by CCW | 2 February 2023 20:00
This is an ancient feast and an ecumenical feast, uniting both east and west. Its full title suggests something of its rich significance. It is a double feast in which we honour both Jesus, our Lord and his Mother Mary, our Lady, in one festival. It is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin.” For Eastern Christianity, it is known as hypapante, meaning meeting. But its simpler and more usual name is Candlemas. These are all terms and names which contain a host of associations.
Its most basic sense is the remembrance that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth to offer the required and ancient sacrifices of purification and presentation of the first born. Luke alone gives us this story. The focus is on the encounter between the Child Jesus and the old man Simeon and the aged Anna; a meeting rich in significance.
The Song of Simeon is the Nunc Dimittis, for instance, which has long been a feature of the Church’s evening sacrifice of prayer and praise. It is, we might say, the Song of Candlemas. It signifies the meeting or the bridge between the old and the new; thus the significance of hypapante or meeting in the Eastern Church.
The meeting signifies something more than just the passing away of the old and the inauguration of something new; it captures the sense of fulfillment. There is the sense that what was looked for is actually more than what was expected.
Simeon and Anna are in the temple at Jerusalem waiting, watching, and hoping. The overarching theme here is that of hope. And what Simeon beholds in Christ is the hope of the Old Testament brought to an intensity of expression, to its fullness of meaning. It marks the inauguration of something new, ultimately, we may say, it is the Church; but this does not mean the eclipse of the old so much as its redemption and the purification of its intention; “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” This is its ringing theme and song with its emphasis upon universality.
He sees in the child what Isaiah had seen as belonging to the vocation of Israel as a people; “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” a light for the world now in the midst of the world. Thus Epiphany’s theme is brought to a kind of crescendo of illumination at Candlemas, appropriately enough on the last week of Epiphany this year. But it also looks ahead to Septuagesima and the Gesima Sundays, for that light illuminates our lives on the ground, as it were, in the very fields of creation and in the meeting-places of our humanity.
Candlemas marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, the transition from light to life. It comes exactly forty days after Christmas yet points us to the temple and sacrifice of Christ, to Lent and Easter. Here he is presented in the temple according to the custom of the Law; his presentation is the hope of our presentation through the purification of our hearts and minds which belongs to the themes of pre-Lent and Lent itself.
The whole of Israel is recapitulated in the sacred and pure humanity of Jesus Christ, here carried in the arms of Mary, the pure mother of his pure humanity. The way of divine preparation is here the grace of illumination. The Word is in the flesh. The Light is embodied in the Child. The Son is presented in the temple.
Simeon takes the child into his arms. His song, upon the occasion of this meeting, is the Evensong of grace and salvation, of light and glory. His song signals the reality of Christ as the light of the world, the light that overcomes every form of darkness. And so this “meeting” is also a “feast of lights,” hence Candlemas.
The warm glow of the candles simply testifies to the greater light that “emanates for all times from the person of Jesus,” as the former Pope, Benedict XVI once remarked. We are to be the bearers of that light, that same light that Simeon saw in the infant Christ. And we are to be the bearers of that light to the world. “Light up the two candles of faith and good works,” the 17th century Anglican divine, Mark Frank (1613-1664), bids us, “light them with the fire of charity.”
We find ourselves in that light of understanding, the light which counters and checks the darknesses within and without us. Candlemas, in the richness of its allusions and associations, calls us to love the light that illuminates the hope of the world. All our desires find their place of meeting in the light of Christ who has come to his temple. It is here that we may find him, in the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated, in prayer and praise, in sacrifice and service, in his meeting with us and our embrace of him. For as Mark Frank beautifully puts it:
The candle of faith will there show you him, and the candle of charity will light him down into your arms, that you may embrace him. We embrace where we love, we take into our arms whom we love; so that love Jesus and embrace Jesus – love Jesus and take Jesus – love Jesus and take him into our hands, and into our arms, and into our mouths, and into our hearts … for without him nothing is righteous, nothing is holy.”
Fr. David Curry
Candlemas 2023
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