Luke 2:22–38
Picture the temple in Jerusalem on this ordinary morning. It’s loud. Priests are working. Animals are being sold for sacrifice. Coins are being counted. Hundreds of families come and go, and almost nobody looks at anybody else.
Into that crowd walks a young couple carrying a 40-day-old baby. They’re poor. You can tell, because of what they’re holding: 2 small birds—the offering the law allowed for families who couldn’t afford a lamb. Few would give them a second glance.
But two people do.
One is Simeon. The other, a woman called Anna. Both are old. Neither is a priest. And neither of them holds any office. Yet so far as Luke tells us, these two are the only people in the whole city of Jerusalem who look at the baby and know exactly who He is.
Luke gives them 17 verses. We never hear of them again. And yet those 17 verses carry more theology than almost anything else in the Christmas story. They tell us what the child came to do, who He came for, what it will cost Him and His mother. And how a believer may face death without fear.
40 days: what the law asked, and what Luke quietly leaves out
Two separate laws bring Mary and Joseph to the temple that morning—one concerns purification of mothers after childbirth, and the other law is about redemption of the firstborn son (Luke 2:22-23). One of them hides a surprise.
| THE DUTY | WHERE THE LAW SAYS IT | WHAT IT REQUIRED | WHAT LUKE REPORTS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purification of the mother after childbirth | Leviticus 12:2–8 | After 40 days (for a son), a lamb and a bird; if the family was poor, two birds instead | Two birds are offered (verse 24). This family is poor. |
| Redemption of the firstborn son | Exodus 13:2, 12–15; Numbers 18:15–16 | Five silver shekels paid to the priests to “buy back” the firstborn son from the Lord | No payment is mentioned. Jesus is simply “presented to the Lord” (verse 22). |
The second line matters. Every other Israelite firstborn son was bought back. Luke doesn’t say this one was—the baby is merely “presented”. It’s the same picture we see in 1 Samuel 1, where Hannah brings little Samuel to the sanctuary and doesn’t take him home again.
This firstborn son who isn’t bought back will grow up to become the payment Himself. Years later He says it plainly: He came “to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
There’s a second thing hiding in this paragraph. In 17 verses Luke says “according to the law of the Lord” five times (verses 22, 23, 24, 27 and 39). That’s not careless repetition. Luke is showing us that from day 40 of His life, Jesus is inside the law, keeping it, fulfilling it. Paul says the same thing in one sentence: God sent His Son, “born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” (Galatians 4:4–5).
At 40 days old a baby can obey nothing. So the obedience is carried out by His parents on His behalf. That’s not a technicality. It’s the pattern of the whole gospel: what we could not do, Christ did for us, in our place. His obedience begins before He can even speak.
WHERE IN THE TEMPLE DID THIS HAPPEN?
Almost certainly in the Court of the Women. This was the furthest into the temple a woman was allowed to go. It’s a small detail with a large point attached: the one part of the temple open to women is where God chose to have His Son publicly recognised, and one of the two witnesses He chose was a woman.
Simeon: a man with no credentials, only a promise
“Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.” (Luke 2:25)
Read that carefully and notice what’s missing. Luke doesn’t tell us Simeon was a priest. He doesn’t say he was a scribe, a rabbi, or a member of the council. He doesn’t even say he was old, though the way he speaks about dying suggests he was. Luke tells us four things. And no more:
- He was righteous. That is, his life was upright before God and other people.
- He was devout. He took God seriously and worshipped Him carefully.
- He was waiting for “the consolation of Israel”.
- The Holy Spirit was upon Him.
“Consolation” simply means comfort. The phrase comes straight out of the second half of Isaiah, which opens with God saying, “Comfort, comfort my people” (Isaiah 40:1). Simeon is a man soaked in those chapters. He’s not waiting for a political rescue or a better emperor. He’s waiting for God Himself to come and comfort His people, exactly as Isaiah promised. When he finally speaks, his song is almost entirely borrowed from Isaiah.
And that’s his whole resume. No title, no office, no platform. Just the Scriptures and the Spirit. This should encourage anyone who has ever felt small in the church. God didn’t need an institution to identify His Messiah. He needed a man who believed His word.
