Month: February 2022

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”

We don’t hear these readings very often. Epiphany season varies in its length along with the Trinity season. The readings for the Fifth and Sixth Sundays after Epiphany do double duty. They were appointed by John Cosin in the 17th century for both these Sundays after Epiphany and for the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity in those years when the date of Easter is early, resulting in the shortening of the Epiphany season and the lengthening of the Trinity season. Cosin’s choices reveal a profound understanding of the logic of the eucharistic readings throughout the course of the church year and, especially, about the connection between the Epiphany season and Trinity season.

One of the benefits of the suspension of services over the past several weeks – over Christmas in its entirety and most of the Epiphany season – has been the opportunity to consider not just the eucharistic readings (Epistles and Gospels) but the readings for Matins. For the last three Sundays we have been reading from the Book of Amos and from John’s Gospel. Such readings contribute to a deeper appreciation of the doctrinal and devotional aspects of the Epiphany season. Accordingly, I want to make reference this morning to the Matins readings along with the eucharistic propers.

This Sunday marks the end of the Epiphany season this year. It ends, we might say, with the sunset blaze of the light of Candlemas, on the one hand, and with a note of reflective judgment, on the other hand. Candlemas marks the transition from the Christmas cycle to the Easter cycle. It belongs both to Epiphany and to the pre-Lenten and Lenten journey of our souls. Such coincidences are providentially wonderful and soul-enriching..

Epiphany season is about the making known of God and about what God wants for us. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us. That says much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity and about the truth and the mystery of God. God makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us. This is Paul’s point: “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”. In a way, it is a kind of summary of the Epiphany teaching.

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“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.

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