“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 These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed.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.
The temple is the place of sacrifice and that, too, is highlighted in the Candlemas story, first in terms of the rituals of ancient Israel – “a pair of turtle-doves, or two young pigeons” – and, then, in the words of Simeon to Mary. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” The concept of sacrifice as revelation extends to our humanity through Mary in Simeon’s parenthetical remark; “(yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also;) that the thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed.”
For sacrifice is also revelation, a making known of the desires of our hearts, a revelation of ourselves in the light of God. The temple, as the figure of Anna shows us, is precisely the place where the redemption of the Lord is looked for, a place of waiting and watching upon the motions of divine grace moving in human lives. Such, too, is the meaning and purpose of our Churches as the temples of the Lord, the places of our encounter with the will and purpose of God for our humanity, the places of sacrifice and revelation, of light and life, the places where the Lord is looked for and sought as in Malachi’s prophetic words.
Such is the magic, one might say, or better the mystique of the Church as the place of our encounter with God, especially at Communion, in “this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,” in Cranmer’s words in our liturgy. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury observes, this is “what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God’s guests at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.” He goes on to say, that “this is the moment” [however fleeting] “when people see one another and the world properly: when they are filled with the Holy Spirit” [like Simeon coming by the Spirit into the temple] “and when they are equipped to go and do God’s work”. He asks the question about “what is the appropriate response?” to which the answer is “thanksgiving”. Why? “Because one of the ways in which the Eucharist overflows into the rest of our life is precisely in giving us that energy and vision for thanksgiving in all things, for making the connection between God the Giver and everything we experience.” It happens in our temples, our churches, and in ourselves as temples.
In the context of Candlemas, that theme of thanksgiving is sacrifice and revelation, light and life. It is captured in Malachi’s words.
“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.”
Fr. David Curry
Candlemas, 2021