Luke then mentions the Spirit three times in three verses, which is more concentrated than anywhere else in the Christmas story:
| VERSE | WHAT THE SPIRIT DOES | WHY IT MATTERS |
|---|---|---|
| Luke 2:25 | The Spirit was upon him | God was already at work in this man before anything visible happened |
| Luke 2:26 | The Spirit revealed a promise to him | His hope rested on God’s word, not on his own feelings |
| Luke 2:27 | The Spirit led him into the temple | God arranged the timing so that promise and fulfilment met at one hour |
Remember what had happened in Israel before this. After the prophet Malachi, roughly 400 years passed with no prophetic word from God. People call it “the silent years”. Now, suddenly, the Spirit is speaking again, and Luke shows him speaking through Elizabeth, Zechariah, Mary, John the Baptist, and now, Simeon and Anna in quick succession. Something has restarted. Sinclair Ferguson has often made the point: the Holy Spirit in Luke is never a private, decorative extra but the one who brings Christ to people and people to Christ. That’s exactly what He does here. He doesn’t merely give Simeon a warm feeling. He walks him to the right place. At just the right moment.
“My eyes have seen your salvation”: the song of a dying man
Simeon takes the baby into his arms and sings. The church has sung his song after him ever since, under its Latin name, the Nunc Dimittis, meaning “now you dismiss”.
“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:29–32)
Four things in this short song deserve slow reading.
1. Death has become a relieving order
The words Simeon uses are the language of a household. He calls God “Master” and himself a “servant”—in the Greek, a bondservant. The picture is of a slave being set free, or a guard being told his watch is over. He may now stand down and go home. Simeon doesn’t say, “Now I am ready to die.” He says, in effect, “Master, my duty is finished. May I go?”
That’s a very different way to face the end of life. Death here isn’t a defeat that happens. It’s a permission he asks for and receives.
2. Salvation is a person, not a feeling
“My eyes have seen your salvation.” Taking the baby in his arms, Simeon is in effect telling us, “Salvation has a face, and I am carrying Him.” Simeon’s peace didn’t rest on how he felt about the baby. It rested on who the baby was. Christian hope isn’t an inner mood. It rests on a person who was actually born and actually held, actually crucified and actually raised.
3. The whole world is in view from Day 40
“A light for revelation to the Gentiles.” Gentiles simply means the nations, everyone who isn’t Jewish. Simeon is standing in the most Jewish place on earth, holding a Jewish baby, 40 days old, and he announces this child is for the whole world. He quotes Isaiah, who’d said the servant of the Lord would be “a light for the nations” (Isaiah 49:6).
Notice how early this is. Jesus hasn’t preached a sermon, healed anyone, or called a disciple. The mission to the nations isn’t a later adjustment after Israel rejected Him. It was the plan, announced in the temple, before the child could even hold His head up.
4. What Simeon actually saw
Here’s the part that should stop us. What did Simeon’s eyes physically see? A tired teenage mother. A working-class husband. A baby. Two cheap birds in a cage. That’s all. Everything else—salvation, light, glory, the nations—he saw by faith.
And the priests, standing a few metres away, professionally trained in the Scriptures, saw the same scene and saw nothing else besides.
THE PROBLEM WAS NEVER THE EVIDENCE
This scene is one of the clearest pictures in the Bible of a truth Christian thinkers keep returning to: the same facts don’t speak the same way to every heart.
Cornelius Van Til argued there are no “bare facts” that everyone reads neutrally. Every person interprets what they see through what they already believe about God.
Greg Bahnsen pressed the same point in debate: unbelief isn’t usually a shortage of information but a settled way of handling information.
RC Sproul often said the deepest human problem isn’t that God has hidden Himself, but that we’re unwilling to see Him.
Paul says it in one line: “The natural person doesn’t accept the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Simeon didn’t have better eyesight than the priests. He’d been given sight. That gift has a name in Christian teaching: the inward work of the Holy Spirit, opening a person’s eyes to what is really there.
