RECOGNIZING THE EXTRAORDINARY
Malachi 3:1-4; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40
In November 2003, Elizabeth Gibson noticed a painting between garbage bags set out for collection. Ms Gibson, who knew little about modern art, said she took it home because “even though I didn’t understand it, I knew it had power.” That painting was Rufino Tamayo’s abstract masterpiece “Tres Personajes” which had been stolen twenty years earlier. On 20 November 2007, Sotheby’s auctioned it for more than one million dollars. Several people must have seen the painting (and one even trashed it) but only Ms Gibson recognized the extraordinary.
Something similar happened a couple of millennia ago in Jerusalem.
The busy temple of Jerusalem must have been filled with hundreds of people—priests and scripture scholars, pilgrims and worshippers… and many of them must have seen an infant with his parents. Only two senior citizens—Simeon and Anna—recognized the extraordinary in the ordinary infant and his ordinary parents who made the ordinary offering of the poor.
Simeon and Anna were the “anawim” who had neither power nor prestige but had deep faith. Simeon was “righteous and devout… and the Holy Spirit was upon him” and Anna “worshipped night and day with fasting and prayer”. This rootedness in God and their faith enabled them to recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary and the divine in the human.
Each one of us is ordinary; yet, we have in us the extraordinary and the divine. Do you and I recognize the extraordinary and the divine in ourselves and in others? Or do we treat ourselves and others as trash?
May the Spirit in us and our eyes of faith help us recognize the extraordinary and the divine in us!
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