Sermon for Candlemas
“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”
Candlemas is a wonderfully multi-layered feast of interrelated concepts and themes. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. Thus it complements the truer meaning of last week’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which belongs at the very least to the beginnings of the emergence of Christianity yet happens entirely within the context of Israel.
Even the title is a conjunction of themes: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of the Saint Mary the Virgin,” at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of a child and a mother, of Joseph and his mother in wonder, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast. We should be glad of its contraction into the simplicity of Candlemas, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.
Yet the meeting of themes all happens in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The lesson from Malachi highlights the theme of the preparation of the way for the Lord who “shall suddenly come to his temple,” a coming which portends judgement and purification; in short, redemption. “They found him in the temple,” the Gospel for the First Sunday in Epiphany tells us in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is his first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.
The temple itself takes on a whole new meaning. It is at once the sacred space that encapsulates and intensifies the teachings of Israel but extends to the sacred space that is the womb of Mary, itself an habitaculum dei. She, too, is the temple even as Christ’s body is the temple, and our bodies, too, are to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple carried the temple into the temple, as a preacher once put it. There is this wonderful sense of the necessity of the embodiment of ideas, a wonderful sense of the ways in which ideas are bodied forth, the ways in which we are gathered into the light and life of God through the forms of mediation.
