended, it may be, and they didn’t want to find themselves fighting against God, did they? This was better than most of the Sanhedrin, but even Gamaliel must have been one of the ones to condemn Jesus to death, and this was a far cry from what Simeon had to say about Jesus.

Simeon spoke, first in prayer, and then to Mary. My paraphrase of what Anna heard would go something like this. “Oh, Lord, I let me go ahead and die now. You said I wouldn’t die until I saw the Messiah, and now I have seen Him—the salvation You prepared in front of all people, the One Who will bring light to the Gentiles and glory to Israel.” After this, what one commentary I saw described as a swan song, he turned and spoke directly to Mary, telling her that her Son would cause many to fall, and many to rise. He said that Jesus would be spoken against, and that through Him “the thoughts of many hearts” would be revealed. Then he said one more thing to Mary. I remember seeing this depicted once on a television special, a movie—I think it was actually a mini-series—about Jesus’ life, and the actors that interpreted the scene showed it as being very upsetting to Mary, very understandably. Simeon told her, “A sword will pierce your own heart, also.”

I don’t know for sure what Simeon meant, but being the mother of the Son of God was surely not as easy as the teenaged Mary probably thought it would be. And when, thirty-three years later, she saw a Roman soldier’s sword pierced Jesus’ side, she must have felt as though Simeon’s words had come true. I’m sure they had.

Anna, watching all this, knew that Simeon hadn’t just picked out a baby boy at random from among the many eight-day-old babies that showed up there all the time with their parents to be circumcised, named, and sacrificed for. She knew that Simeon had picked the right one. Perhaps she knew that God had promised him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. Perhaps she even knew that the Spirit of God had sent him into the temple area that day. But whatever she knew or didn’t know, she knew one thing without a shadow of a doubt: Simeon was right about this baby. She knew it because the Bible says she was a prophetess. God had revealed to her the exact thing He revealed to Peter when Jesus asked His disciples “who do you say I am?” and Peter answered “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And because she knew it, she said so. She came right up to Mary and Joseph and Jesus and praised God. And she said more, too. Perhaps right then, perhaps from then on for as long as she lived afterward, though that couldn’t have been very long, she told about the baby Simeon had blessed to anyone she could find who was hoping for the Messiah.

My prayer is that I will remain faithful to God, even if there is around me a “great falling away,” as has been prophesied in the New Testament will happen “in the last days,” just as the unnamed Asherite was faithful during the reign of Jereboam. And I hope also that if Jesus’ second coming to earth is a thousand years from now (which of course it may not be nearly so long), I will have descendants as faithful to Him as Anna, faithful as long as they live, however long or short that may be, no matter what they go through along the way.