Anna

Luke gives Anna only three verses, and packs a lifetime into them (Luke 2:36-38). A prophetess – the only person in the Gospels given that title – of the tribe of Asher, one of the “lost” northern tribes, she had been widowed after seven years of marriage and had spent the decades since, into her eighty-fifth year, in the temple courts, “worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.” Jerusalem’s most faithful worshiper was an old widow everyone had walked past for sixty years.

Her timing, like Simeon’s, was the Spirit’s: “coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God.” And then Luke adds the detail that makes Anna an evangelist: she “spoke of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.” There was evidently a network of such people – the watchers, the waiters, the ones still expecting God to keep his word – and Anna knew every one of them. The first woman to preach Christ went door to door among the hopeful with news that the waiting was over.

Between Simeon’s song and Anna’s testimony, the infant Jesus was received at the temple by the truest Israel: not the establishment, but the expectant.

In the New Testament

• The prophetess in the temple (Luke 2:36-38)