KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 February
For now we see through a glass darkly
But we see, however dimly, and that is the important insight. It belongs to the awareness of the limitations of our knowing that counters human presumption and arrogance. It is good to be reminded of this in the bleak midwinter.
A winter storm with snow and wind has given place to the not altogether unusual midwinter thaw. There is an almost spring-like feel to things in the return to School after the late January break. That spring-like feel is warranted from the perspective of the turn towards spring signaled by Candelmas observed on February 2nd. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter in the Christian understanding. Literally forty days after Christmas, it points us to Jerusalem, to the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter, which follows immediately upon the spring equinox.
It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. It is 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 the child with Mary and Joseph, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.
Yet the meeting of themes all happens in the temple in Jerusalem. “The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple,” as Malachi prophesies. “They found him in the temple,” as we heard in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is Christ’s 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 These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed.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.