The second thing Simeon said, which we rarely put on Christmas cards
Simeon blesses the parents. Then he turns to Mary and says something that changes the temperature of the whole scene.
“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” (Luke 2:34–35)
Three hard truths sit inside that sentence.
Nobody stays neutral
“The fall and rising of many.” Isaiah had spoken of the Lord as both a sanctuary and “a stone of offence” over which people stumble (Isaiah 8:14). Peter and Paul both later apply that image to Jesus (Romans 9:33; 1 Peter 2:6–8). The same Christ is either the rock we stand on or the rock we trip over. There’s no third option, and no neutral ground.
Opposition isn’t an accident
“A sign that is opposed.” The word “appointed” governs this too. Jesus wasn’t opposed because His followers were tactless or because the timing went wrong. Opposition was written into the plan. Any version of Christianity that promises the world will admire us if we present Christ nicely enough hasn’t read Luke 2:34.
The sword through Mary’s soul
This line has been read in two very different ways, and it’s worth being clear.
Roman Catholic devotion has often taken it as marking Mary out for a unique share in her Son’s saving suffering—the “Sorrowful Mother”, whose pain is joined to his. We read it differently, and not because we think little of Mary. We read it differently because of where Luke has placed the words.
- It sits inside a sentence about everyone else. The clause about the sword is in brackets, in the middle of a statement about “thoughts from many hearts” being revealed. Mary is not the exception to that exposure. She is the first example of it.
- Luke keeps Mary among the disciples, not above them. Later in the same Gospel, when told his mother and brothers are outside, Jesus says His true family are “those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21). When a woman calls His mother blessed, He answers, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28).
- The word used is a large sword. It’s the long broadsword of the Greek Old Testament, not a small blade. Mary’s pain is real. And enormous. But it’s the pain of a believing mother watching her Son die, not a payment added to His.
That reading isn’t colder than the Catholic one. It’s warmer, and more useful. Mary isn’t placed on a shelf above us. Mary is the first person in the Gospel to find that following Christ costs something, and she stands with every believer who has since discovered the same thing.
Anna: 84 years in exactly the right place
Then, Luke says, “coming up at that very hour”, Anna arrives. Most sermons treat her as a footnote to Simeon. Luke doesn’t, and neither should we.
| WHAT LUKE TELLS US | WHY IT’S WORTH NOTICING |
|---|---|
| She was a prophetess | She stands in the line of Miriam, Deborah and Huldah: women through whom God spoke to his people |
| Daughter of Phanuel | Phanuel is the name Jacob gave the place where he said, “I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30) |
| Of the tribe of Asher | Asher was one of the northern tribes usually called “lost”. God had kept a remnant of all Israel, not only of Judah |
| Married seven years, then widowed | Her adult life began with a bereavement. And didn’t get any easier |
| Didn’t depart from the temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day | Almost certainly means she was there at every hour of prayer, for decades, rather than that she lived on the premises |
| She gave thanks and spoke of the child to all who were waiting | She is the first person in Luke’s Gospel to tell a group of people about Jesus |
Her name is worth pausing over. In Hebrew, Anna is Hannah, and it means “grace”. Luke has already given us Mary singing a song that closely echoes Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2. Now a second Hannah appears, at the sanctuary, prophesying. And she’s the daughter of “the face of God”, and what she sees is God’s salvation. With a human face.
Then comes the detail that sounds ordinary but isn’t. Anna is found in the temple because Anna was always in the temple. She had no way of knowing this Tuesday was the Tuesday. She simply kept turning up where God had promised to meet His people—the place of worship, prayer and the word—and one morning, after decades, the Messiah is carried in.
THE QUIET LESSON OF ANNA
Christians sometimes talk about “the ordinary means of grace”: the plain, unexciting things God has told us to keep doing—reading and hearing His word, praying, worshipping with His people, receiving the sacraments. Nothing about them looks powerful on any given day.
Anna is the argument for them. 84 years of showing up looked like nothing at all, right up until the morning. Kevin DeYoung has made this point about the Christian life in general: God usually works through faithfulness that nobody is filming.
