WHEN THE END OF LIFE MEETS ITS BEGINNING

Reading a book on the role of women in Russian history recently and how their contribution has been overlooked by historians reminded me of how we treat scripture. We believe it is inspired by God, but it also has human agency – God did not dictate the Bible word for word. This means we have to consider the people involved in its production. And these are mainly men, giving voice to what men said. The presentation of Jesus in the Temple is a case (Luke 2: 22-40). Simeon and Anna are both present, but Simeon is the spokesman and it is his words Anglicans have used ever since in our liturgy in the form of the Nunc Dimmitis.

Anna is not given words, but she used them. Luke says she ‘spoke about the child to all’, so Anna was an evangelist for the infant Jesus. She was one of the vanishingly few people to identify the future of this child before Jesus retreated back into obscurity for three decades, during which time many of those present in the Temple that day would have died.

We lazily imagine the Temple to be like the local parish church on a weekday – one or two people pottering around doing tasks, perhaps a few looking round if it’s pretty, and a couple quietly praying. In reality the Temple would have been packed with people doing different things: a bustling, lively, smelly cohort of people, coming and going, barely aware of the others around them. In our terms, the Temple was a town square, a retail outlet and a cathedral all rolled into one. It was the easiest thing in the world to miss someone, and Jesus being presented in the Temple was a routine act of devotion for Jewish mothers. There was nothing exceptional about a couple of young parents down from the north, doing their parental duties. Everyone missed its significance – except Simeon and Anna.

But this wasn’t by chance. They were plugged in spiritually. Both were prayerful, attentive, patient. Simeon had already had a revelation from God about this moment. Did Anna, as well? We don’t know, but she must have had deep spiritual intuition to grasp what she was seeing and a God-given knack of being in the right place at the right time.

Being visionary is highly esteemed, the possession of people who can scan the horizons and prepare for outcomes. But God often asks us to scan the margins, not the horizons. Who is languishing there? Whose quiet voices are we missing amid the white noise of modern life? Many people in our culture are seduced by the priorities of a world devoted to strength, youth and looks. Older people are remaindered, boxed up by easy judgments. And yet in them they carry lifetimes of rich experience. It’s this dissonance that those who offer pastoral care should make a harmony out of. To assure older people with the presence of a listening ear that their stories have meaning, can be talked about, made sense of and shared. Like Anna and Simeon beforehand, to know the consoling presence of Jesus in the latter stages of their lives.

In Ephesians 2, it says we have been ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand’. These are the works that lie ahead in pastoral care – actions, words and silences to envelop our elders with the love that is everlasting. Holding them by their right hand, the very act of God himself, until they too are dismissed with the peace that Simeon and Anna shared that era-defining day.