Sermon for the Eve of Candlemas
“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.