A Sermon preached on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple (transferred)
1 February 2009
Some words of Origen from his commentary on today’s Gospel:
If thou wilt touch Jesus and grasp him in thy hands, strive with all thy strength to have the Spirit for thy guide, and come to the Temple of God.
In the name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit.
Today the Lord enters his Temple. Amidst the noise and the filth of the Temple precincts, the hue and cry of money being exchanged, of animals bought and sold and slaughtered, Mary and Joseph bring their infant son: and Simeon, filled with the Spirit and looking for the consolation, the paraklesis, of Israel, sees salvation. St Luke’s beautiful story, at once intimate in its telling and cosmic in its theological significance, is a masterpiece of irony. To the place of sacrifice comes the one who will perfect, accomplish and seal the perfect sacrifice, in the offering of his own body on the Cross. To the place of worship busy with the ministration of priests comes the great high priest of the new covenant, the one who will be both priest and victim. To be ransomed, redeemed, according to the dictates of the law, comes the one who will offer his very self for the redemption of the world. To the Temple, that vast edifice of white limestone ornamented with gold plating and gilded pinnacles – how truly impressive a sight it must have been – comes the one who will erect a new temple in his body, a temple not built with human hands, a temple to be raised up on the third day. St Luke’s Gospel begins in the Temple, with the annunciation to Zechariah, the Temple priest; it ends with the disciples gathered together in Jerusalem, the city of the Temple, on the evening of the first Easter Day, meeting the Lord in the breaking of the bread; and it is from Jerusalem, too, in Luke’s second book, that the Lord ascends to his Father, commissioning the Twelve at the same time to bear witness to him even to the ends of the earth, and promising to them that same Spirit who fills Simeon with grace to know the Christ. At every turn there is that counterpoint, that movement, from the figure to the fulfilment, from the type to the reality, from the shadows to the light.
The Lord enters his Temple, and Simeon proclaims the coming of the light, even as Zechariah, at the birth of John the Baptist, had greeted him as the herald of the light. In the Holy of Holies, the sanctum sanctorum, was only darkness; and, save at the time of special festivals, the Temple’s outer courtyards would have been gloomy as well as full of dirt and clamour. But Simeon sees the light of the world in the Christ-child cradled in his mother’s arms. Hail holy Light…Bright effluence of bright essence increate…Blind Milton’s invocation to the light makes light divine and divinity all lightness; but it is not just that Christ dwells in the light or comes surrounded by light: he is the light, the light which is the life of men. It is as in Keble’s notable and felicitous translation of the ancient hymn: Hail, gladdening LIGHT, of His pure glory poured / Who is th’immortal FATHER, heavenly, blest, / Holiest of Holies – JESUS CHRIST our LORD.
But Simeon does not only proclaim the light: he receives it, touches it, holds it as he takes Jesus in his arms. This is the wonderful mystery and incomprehensible reality of the Incarnation; the Light of the World can be cradled in an embrace. As St John the Evangelist has it in his first epistle: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands…this is the Word of Life. St John’s letter and St Luke’s Gospel unite in their testimony: Light, Word, Life, all is Christ; there is no salvation which is not Christological, christocentric. The old Adam is refashioned in the new; humanity is perfected in the divine-human incarnate one, the Word made Flesh. There is no part of our life, no arena of our existence, which does not look to Christ for its perfection and fulfilment; we see who we should be, who we are to become, who we truly are, in Christ. This is no empty slogan or pious hope. Rather it strikes at the very heart of our self-understanding; it determines a truly Christian anthropology. Perhaps since the Renaissance, certainly since the Enlightenment, the trajectory of human thought has been in thrall to the idea of each human person as a potentially self-sufficient, rational, perfectible individual, man come of age with no need of God. Such a philosophy leads on the corporate and collective stage to the disasters of paganistic fascism and atheistic communism, and on the personal level only to sadness, disillusion, despair. Only in Christ can these fantasies be put to flight; only in Christ can we dare to see ourselves as we really are, sons and daughters beloved of the Father, and precious in his sight. That is why Simeon proclaims Christ not only to be the light which lightens the world, but also the light which brings about judgement, the sign (as we would have heard had we read a few verses further) that will be spoken against…that thoughts out of many hearts will be revealed. Christ who is the light of the world reveals our own un-Christlikeness, exposes those parts of ourselves which are yet to be conformed to his image and likeness. And, yes, he brings us to a point of choice: are we for the light, or for the darkness – the darkness which stands, in this instance, for the world and its vanities, its cruelties, its misplaced ambitions and self-centred aspirations; the world which, for just a few hours, looks as if it will triumph when Judas leaves the company of the disciples to betray Our Lord and, as St John has it, it was night.
