Sermon for the Eve of Candlemas
admin | 1 February 2018“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”
It is a double-barrelled feast; a feast at once of Christ and of Mary. All the festivals of Mary are tagged to the feasts of Christ, but here uniquely they are together in one. This is signaled explicitly in the Luke’s first sentence of this evening’s Gospel reading in the words “purification” and “presentation”. A most intriguing scene, it is also rather complex. The celebration itself is more familiarly called Candlemas, acknowledging the words of the aged Simeon who sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Few passages concentrate so wonderfully the interdependence, connection, and difference between Judaism and Christianity in the interweaving of the particular and the universal.
Candlemas marks the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter. It reminds us that the twin centers of the Christian contemplation are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each bound up in the other, each incomprehensible without the other. Once again we are presented with something very different from a linear narrative. Instead, the focus is doctrinal. With Candlemas, we learn with Mary about the deeper and truer significance of her holy child. Throughout the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries, Mary has been very much in the picture both in the paradox of virgin and mother and in the activity of “pondering in her heart all the things that are said” about the child Christ.
Here on the fortieth day after Christ’s birth and in accord with the cultural and religious custom of Israel, she and Joseph are in Jerusalem “to do for him after the custom of the law” – honouring God for the gift of the first-born male. It is also “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished” – forty days after childbirth. This has its later expression in the little service “commonly called The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving After Child-Birth” in the Prayer Book (pp.573-575), a service that also acknowledges the frequent loss of children in childbirth. These are very real human realities and experiences. Both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel and yet both presentation and purification open us out to something universal and for all.
The words of Simeon cause Joseph and his mother to marvel “at those things which were spoken of him” but Simeon has words as well for Mary in relation to Christ, words which point us to his passion and death and to the form of her participation in that (and ours) as well. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against,” he says, before adding in a parenthesis to Mary, “(yea, sword shall pierce through thy own soul also)”. The conclusion is that as a consequence “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” In Christ’s sacrifice our own hearts are on display. We are to be pierced in one way or another in the contemplation of Christ pierced on the cross either convicted of our sins or convinced of the love of God revealed in Christ. Or both – at once convicted and convinced.
Candlemas points us to Jerusalem and to its significance. The purification and presentation anticipate the passion in the transition from light overcoming darkness to life conquering death. The interplay of Mary and Christ underscores the deeper point of the Incarnation. Human redemption comes with a price; the heart-blood of the Son of God who through Mary has “now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us,” as Richard Hooker beautifully puts it. In that idea of exchange and coinherence lies the mystery of our life in Christ.
The Eastern Orthodox traditions refer to this feast as the hypapante, meaning ‘meeting’ for it represents the encounter between the Old Law and the New, between man and God, between the old and the young, between the sexes, and all in the temple at Jerusalem, the place of meeting. On The First Sunday after the Epiphany, Mary and Joseph “found him in the temple in the midst of the doctors”. He was, as he tells us there, “about his Father’s business”. In a way, that story complements and builds upon this first visit (in terms of time) to Jerusalem which reveals as well to us the very meaning of his coming. Candlemas concentrates for us the conjunction between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the twin poles of our Christian contemplation.
Light is a powerful theme and concept religiously and philosophically. Simeon sees in the infant Christ the light of the world, the light of human redemption and what that costs. “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation,” he says, and that for him is enough, enough for him who like aged Anna, too, belong to those who “looked for redemption in Jerusalem.” It is found in the temple in him whom they behold in the temple.
This is surely the true role and meaning of the Church: namely, to be the place where we find Christ and learn from him, a sword piercing our own hearts, our own hearts revealed to us. Even more, here we are with him who has come to be with us, all our darkness and sin notwithstanding. Such is the meaning of the great meetings of Candlemas even in the quiet darkness of the bleak mid-winter. He is “presented in the temple in substance of our flesh” which he has alone from Mary so that “we may be presented unto [God] with pure and clean hearts.” The themes of purification and presentation are thus constantly interwoven for us in our lives.
“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Candlemas, 2018