Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
The Gospel passage we heard today was a preview of the Feast of the Presentation, which will conclude the cycle of Feasts of the Child Jesus. It was once common to leave Christmas decorations until the Presentation, because it is only then that the Christmas cycle ends.
If we consider Christmas, the Epiphany, and the Presentation—these three Feasts—we see that Christ's birth was manifested to three classes of people, and in three distinct ways. First, angels told the shepherds about Him. Then, a star guided the magi to Him. Finally, the Holy Spirit Himself inspired Simeon and Anna. We also see three degrees of response, for the shepherds saw Christ, and the magi worshipped Him, but Simeon and Anna embraced Him.
So, this is how we are to progress. First, we recognize Christ. Then, we worship Him, and finally, when in terms of virtue, we are no longer children, but of venerable age, we simply embrace Him with arms of love. We also see in these three Feasts three degrees of knowledge. The shepherds are uneducated, and the magi are wise men who have studied the human sciences, who are respected for their expertise. But Simeon and Anna have been taught by God, and speak things beyond human knowledge. Both, in fact, have prophecies on their lips.
Also, in the First Reading, we can identify three degrees of progress in the spiritual life. In the children, we can see the newly baptized. Their sins, plural, have been forgiven for His namesake. So, they are probably not physically children, but adults who had committed sins before their conversion and baptism. The young men have made some progress in the spiritual life. Having grown strong in virtue, they have now conquered the evil one. Finally, the fathers are those who have grown through various stages of faith, to the point that they are capable of begetting faith in others. 
Since the maturity we are talking about is spiritual rather than physical, it's possible to be old in body and yet still a weak infant in terms of spiritual development. For, as the Book of Wisdom says, "The age that is honorable comes not with the passing of time, nor can it be measured in terms of years. So, conversely, one can be physically young, but spiritually mature, as in the case of young saints like Jacinta and Francisco of Fatima, Saint Thérèse, and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Saint John says that young men are strong. This is the characteristic he picks out. On a physical plane, a child has little strength in comparison to a young man. Things that a young man can easily move or carry can be difficult or impossible for a child to move or carry. Similarly, someone who is spiritually a young man has grown in virtue to the point that he is no longer stopped by obstacles that would have stopped him earlier in his spiritual life. He can bear a heavy burden, bear a heavy cross, without faltering.
So, while we should, as Jesus says, be spiritually like children in terms of innocence and trust in our Heavenly Father, we should not be so in weakness, in lack of virtue. In us, the Child Jesus must grow and become strong. By their virtue, young men of this kind have conquered the evil one. They rarely or never commit deliberate sins, though they may fall when suddenly tempted. The distinguishing feature of the third group, fathers, is that they have children. Therefore, spiritual fathers are those who generate Christ in others and form them.
Such spiritual fathers can also be women, such as Anna, although perhaps we should call her a spiritual mother instead. Today's Gospel gives us background on Anna that could well come from Mary. Since Anna had been worshipping night and day in the temple for decades, she was surely there when Mary was presented at the temple as a small child and while she was growing up there. They may have spoken many times, but they both had a great love for God and a great interest in the things of God, and Mary may have been eager to learn from Anna's long experience. Perhaps she was like another mother to Mary, for she had the same name as Mary's birth mother.
Anna was of the tribe of Asher. This was one of the ten lost tribes. They were called lost because they disappeared from history after the Assyrians carried them off into exile and resettled them in foreign lands. They lost their Jewish identity and so were no longer tribes of Israel. The prophets had said that they would return from exile, but for the most part, this only happened in the sense that the peoples into which they had been dissolved later became Christian, and so the descendants of those tribes were once again part of God's people. But there were some cases of Jews from these tribes who never lost their identity in the land where the Assyrians had resettled them. One was Tobit and his son, who were of the tribe of Naphtali. Another must have been some ancestor of Anna, who evidently returned to the Holy Land. So, in her case, the prophecies of return were literally fulfilled.
Anna was now a venerable age in body and soul. After seven years of marriage, she was widowed. She was probably around 22 years old at the time, so she could have remarried, but instead, she chose to set her only hope in God. She dedicated her remaining years to fasting and prayer in the temple, and the Lord granted her a long life. The Greek is ambiguous as to whether she lived until she was 84 or fasted and prayed in the temple for 84 years. In the latter case, she would be something like 106 years old, which is unlikely but not impossible.
Even if she was only 84, she had seen a lot. She had seen the Romans come, and the Jews gradually lose their independence, and she fasted and prayed. She had seen the cruelty of Herod the Great, who had also made the temple larger and more splendid, and she fasted and prayed. Surely, one of her main prayer intentions was that God hastened the coming of the Messiah, and one day, Mary, whom she had watched grow up in the temple, brought him into the temple. Anna gave thanks to God and spoke about the Child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. The name of her tribe, Asher, means something like "happy" or "blessed," and it was her happy lot to see the Messiah, the Savior. This was the great reward she received for many long years of faithful service to the Lord, whom she loved above all things. She did not love the world or the things of the world, except insofar as they could help her love and serve God.
Saint John warns us against letting the love of the world prevail over the love of God in our hearts. He divides temptations into three classes, which the lectionary calls sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life. More literally, they are the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and pride of life. The first is the lust for bodily pleasure, whether from food or drink, or anything else. The second is the desire for possessions, or the uncontrolled lust for possessions—to have more and better things, irrespective of whether we really need them to serve God, and without concern for our neighbor's needs. The third is ambition, the desire for praise and power, for preeminence and glory. This too can be expressed in acquiring things, but not so much for one's own enjoyment as to show others what you have.
These are the three obstacles to spiritual growth. If we do not battle and kill off the mortified, that is, the disordered love of the world that springs up in us in these three ways, we will find ourselves still spiritually immature as children, even when our bodies have grown old. To keep this from happening, we must choose to love God above all things, and to grow by the grace and gifts of God, until we all attain to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.