Sermon for Quinquagesima
“I will show you a yet more excellent way”
We meet in the bleak mid-winter on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday that points us to Lent and to its proper meaning. And we meet, too, in the sweet afterglow of Candlemas, the feast that marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. Central to that feast is the idea of sacrifice, of love in motion that seeks the greater good of our humanity. It is a feast at once of Christ, his presentation in the Temple, and of Mary, her purification and thanksgiving for birth. “This child”, Simeon says, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel” and then to Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through your own soul also.” And why? “That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Such is the meaning, too, of Lent! “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face,”as St. Paul puts it, that we may know even as we are known in the love of God. Candlemas marks the first time the Incarnate Christ is in Jerusalem and points us to his final journey to Jerusalem about which today’s Gospel speaks. In that lies the whole meaning of his Incarnation. There is a wonderful correspondence between Candlemas and Quinquagesima in the transition from Christmas to Lent and Easter.
Our secular culture celebrates February 2nd as Groundhog Day and with a certain curious anxiety about the winter weather. But why February 2nd? Why not February 1st? Because it draws upon the far more ancient and far profounder Christian festival of Candlemas, a feast of light signifying life through sacrifice. You have a choice, I suppose, between celebrating a rodent to whom, somehow, we attribute self-consciousness in terms of seeing or not seeing his shadow and skills in weather prognostications (not a little unlike reading the entrails of birds!), and the feast of Candlemas which this year brings us to this Sunday which portends the near approach of Lent.
Lent is about our going up to Jerusalem with Jesus in his final journey to Jerusalem. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus tells us. He has something in mind that is greater than death. In that going up he would teach us and he would heal us. He would set our love aright. We do not really know what we want. We do not really know what is truly good for us. We do not really know what is rightly to be wanted except through the perfecting path of his love. In the Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem with them.
