A light to lighten the Gentiles
Light is such a powerful and important religious and philosophical image and one which pervades even our secular culture in its exuberances and its despair. Candlemas is the popular name for a very complex story and set of feasts that belong to early February in the life of the Christian Church. Candlemas – a mass of candles – belongs to the Feast of the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of Mary. A double-barrelled feast, it speaks to the deeper meaning of our humanity in union with God. It marks the transition from light to life, from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter, to the overcoming of darkness and its parallel in the conquering of death.
Candlemas marks the first time that Christ comes to Jerusalem. It happens forty days after his birth, in the constructed time sequences of the Church, and so is celebrated now on February 2nd. No mention of groundhogs, I am afraid! It also marks, in the Jewish custom, the purification of the mother forty days after child-birth. There is something quite profound in these traditions: the one honouring God for the birth of a child; the other, recognizing the uncertainties and wonder of child-birth itself. In the classical Anglican understanding, for instance, the latter sensibility contributes to a special liturgy known as “The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving after Child-Birth,” which also includes a prayer for the loss of a child in child-birth. Joy and sorrow are powerfully intermingled. Pretty powerful stuff about the realities of human experience and expectation. It is a wisdom we would do well to ponder.
The more philosophical aspect of this story is that it speaks to the universality of the religions of the world, to the way in which they necessarily connect and overlap even in and through their divisions and differences.
The churches of Eastern Christianity have grasped this well. Candlemas for them is ‘Hypapante,’ which literally means ‘meeting’. It is about the meeting of cultures and religion, of men and women, of old and young, of the Old Law and the New Law, of God and humanity. It all happens in the temple of Jerusalem. This first meeting in the temple complements the Epiphany story of Jesus as a boy of twelve being “found in the temple in the midst of the doctors.” As in that story so here something is made known and communicated.
Candlemas points us to the passion of Christ. “This child,” Simeon says, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” He indicates parenthetically what this means for Mary: “(yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also)”. The consequence is that “the thought of many hearts may be revealed.” We too shall be pierced in gazing upon Christ pierced on the cross, either pierced in the awareness of our sins or pierced in compassion at Christ’s sufferings. Perhaps, both. At once convicted of our faults and failings and convinced of the depth of God’s love. Either way something of ourselves is revealed to ourselves.
Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin centers of the Christian understanding but in such a way as to open us out to the intersection of cultures and religions more generally. There is something inescapable universal and particular in the story.
Aged Simeon sees in Christ the fulfillment of Israel’s truest vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” meaning the other nations who are not Jews. And yet it happens through the place and customs that belong especially to Judaism. Both he and old Anna, the prophetess, are among those who are “longing for the redemption in Jerusalem,” but longing for the redemption of our humanity. Such is Simeon’s insight about the power and nature of light: “a light to the lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Something universal is signaled through what is particular.
Candlemas bids us see things in new ways, opening us out to new ways of thinking about things but always by returning us to the fons et origo of our thinking and being; in short, to the God who engages our humanity, the God who is light and life. In so doing we are being taught more and more about what it means to be human. No easy lesson and yet none more necessary.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy