02_Feník Lapko_498-524_498-524 10/12/15 10:15 Pagina 517 517 ANNUNCIATIONS TO MARY IN LUKE 1–2 517 The sentence addressed to Mary serves to augment her portraiture within the annunciations. The inception of this phenomenon is to be found in the first annunciation. Next to the initial christological pro- file in 1,26-38, the focus on Mary was kept by the angel’s use of five verbs in second person singular in reference to her in 1,30-31 (mh. fobou/, eu-rej, sullh,myh|, te,xh|, kale,seij). In the sequence of the last three verbs in the future tense one may perceive an an- nouncement to Mary of her role. A comparable strategy of including Mary in the texture of the announcement appears in Simeon’s words in 2,35 in which she is told that her soul represents a sphere through which a sword shall pass (dieleu,setai r`omfai,a). A link between Simeon’s annunciation and Gabriel’s annunciation under- lining the figure of Mary is forged. In the first annunciation (1,26- 38) Mary learns that she will be the one to conceive, bear, and name the child; in the third annunciation (2,22-35) she is informed, hear- ing the cryptic words about the sword in her soul, that she will not be left unaffected in the future. When Simeon describes Jesus as shmei/on avntilego,menon, in the next sentence he hints at the pain his mother will have to endure, implied by the image of a sword penetrating the soul 36. In this final segment (2,34-35) Mary hears a daunting revelation regarding her son and herself as well. The proposal has been put forward here that the episode conven- tionally known as the presentation of the Messiah bears unmistak- able features of an annunciation, for Simeon’s words occupy the epicenter of the episode. Simeon decisively adjusts Mary’s under- standing of the identity of her son by highlighting two remarkable additions to Jesus’ mission. In contrast with the two preceding an- nunciations, Simeon — arriving in the Jerusalem temple — first in- forms Mary of Jesus’ saving significance for e;qnh. Second, Simeon furnishes Mary with a remarkably startling revelation that her son has been set to provoke the fall and the rise of many in Israel and 36 The odd obliquity of Simeon’s words causes the meaning of the image of the piercing sword to remain probably an open question. Mary’s alignment with Jesus — syntactically secured by the ou-toj – kai. sou/ de, tandem — implies that the sword in Mary’s soul is an image of sharing the rejection of her son. WOLTER, Das Lukasevangelium, 142-143, argues that no attempt to identify the referent behind the sword “wird der Metaphorik des Textes voll und ganz gerecht, und darum wird man nicht mehr sagen können, als dass Simeon Maria hier leidvolle Erfahrungen ankündigt”.