Note too what Luke doesn’t do. He tells us Anna prophesied and then records not one word of what she said. The only prophetess in the Christmas story, and her sermon is lost. Her honour is in the obeying, not in being quoted. Most Christian faithfulness is like that.
One small puzzle: Luke’s Greek can mean either that Anna was 84 years old, or that she’d been a widow for 84 years, which would make her well over 100. The English Standard Version takes the first. Either way, Luke’s point stands, and we deal with the question below.
Two witnesses, one testimony: why Luke pairs a man and a woman
The law of Moses required a matter be established by two witnesses, not one (Deuteronomy 19:15). Luke, who tells us at the start of his Gospel he has investigated everything carefully, builds his account that way.
And he keeps pairing men with women:
- Zechariah and Elizabeth
- Mary and Joseph
- Simeon and Anna
- Later in Luke and Acts: Aeneas and Tabitha, Ananias and Sapphira, Priscilla and Aquila
In the first century, a woman’s testimony carried little legal weight in many settings. Luke makes a woman half of the temple’s witness to the Messiah. He doesn’t comment on it or turn it into a slogan. He simply writes it down as fact, and lets the fact do the work.
There’s also a pattern here across the whole Christmas story. God announces His Son to shepherds in a field, then confirms Him through two ageing believers in the temple. Heaven testified outside the covenant centre; Israel now testifies inside it.
So what’s this scene actually doing in the Advent story?
Pull it together, and Simeon and Anna are doing at least 8 things at once. This is the heart of the passage.
| WHAT THE SCENE ACHIEVES | EXPLAINED |
|---|---|
| Legal proof | Two qualified Israelite witnesses identify the Messiah inside Israel’s own temple. The claim is now on the record |
| A promise fulfilled. And missed | Malachi 3:1 said the Lord would “suddenly come to His temple”. He does—carried in His mother’s arms—and the priesthood doesn’t care to look |
| The remnant is still there | 400 years of prophetic silence didn’t mean 400 years without faith. God always keeps a people (Romans 11:5) |
| The old covenant hands the child on | Aged, faithful Israel receives the promised child, blesses Him, and asks to be released. The old order’s last act is not to grip but to let go |
| The nations are in from the start | “A light for revelation to the Gentiles” is announced in the most Jewish space on earth, before a word is preached |
| The cross falls across the cradle | Simeon’s second word makes a purely sentimental Christmas impossible. Falling, opposition and a sword are all named over the manger |
| Death is redefined | A man who has held Christ can be dismissed in peace. Death becomes a door, not a wall |
| Waiting is honoured | Luke uses the same verb for both of them: Simeon was waiting, Anna spoke to those who were waiting. Waiting isn’t wasted time |
Point two deserves a special mention, because it’s uncomfortable. Everything Malachi promised happened that morning, in the building where the professionals worked, and they missed it. Michael Horton has written repeatedly about our preference for a God of visible glory over a God who comes hidden in weakness. The temple staff weren’t wicked men. They were simply looking for something more impressive than a poor couple with two birds.
Still waiting: from the first Advent to the second
Luke describes both of these people with the same word: waiting. Simeon was “waiting for the consolation of Israel” (verse 25). Anna spoke to all “who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem” (verse 38).
Which is exactly where the church stands now.
They waited through silence for a first coming. We wait through noise for a second. They had a promise and no visible progress. So do we. They grew old with the promise, and it didn’t turn out to be a wasted life.
Their waiting had been the most productive thing they ever did—though it looked like nothing for decades.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Was Simeon a priest, or even the high priest?
Luke doesn’t say so. He calls him simply “a man in Jerusalem”, righteous and devout, with the Holy Spirit upon him. The idea that Simeon was a priest comes from later writings outside the Bible, particularly a 2nd-century work called the Protevangelium of James, and other traditions made him the son of the famous rabbi Hillel or one of the translators of the Greek Old Testament. None of this has any support in Scripture. It’s a good example of why we test every tradition, however old and however devout, against the written word alone. And the plain reading is better than the legend: God’s chosen witness needed no office at all, only faith in a promise.
