If you don’t have your Bible handy, you could read the passage here.

https://www.bible.com/bible/116/LUK.2.NLT#:~:text=21-,Eight%20days%20later%2C%20when,favor%20was%20on%20him.

Luke 2:21-40

There is mind-blowing irony in the thought that Jesus was redeemed as a firstborn male. Of course it was the correct thing to do. Joseph and Mary wanted to do their best to raise the son of God according to God’s law. Go figure. But it’s just wild to think that the one whose blood bought/redeemed the world, was purchased/redeemed for the equivalent of a few coins. If you aren’t familiar with this, what Jesus’ parents did was something Jewish parents had been doing since the law was given to Moses. We will talk more about a Jewish celebration called the Passover as we go through this story, but it celebrated a time in Israel’s infancy when God rescued them from slavery. At that time, the firstborn male of every person and animal in Egypt where they lived as slaves died, but God rescued the firstborn of the Israelites. As a result, God told his people that every firstborn male was his and should be given to him. So every firstborn animal was given to those who served in the Temple. The Levite tribe had been selected by God to serve in the place of the firstborn sons of Israel. Rather than sending every firstborn to work at the Temple, their parents would redeem or buy them back for five shekels of silver which was given to the Levites along with the firstborn of every animal so that they could provide for themselves and their families.
Anyways, Mary is through her period of purification after having a baby and they head to the temple to make the customary sacrifice. Here we meet Simeon. He must have been a remarkable man because the Spirit of God had promised him he would see the Messiah. And that same morning the Spirit wakes Simeon up and tells him to head to the temple. He takes one look at Joseph, Mary and Jesus and God’s spirit tells him, “There he is! That’s him!”    The next thing we know Jesus is in his arms and Simeon is praising God and paraphrasing messianic prophecy. Specifically (and thank you for pointing this out my Gentile friend Luke) he reminds us that the Messiah will be a light to the Gentiles as well as the glory of the people of Israel.
Simeon blesses the little family and delivers a warning to Mary. “This little dude is going to make quite a fuss, and he’s going to ruffle a lot of feathers. He’s going to suffer, and you’re going to feel that pain.” Simeon understood that the Messiah would suffer even if most of Israel did not.
And then we have Anna. She never left the temple! She worshiped day and night fasting and praying. Wow. I guess she got pretty good at recognising the voice of God, because she knew who Jesus was immediately and started telling everyone within earshot that he would redeem Jerusalem.
This was quite the day for Joseph and Mary. Luke says after they had done everything required by the law they went to Nazareth. If you read Matthew’s gospel, he tells us that this little family actually fled to Egypt not long after this to avoid the jealous persecution threatened by King Herod when he heard a rumour about a new king being born. Either way, Jesus and his parents made their way to Nazareth early in his childhood and that’s the last Luke tells us until Jesus is twelve.

Before we fast-forward a decade, I want to talk about Mary’s days of purification. I want to pause on this, because the first 83 times or so that I read it, it felt a bit offensive. Let me be clear. If I am offended by the way God does things, that’s really my problem. He’s God. He doesn’t owe me an explanation. But the more time I study the Bible, the more I have discovered that things God has said or done that I have found offensive, were in fact, the opposite. I just didn’t understand what was going on. This is an example of one of those things that annoyed me for no good reason. Why would the Bible insist that a woman should take a time of purification after having a baby? How would that make her impure? What is unclean about having a baby? What’s with forcing her to hide away from society? Then I had a baby. And someone told me that, during the purification period, the relatives or neighbours of the new mom would feed and care for her and her family while she rested and healed. That was a bit of an epiphany for me. Frankly, it just seemed like a good idea. God knew the culture to which he gave these rules. He knew the ways in which their medical knowledge was limited. He knew the way they viewed different people in society. He knew so many things they didn’t and we still don’t. And he definitely knew that new moms were going to be tired and need help. As well, he knew that women didn’t have a lot of value in many ways, so taking care of a young mom would be counter cultural, unless he wrote it into the culture. And he did.
Was that his motivation? Is that the whole picture? I have no idea. Please don’t hear me saying I understand the mind of God. I unequivocally do not. But the more I read the Bible and think about it in context, the more of these unsettling rules seem like acts of grace and kindness. If I ever write my way through Leviticus, this will definitely come up again.