Meditation for Candlemas

admin | 2 February 2022

“A light to lighten the Gentiles”

Candlemas is the most complex of all the festivals of the Christian year. It is perhaps easy to get lost in the details and find it all a bit confusing. But perhaps with an effort of attention we can begin to make sense of the significance of Candlemas, the more popular and simpler term for this festival. It is the Greek word for this festival, υπαπαντη (hypapante) which captures wonderfully the meeting or coincidence of opposites that Candlemas presents.

Hypapante means meeting. Here, in Luke’s Gospel, is the meeting of the old man Simeon and the infant Christ, the meeting of the old woman Anna and the Christ child, the meeting of Mary and Joseph. It is the meeting of God and man, male and female, old and young, more generally speaking, and the meeting of cultures as well.. And they meet in the temple at Jerusalem. The words of Simeon, echoing Isaiah’s first and second Servant Song, signal the greater meeting of the Old Covenant and the New, of Jew and Gentile. The waiting of Simeon and Anna “for the consolation of Israel” and “for the redemption of Jerusalem” respectively is fulfilled with the coming of the infant Christ and his mother to the Temple.

They come to the Temple for a twofold purpose captured in the Prayer Book title for this mid-winter feast. It is both ‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’ and ‘The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin’; in short, a double-barrelled commemoration that concentrates the meeting of God and Man in Jesus Christ. Simeon’s words about the infant Christ are at the heart of the feast as are his words about Mary. Christ, he says, is “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel”. But what his being presented means is further signalled in his words 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,” adding parenthetically what that will mean for Mary herself: “(yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also;)”. To what end, we might ask? To which he tells her and us, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”. A “light to lighten”, it seems, awakens us to a kind of self-awareness.

What are we looking and waiting for? The truth of our lives is really very much like what we see in Simeon and Anna. It is about our waiting and watching upon the Word and Will of God. What we seek in some sense defines us but we can only wait upon what comes from God to us. Our waiting and watching is an activity of the soul, a contemplative looking to God, the God who comes into the midst of life. He is light and life. Candlemas concentrates the Christmas Gospel which proclaims Christ as the light and life of the world. It speaks to the universal desire of our humanity for what is absolute and all-embracing. In the Christian understanding, this is the meaning of Christ who comes as saviour and redeemer, as light and life to our dark and weary world.

Candlemas, in other words, concentrates the Christian mystery for us in a compelling and complex manner. There is at once the fulfilment of Jewish custom and law in his presentation and in Mary’s ritual act of purification forty days after the birth of Christ; but there is as well the further envisioning of something new and transforming which can only be accomplished through the greater sacrifice of Christ in his love for the Father. Everything in the Candlemas mystery must be seen in terms of the primacy of that relation. It is sacrifice understood as the love which restores and redeems in and through the sufferings and the sins of the world. That love revealed in the pageant of Christ’s incarnate life makes known the love of God as Trinity, the love which gathers everything to itself in its going forth and return to the Father by the Son in the bond of their love in the Holy Spirit.

What Candlemas means for us is equally twofold. First, our lives as Simeon suggests, are lived entirely “according to thy word”, echoing Mary’s own words at the Annunciation and, secondly, the light of that word is soul-piercing and heart-revealing. The light which enlightens reveals us to ourselves in all of our failings. Thus Candlemas marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, from the theme of light to life, from the light which overcomes the darkness to the life which overcomes death.

The themes meet in Christ and Mary in the Temple, the place of our attention to the motions of God’s love towards us in Word and Will. Our churches are the temples of the meeting of God and our humanity where we learn about God and ourselves and about what is required in our lives with one another. The Gospel reading from Luke is complemented by the powerful lesson from Malachi. God’s coming to his temple is “like a refiner’s fire” that purifies and purges away all of the imperfections and injustices of our lives in community. Here is the light which awakens us to our obligations to and with one another over and against the disorders and forms of injustice. It is an awakening to the presence of God with us.

It happens in the body of our humanity in Mary and in the Temple. She is herself habitaculum Dei, a little temple of God, even as Christ is the God who has dwelt, literally ‘tented’, among us in the flesh which he has taken from her in her constant and pure yielding of herself to the Word of God. That Word is the light of the world; nothing less than the light of God that enlightens the darkness of the world. Candlemas is the lovely warm glow of candles enveloping us in the light and love of God; a mid-winter blessing found in Christ, the hope and light of the world in the winter of our discontents and fears.