Author: CCW

“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”

It is a double-barrelled feast; a feast at once of Christ and of Mary. All the festivals of Mary are tagged to the feasts of Christ, but here uniquely they are together in one. This is signaled explicitly in the Luke’s first sentence of this evening’s Gospel reading in the words “purification” and “presentation”. A most intriguing scene, it is also rather complex. The celebration itself is more familiarly called Candlemas, acknowledging the words of the aged Simeon who sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Few passages concentrate so wonderfully the interdependence, connection, and difference between Judaism and Christianity in the interweaving of the particular and the universal.

Candlemas marks the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter. It reminds us that the twin centers of the Christian contemplation are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each bound up in the other, each incomprehensible without the other. Once again we are presented with something very different from a linear narrative. Instead, the focus is doctrinal. With Candlemas, we learn with Mary about the deeper and truer significance of her holy child. Throughout the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries, Mary has been very much in the picture both in the paradox of virgin and mother and in the activity of “pondering in her heart all the things that are said” about the child Christ.

Here on the fortieth day after Christ’s birth and in accord with the cultural and religious custom of Israel, she and Joseph are in Jerusalem “to do for him after the custom of the law” – honouring God for the gift of the first-born male. It is also “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished” – forty days after childbirth. This has its later expression in the little service “commonly called The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving After Child-Birth” in the Prayer Book (pp.573-575), a service that also acknowledges the frequent loss of children in childbirth. These are very real human realities and experiences. Both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel and yet both presentation and purification open us out to something universal and for all.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard”

In the western imagination, perhaps nothing speaks more profoundly to the idea of civilisation and culture than vineyards. In a way, they epitomise our humanity’s proper relationship to nature and to the theme of cultivation and learning. Scripturally speaking vineyards, too, are an important image about our relationship with God.

The older classical and catholic patterns of reading the Scriptures in the course of the year are intentionally instructive. With the older “Gesima” Sundays, there is a turn towards the human soul. They mark the beginnings of a kind of inwardness that has very much to do with the classical traditions of moral philosophy. The “Gesima” Sundays provide a catechism, an instruction, about the virtues. The virtues are the qualities of excellence belonging to the ancient Greek and Roman understanding of the good of human personality but which undergo a kind of sea-change, transformed by the three Christian ‘graces’ of faith, hope and love.

In the imagery of the “Gesima” Sundays, the Gospel readings from Matthew and Luke locate our humanity first, in a vineyard, secondly, on the ground, and thirdly, on the road to Jerusalem. Viewed in conjunction with the Epistle readings from 1st and 2nd Corinthians, they comprise a short treatise on the virtues of temperance and justice today in the Epistle and Gospel respectively, the virtues of courage and prudence on Sexagesima Sunday, and through the Epistle and Gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, the realisation of their transformation into forms of love through the theological virtues of “faith, hope, and charity” or love which is the basis of the Christian pilgrimage of life concentrated for us in the season of Lent.

The Latin terms Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima are, I suppose, a bit intimidating and a bit of a mouthful, but they are easily explained. These three Sundays orient us towards Easter, marking the week of the seventieth day, the sixtieth day, and fiftieth day before Easter, for which the Quadragesima, meaning the forty days of Lent, prepare us. The terms reflect in part some of the history of the development of the forty days of Lent in terms of the number of days allowed in each week as a break from the rigour of the Lenten fast. They are simply the three pre-Lenten Sundays which prepare us inwardly for the Lenten pilgrimage by recalling us to the virtues as the active principles that belong to the Christian journey of faith. Critical to this instruction is the recognition that by themselves, as Augustine memorably put it, the virtues are but splendid vices, meaning that the journey of the soul to God cannot be undertaken simply by us alone but only by way of Christ in us; in short, by grace perfecting nature, by the virtues transformed into the forms of love. The point is that something is required of us; we are not simply passive beings, mere automatons, if you will.

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