And when the days of her purifying are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting a lamb a year old for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering, and he shall offer it before the Lord and make atonement for her. Then she shall be clean from the flow of her blood. This is the law for her who bears a child, either male or female. And if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her, and she shall be clean.

The second chapter of Luke’s Gospel contains the famous story of Jesus’s birth in the small Jewish town of Bethlehem. There, Mary gave birth to her firstborn in a stable and laid him in a manger because there was no room in the inn. An angel of the LORD proclaimed the good news that in the city of David, a Savior had been born who was Christ the Lord. By comparison, the story of Jesus’s presentation in the temple is less well known.

Forty days after Jesus’s birth, Jesus’s parents made the “simple, six-mile trip north” from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, which “should not have taken more than two hours.”[1] In his account, Luke goes to great lengths to document that Jesus’ parents, his mother Mary and his adoptive, legal father Joseph, were a God-fearing young Jewish couple that was careful to observe the Law of Moses.

The Presentation of Jesus

This devout observance of the Law is on full display when Jesus’s parents present Jesus to the Lord at the Temple. “And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses,” Luke writes, “they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Luke 2:22). Parenthetically, Luke adds, “as it is written in the Law of the Lord, ‘Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord’” (Luke 2:23; cf. Exod. 13:2).[2] He also notes that Jesus’ parents, when presenting him, came “to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons’” (Luke 2:24; cf. Lev. 12:8).

Luke concludes, “And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth” (Luke 2:39).[3] He also points out that Jesus’s “parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover” (Luke 2:41). In this way, Luke sets Jesus’s future ministry into its proper context. Thus “Jesus would save Israel as a law-observant Jew within Judaism.”[4]

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