ANNA, THE PROPHETESS.
With this temple scene, the aged Anna comes into and goes out of history, but in its light certain great facts are made luminous forever, namely, that Jesus the Christ comes into our common humanity along no royal road, but through the great common gateway of common people. Jesus touches life at its majority points, meeting our needs and our weakened nature with a brotherhood that loves us and lifts us up. Christ’s first welcome into the world was not through Herod, nor the famous Council of the Seventy, nor through the wiseScribes, or great Pharisees, but through the trembling arms of an aged man and woman.
To pause upon the romantic fitness of this temple scene were easy, when the heart of the old and the new, the beginning and the end of life throb together, but rather we turn to the mission of Christ to old age as embodied in this incident of Simeon and Anna. Age is to a well-spent life what the fruit is to the vine, the garnered and best part of it. That ripeness of experience, of mind, of judgment, which comes alone from long and patient drudging on until the mile-posts are many, that calm which comes at the sunset—these are the crowns that come to the soul as it stands on the delectable mountains with the Celestial City in full view. Youth is clear-visioned and hopeful, early life is busied with palpable ambitions, and later on is occupied with the harvesting of ventures and the fruitage of success. But age has nothing but a memory and a hunger, therefore it was a fitness and a providence that Simeon and Anna should reach out their trembling hands in initial welcome to the Son of God.
Again, Anna stands as the type of the spiritually-minded, to whom in old age are vouchsafed the revelations of God. Her attitude was very significant. She “departed not from the Temple,” that is, she was watchful. She served God “with fastings and prayers,” peculiarly expressive of Old Testament piety, with its minute attention to precept and ceremony. That to this woman it was permitted, under the Spirit’s guidance, that morning to come into the court of the women at the “instant,” indicates a perpetual spiritual condition, rather than a sudden impulse or illumination—the habit of one who walked and talked with God “night and day.” These reveal the spiritual qualities of the prophetess of Jehovah, where an obedient will and loving heart are linked to far-sighted spiritual vision in the discernment of the providence and truth of God. To such elect souls revelations are always coming, because of spiritual affinities and the unerring insights of love. Therefore it was no accident, this coming into the courts of the Temple at the “instant,”but in accord with a world-wide and unbroken law of spiritual discernment, for spiritual truths are spiritually discerned.
She that desires this spiritual sense must do as Anna did, wait upon God in prayer. She “served God.” She was spiritually-minded. An intense desire always precedes possession. Our Lord said, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” Do we hunger after righteousness, with a hunger that joins a great longing with a strong will? Then shall we possess it, for these powers of the mind and heart wait with sure benediction upon the prayers of earnest souls. This desire lies at the threshold of spiritual-mindedness. It is synonymous with love. Do I love God? Is my eye single and my heart pure? If so, I shall see Him. If not in the court of the women, as Anna did, in the inner courts of an unending eternity.
The other factor that enters into this spiritual life is abiding. Anna “departed not from the Temple.” She waited patiently. Go back to that night in Shiloh, ere the lamps of God had gone out, and note how Samuel the child became Samuel the prophet by waiting on God in a listening attitude and prompt obedience. Follow Paul from the vision on Anti-Lebanon to the prisons of Nero, and the roadway of his Christian life is literally paved with waiting and prompt obedience, and both the seer and the apostle give us the rule of spiritual expansion, and set the step for all the regiments of the heavenly-minded. An eminent divine has said, “Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known,” and a greater than this divine has said, “He that doeth truth cometh to the light.” The secret of all soul degeneracy, of a seared conscience and a blunted moral sense, alas! we all know too well, is disobedience to the heavenly visions. Like Eli, our eyes are grown dim, and like Paul’s fellow-travelers to Damascus, we hear a sound, but no articulate voice of call. “To obey,” said the great and good Samuel to the disobedient Saul, “is better than sacrifice.” It is because of disobedience to the clear visionsof duty there is so much of moral “near-sightedness” in the modern Christian life. The options of spiritual life or death are always with us, to see or not to see, to know or not to know. Here is the power and the peril of the Church our Saviour purchased at the price of His own blood; here is her strength and her weakness; for the dominant danger in the Church of our time, with its wealth, its average moralities and its social compromises, is unspirituality, when the lines of division between a refined worldliness and a perfunctory Christianity are so vague that both seem so near alike to many professed followers of Jesus as not to know where worldliness ends and the Christian rule commences. An unspiritual life is the real apostacy which clogs the chariot wheels of God and dims the eye to the King in His excellent glory.
Do you wonder at the high honor heaven conferred upon this aged prophetess, who “departed not night nor day from the Temple,” lest she should miss the opportunity of a lifetime, of making her the first woman to witness for Christ? It was in perfect keeping with God’s eternal plan of exalting the humble of this world who have loyal hearts. Rebekah, with cheerful alacrity, watered the ten camels of Eliezer, the servant of Abraham, when he called her to be the bride of Isaac; Rachel was driving her father’s sheep to the well in Haran when she won the heart of Jacob, the heir of promise; Miriam watched the little craft among the rushes of the Nile, before she led the women in triumphal song at the Red Sea; Ruth gleaned in the fields of Bethlehem to relieve her own and Naomi’s necessities, when she attracted the attention of Boaz; Esther lived a modest, retired life in the house of Mordecai, the porter at the royal palace, when she was called to be queen over the Persians. Poverty and homely toil are no hindrance to holy zeal in Christian service; nor are they hindrance to high communion with the Eternal.
These are truths attested by revelation and by history. We are sometimes tempted to question humility as a stepping-stone to exaltation, and to complain of our lot; temptedto think ourselves hemmed in and circumscribed, thus to lack all opportunity for large service or large vision, or large attainments of any kind. Nothing is more common among those whose life is crowded with what is termed coarse and common toil, who are loaded down with many cares, and confined in what seem to them narrow bounds, to count others vastly more highly favored than themselves, and to regard themselves as out of range of all spiritual visions or special divine communications! Let her who is left to think such thoughts, or to place such estimate on her lot in life, remember that no eye of Scribe or Pharisee, of priest or king, saw or recognized the Son of God that day when Mary presented Jesus in the Temple. Such vision was reserved for the aged prophetess, who was looking for redemption in Jerusalem.
What is the lesson? This, that the waiting and the morally qualified are the chosen channels of divine communication; that to such the revelations of God unfold wonderful visions. Heaven and earth meet where the truly devout are found watching “night and day” by the altars of prayer. If doxologies of the soul are to be rendered in the ear of mortals, they shall hear them whose hearts are open towards the throne of grace, and whose longings are for “redemption in Jerusalem!” and who are “waiting for the consolation of Israel.”