by CCW | 2 February 2014 14:48
Candlemas marks the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. A blaze of light in the bleak darkness of winter, Candlemas awakens us to the hope of spring when we might hear again the words of the Lord of love, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away, for lo, the winter is past, the rain (and the snow!) are over and gone.” Candlemas points us to Easter, to the triumph of life over death. That alone is a comforting and even a cheering thought, isn’t it, especially for a people oppressed and wearied by the winter storms?
We aren’t there yet, of course! But Candlemas is a compelling and significant festival and this year, in the Providence of God, it falls on a Sunday, on what is the penultimate Sunday of the Epiphany season. A double-barreled feast, at once of Mary and of Christ, it reminds us of the deep logic of the Incarnation, of the radical meaning of God being with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the eternally-begotten Son of the Father, born of Mary. The themes of the Epiphany are wonderfully concentrated in the rich fullness of this celebration: The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, to give it its full title, redolent of theological significance, and yet even more commonly known as Candlemas. Light blazes forth into glory.
In some many ways, it is a most complicated feast. It is a feast of meetings. Eastern Orthodox Christians call it “hypapante”, meaning encounter or meeting. And to be sure, there are a great number of meetings that the Gospel presents: the meeting of God and man in the infant Christ, the meeting of Law and Gospel, the meeting of men and women, Mary and Joseph, old Simeon and aged Anna, the meeting of the Old Covenant and the New. A rich feast of meetings.
And these meetings all happen at Jerusalem, in the temple. Candlemas reminds us of the true meaning of the temple, of our churches and ourselves. “The temple of the Lord is for the Lord of the temple”, as St. Bernard wonderfully puts it. Here is light and life signifying love and sacrifice. The theme of the temple is profound. It reaches back to the temple of Solomon and to the rebuilding of the temple under Josiah; to the destruction, too, of the temple in Jerusalem in 70AD. But, even more, it recalls us to the radical reworking of the idea of the temple in the New Testament.
The Candlemas story marks the first occasion of Jesus in the temple of Jerusalem and yet, in the logic of the Epiphany season, we have already “found him in the temple”, a boy of twelve engaged with the learned doctors of the Torah, the Law, a remarkable scene that manifests the essential divinity of Jesus. In response to the anxious rebuke of Mary, his mother, he says, “did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Or as other translations suggest, “in my Father’s house.” And in that other extraordinary dialogue with Mary, he responded to her observation that they have no wine, “O woman, what is that to thee and to me. Mine hour is not yet come.”
Here in the story of Candlemas both Mary and Jesus are silent. Yet their silence is eloquent. Through the silence of the unspeaking infant and quiet Mary there is the marvel of prophecy that opens us out to the meaning of Christ’s coming, to “his Father’s business”, to “his Father’s house” and even more to his “hour”, the hour of his passion and death, the divine redemption of our humanity. It is captured in the words of Simeon about the child Christ and in his words to Mary that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” since “this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against”. And to what end, we might ask? “that the thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed”.
Epiphany makes manifest the essential divinity of Jesus and shows us the divine will for our humanity. All of those themes are concentrated here. God reveals himself to us and we, too, are revealed to ourselves; our own hearts are convicted and convinced by what we are given to see and hear. Simeon’s words point us to the sacrifice of Christ, to the meaning of his “hour”.
Wherever we meet to praise God, that is his temple, a place of learning and worship about what God wants us to know, a place of our being with him in his will and purpose for us. The temple of the Lord is for the Lord of the temple. And we, too, are called to be temples of the Lord in our lives of service and sacrifice. The lesson from Malachi speaks of “the Lord, whom ye seek, [coming] suddenly to his temple”. A wonderful image it suggests, too, how awesome and fearful such a coming actually is, for “who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth?” His coming is light that names the darkness of human sin and death. His coming in Word and Sacrament should both trouble us and comfort us for it is really all about what God wants for us and so it counters all our idolatries, all “the devices and desires of our hearts” about what we seek and think we want. God always seeks something more and greater for us, like the good wine of the marriage feast of Cana of Galilee.
The Candlemas story marks chronologically the first time Jesus comes to the temple. The First Sunday after the Epiphany marks the second time, at least in Luke’s Gospel. But we cannot be unaware of another meeting and encounter of Jesus in the Temple. It was before us on The First Sunday of Advent in the fuller Gospel reading as instituted by Cranmer – the story of the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem is followed immediately by the story of the cleansing of the Temple. “My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves”, Jesus says in wrath and anger, it seems, a story which is recalled again on Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week. It, too, recalls us to the true purpose and meaning of the temple. It is for the Lord of the Temple.
The themes of temple are multi-layered. Here is Mary, herself the temple of the Lord, her womb, the place of his abiding from which he now comes forth and is taken up in the arms of Simeon in the Temple at Jerusalem. And we, too, are called to be the temples of the Lord, our lives as lived for God and for one another in his love. It requires something of us, namely, “that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service”. Christ, the “only-begotten Son” of the Father, to make the theological point of Epiphany, is today “presented in the temple in substance of our flesh”, taken from Mary, so that “we may be presented unto [God] with pure and clean hearts”, as the Collect wonderfully puts it. We live for God because “the Lord, whom ye seek, [has] suddenly come to his temple”. At issue is whether we are alive to the Lord of the temple, to his Word and Will for us signaled in these places and for our lives.
It is about our learning and our living ; it is about our loving. The point is emphasized for us in our liturgy in the wonderful prayer of thanksgiving after Communion. We pray that “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee”, knowing full well our own unworthiness, but knowing even more God’s love and mercy in Jesus Christ. We live for God because he has come to his temple.
Fr. David Curry
Candlemas/Epiphany IV
February 2nd, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/02/02/sermon-for-candlemas/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.