Year: 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.

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“Why are ye so fearful?”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.

It is the question for our times. That it comes in response to another question put to Jesus by those in the midst of the storm reveals an even deeper problem. “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” they ask. He arises, rebukes the wind and calms the sea, and then asks, “why are ye so fearful?” and answers with a rhetorical question, a question which provides the answer. “How is it that ye have no faith?”

Care but what kind of care and in what way? Our fear about what exactly? Our lack of faith in whom or what? These are the serious questions of the Gospel that challenge each of us and our contemporary world. My hope is that you would have been here today had there been no winter storm because you care about the care of Christ and his Church, that you would have been here not out of fear but out of faith, the faith that is grounded in love not fear, the faith that knows the deep care of God for our humanity and our world so magnificently signaled in this epiphany story.

Storms and tempests are nothing new, especially for a maritime culture. The storms and tempests of nature are an integral part of an older Canadian sensibility about finding ways to survive and not least how to survive the bleak, mid-winter! Our literature has been more about survival than conquest and more often than not that survival depends upon the reciprocity between those who govern and those who are governed. The juxtaposition of this Gospel story with the passage from Romans reminds us of a profound spiritual teaching. We are to “render to all their dues”, to all who are in power but only in the wisdom of knowing that all power belongs to God and that those who wield power do so only in a delegated sense. They are not omnipotent. The exercise of power by those in authority over us must be grounded in respect and toleration. It must be just and not vengeful. It must be aware of the uncertainties of the finite world and the limits of human justice and human reason. When those things are ignored or forgotten then authority overreaches itself and paradoxically undermines itself. Its claims to care reveal more about themselves and the systems of power with which they surround themselves. It is dominance rather than governance.

A problem about care is shown in this Gospel story. Those caught in a tempest at sea awaken Jesus asleep in the boat, not out of any sense that anything can be done, but to enroll him in their own fatalism and fear of death. He is awakened to be yet another fearful one. Not to be part of the culture of fear is to be an outsider and a threat to the dominating spirit of fear. But such is the culture of death; we are but the walking dead.

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