Anna Never Left the Temple

She is very old. She walks slowly. She has prayed in this temple more times than anyone can count. And today, as she reaches a young family with a baby, her tired face lights up like a sunrise.

We are in the temple courts in Jerusalem. Mary and Joseph have brought their forty-day-old son Jesus to present him to the Lord. A man named Simeon has just taken the baby in his arms, praised God, and spoken words of joy and warning. And at that very moment, Luke tells us, someone else arrives. Luke loves to pair a man and a woman in his stories. After Zechariah and Mary, here are Simeon and Anna. Two faithful witnesses, side by side.

Luke gives us Anna's story in a few careful lines. She was a prophetess, a woman through whom God spoke. She was the daughter of Phanuel, from the tribe of Asher. She had married young, and lived with her husband for seven years. Then he died, and she was left a widow. Luke says she was a widow of about eighty-four years. That could mean she was now eighty-four, or that she had been a widow for eighty-four years, which would make her over a hundred. Either way, she had lived a long life, and most of it alone.

But Anna was not idle, and she was not bitter. Luke says she departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. Year after year, through heat and cold, through the reigns of kings, Anna was there. Praying. Fasting. Worshipping. Many people would have walked past her without a second look. Just an old widow in the corner. But God saw her. And Anna was waiting, like Simeon, for God to keep his promises.

Coming up at that very instant, Anna sees the child. And she gives thanks to God. Luke does not record her words, but he tells us what she did next. She spoke of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. Anna knew who else was waiting. Over all her years in the temple, she must have met them all: the faithful, the hopeful, the ones who prayed for God to set his people free. And now she goes to each of them with the news. He is here. The one we have been praying for has come.

Anna's tribe, Asher, is a surprising detail. Asher was one of the northern tribes of Israel, and most of the northern kingdom had been conquered and scattered by Assyria more than seven hundred years earlier. Yet the second book of Chronicles mentions people from Asher who humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem to worship. Anna's family had kept their tribal identity through all those centuries.

You'll find Anna in Luke chapter two, verses thirty-six to thirty-eight. An old woman whom many overlooked, who never stopped praying, and who became one of the first to tell the good news. So here is a question to carry with you. Who is someone quiet and faithful in your life that you could thank, or learn from, this Christmas?