Was Anna 84 years old, or a widow for 84 years?
The Greek can honestly be read either way. If she was widowed at about twenty-one and remained a widow for eighty-four years, she would have been over a hundred, which would echo the great ages of Old Testament figures such as Sarah and Judith. The English Standard Version and most modern translations take the simpler reading: she was eighty-four. Nothing in the meaning of the passage depends on which is right, and it is healthier to say “we cannot be certain” than to invent confidence we do not have. Either way, Luke’s point is the same: a very long stretch of faithful, unrewarded waiting ended in a single morning of joy.
Did Simeon die immediately after holding Jesus?
The text does not say so, though almost everyone assumes it. God had promised Simeon that he would not see death before seeing the Lord’s Christ, and Simeon’s song asks to be dismissed. But a request is not an obituary. He may have died that week, or lived on for years as a man whose great hope had been satisfied. The uncertainty is worth keeping, because it protects the real point: Simeon’s peace did not come from knowing when he would die. It came from knowing whom he had seen.
Why did Mary need purification if Jesus was born without sin?
Because the law of Leviticus 12 was about ceremonial uncleanness, not moral guilt. In the Old Testament, many perfectly innocent and even good things—childbirth, burying the dead, ordinary bodily processes—made a person ceremonially unclean, meaning temporarily unable to approach the sanctuary. It was a teaching system, designed to press upon Israel how holy God is and how much separates us from Him. Mary’s offering says nothing whatever about sin in her or in her Son. It’s the same principle that later has Jesus insisting on being baptised though He had nothing to repent of: He places Himself fully under everything God had commanded, “to fulfil all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15).
Does Luke 2:39 contradict Matthew’s account of the wise men and the escape to Egypt?
Luke says that when they had performed everything required, they returned to Nazareth. Matthew describes the wise men, the flight to Egypt and the return. The two fit together once we notice that Luke is summarising rather than giving a day-by-day diary, which ancient writers did routinely. Matthew also says the wise men came to a “house” (Matthew 2:11), not a stable, and Herod’s order to kill boys up to two years old suggests the visit happened considerably later than the birth. The most natural harmony is: birth, temple presentation at forty days, a period in Bethlehem, the wise men, the flight to Egypt, and eventually the settlement in Nazareth that Luke names as the endpoint. Each writer selects what serves his purpose, which is not the same thing as contradicting each other.
What’s the Nunc Dimittis, and why do churches still sing it?
Nunc Dimittis is simply the first two words of Simeon’s song in the old Latin translation: “now you dismiss”. The church has sung it for around 15 centuries, most often at evening prayer or at the last service of the day, and very frequently at funerals. The reason is beautifully practical. Every night is a small rehearsal of death—we lay down our work, we lose consciousness, we trust ourselves to God—and Simeon gives us the right words for it. Singing a dying man’s song at bedtime teaches Christians to end each day the way they intend to end their life: with Christ held, and nothing left to fear.
Anna is called a prophetess. What does that mean for women prophesying today?
Anna stands in a genuine biblical line: Miriam, Deborah, Huldah and later the four daughters of Philip (Acts 21:9). Scripture plainly records God speaking through women, and Peter quotes Joel at Pentecost to say that sons and daughters alike would prophesy (Acts 2:17–18). What Anna isn’t doing is exercising an ordained teaching office in the covenant community; she is bearing Spirit-given testimony to Christ to whoever will listen. Those are two different things, and confusing them creates arguments the text never intended. The straightforward encouragement here is that God has always used women to speak the truth about His Son, publicly and effectively, and Luke thought Anna’s testimony important enough to preserve her name for 2000 years.
Related Reads
- Who Were the Magi? What Scripture Actually Says
- By Divine Appointment: How the Wise Men Found Baby Jesus
- The Bethlehem Connection: Why God Chose a Humble Town For His Son
- The Mystery of Christmas: Why God HAD to Become Man
- Unpacking Luke 2:52: How Did Jesus Grow in Favour with God?
- The Passover Lamb and Christ: Understanding Bible Typology
- Can Women Be Pastors and Deacons? What the Bible Says
