We cannot for a moment doubt that Mary and Joseph were of this remnant, and that they were in complete sympathy with those whom they found here in the temple when the Child Jesus was brought in “to do for him after the custom of the law.”  The actual ceremony of the purification was soon over, the demands of the law satisfied.  Neither Jesus nor Mary had any inner need of these observances; their value in their case was that by submission to them they associated themselves closely with their brethren, our Lord thus continuing that divine self-emptying which he had begun at the Incarnation.  We are impressed with the completeness of this stooping of God when we see the offering that Mary brings, “A pair of turtle doves,” the offering of the very poor.  Our Lord has accepted life on its lowest economic terms in order that nothing in His mission shall flow from adventitious aids.  He must owe all in the accomplishment of His work to the Father Who gave it Him to do.  It will be the essence of the temptation that He must soon undergo that He shall consent to call to His aid earthly and material supports and base His hopes of success on something other than God.

Accidentally, there is this further demonstration contained in the poverty of the Holy Family, that, namely, the completest spiritual privilege, the fullest spiritual development, is independent of “possessions.”  It is no doubt true that “great possessions” do not of necessity create a bar in all cases to spiritual accomplishment; but to many of us it is a consolation to know that the completest sanctity humanity has known has been wrought out in utter poverty of life.  We shall have occasion to speak more of this later; we now only note the fact that those whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament as waiting hopefully for the redemption of Israel are waiting in poverty and hard work.

What we find in S. Mary as she passes through the ceremony of her purification from a child-bearing which had in no circumstance of it anything impure, is the spirit of sacrifice which submission to the law implies.  She has caught the spirit of her Son, the spirit of selfless offering to the will of God.  It is the central accomplishment of the life of sanctity.  The life of sanctity must be wrought out from the centre, from our contact with God.  No one becomes holy by works, whatever may be the nature of the works.  Works, the external life, are the expression of what we are, they are the externalization of our character.  If they be not the expression of a life hid with Christ in God they can have no spiritual value, whatever may be their social value.  The kind of works which “are done to be seen of men” “have their reward,” that is, the sort of reward they seek, human approval; they have no value in the realm of the spirit.