The lights which we carry on this Candlemass day are signs of our commitment to the light, the light who is Christ. For those of us who are baptised, they remind us of the candles presented to us at our baptism, when we promised, or our godparents promised on our behalf, to turn away from evil and follow Christ, and we were united with him, in his death and in his resurrection. For those of us who are not baptised, they can represent our openness to the prompting of the Spirit, to awaken in us the gift of faith. Be assured, faith is a gift. While the doctors of the Church, lead by St Thomas, teach us that as a consequence of our creation as men and women there is implanted in our hearts and minds a natural desire, a natural longing, to find that fulfilment which can only be met, which can only be accomplished, in God, they insist also that faith is indeed a supernatural virtue, the gift of God. Once given, that gift can never be taken back, taken away; the light of faith might glow very dimly, but it can never be extinguished, because it is not ours, but God’s.
That is why these Candlemass candles are so important, for they speak of the light of the world in our own lives. That is why, at the end of this service, you should not simply leave them on your chairs, or on the floor, for the Sacristan to pick up next time he’s down on his hands and knees (praying, of course): you should take them with you, back to your room in college, or your house, wherever your home may be, and light them again, when you need to – whenever, in joy or sorrow, in a time of need or a time of thanksgiving, you are drawn to the nearer presence of the Light of the World. In a beautiful phrase, St Bede speaks of the old man – Simeon – receiving the infant Christ to convey thereby that this world, worn out as it were with old age, should return to the childlike innocence of the Christian life. Bede, like T.S. Eliot – but unlike St Luke – presumes that Simeon is an old man; in fact, the Gospel says no such thing. Whatever our age, we can feel worn out, wearied: we can suffer from accidie, that spiritual as well as mental and physical idleness which can be so destructive. But our Candlemass candle speaks to us of that refreshment, that new life of mind, body and soul, which is the gift of Christ.
I said just now that the mystery is that the Incarnate Christ can be cradled, held: that is the miracle of the Word made Flesh. Of course, what was a physical possibility for Simeon is not so for us: for in his corporeal presence, Christ now sits at the Father’s right hand on high. Yet the words which Our Lord addresses to St Thomas on Easter Day - blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe – are as applicable to the story of Simeon, and our continuation of that story, on Candlemass Day. What Simeon held in his arms, we hold by faith, and through the abiding presence of Christ to us and in us, in the gift of the Spirit, in the body of the Church, in Word and of course in Sacrament. Recall those words of Origen, with which I began:
If thou wilt touch Jesus and grasp him in thy hands, strive with all thy strength to have the Spirit for thy guide, and come to the Temple of God.
Or, as St Ambrose has it:
But whoso would be cleansed, let him come into the Temple, unto Jerusalem: let him wait for the Lord’s Christ, let him receive in his hands the Word of God, and embrace it, as it were, with the arms of faith.
Coming to the altar, extending our hands – or our tongue – we do as Simeon did. We embrace the Word made Flesh, we cradle the Light of the World. We look upon the Lord, who has come to his Temple. We see, and touch, and taste, our salvation.
The Principal