Eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel even before he was conceived.
Then it was time for their purification offering, as required by the law of Moses after the birth of a child; so his parents took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. The law of the Lord says, “If a woman’s first child is a boy, he must be dedicated to the Lord.” So they offered the sacrifice required in the law of the Lord—“either a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” (Luke 2:21–24 NLT)
There are a couple interesting things happening in these four verses. From the start, we see that Mary and Joseph are doing everything in their power to follow the Law first passed down to the Israelites in the days of Moses. Jesus is circumcised and given his name on his eighth day of life. The young couple then follow the circumcision with the sacrificial offering described in Leviticus 12.
Luke is doing something interesting here. He is connecting two threads of the Jewish Scriptures that seem otherwise unrelated to each other, using Jesus as the knot to tie them together.
The first thread is the dedication of the firstborn. This was a request God made of the Israelites as they were set to leave Egypt after the ten plagues, the last of which struck down every firstborn – from the palace of Pharaoh to the fields full of livestock – save those who were passed over, those who followed Moses’s instructions to paint their doorposts with the blood of a lamb. This is the origin of the Passover Feast, one of the major Jewish holidays, even today.
The second thread of this connection is the sacrificial offering. Leviticus 12 describes the steps a woman who recently has given birth must take to once more become clean so she might return to the Temple to worship as before. This includes a lamb as a burnt offering and a young pigeon or turtledove as a purification offering.
Leviticus is clear these offerings are for the mother, but Luke directly connects them with the dedication of the firstborn son and the story of Passover. He seems to be saying, “This eight-day-old baby, born into a lower-income family, is the sacrificial lamb, whose blood will be our salvation and whose death will purify us from sin.”
This isn’t the only interesting thing happening in this passage. Luke notes that, instead of a lamb, Mary and Joseph bring two birds, an acceptable substitution. Leviticus states, “If a woman cannot afford to bring a lamb, she must bring two turtledoves or two young pigeons. One will be for the burnt offering and the other for the purification offering” (12:8). Because they were too poor to afford a lamb, Mary and Joseph brought turtledoves.
God could have chosen for Jesus to be born to a mother in different economic circumstances. This would certainly have made for an easier childhood. Yet, God rarely seems to choose the easy path, at least from our human perspective.
The perfect Lamb of God, whose sacrifice brought salvation to all creation, lived the simple, humble life of a carpenter’s son in a backwoods village. Jesus is proof that God meets us at our lowest. In taking on flesh and bone, Jesus walked a mile in our shoes and felt the rain leaking through the hole in the heel, all so we might know him, trust him, and call him our Savior and King.
Michael Benson is the communications director for the North American Baptist Conference.