Candlemas 2015
1 February 2015
One might just be forgiven if we don’t pay quite so much attention to Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, as perhaps we should. Yet, this event is not really an anecdote, an aside, a digression from those other two great moments we celebrate in the Life of Christ: Christmas and Easter. It is not a pleasant bench on which we can sit and rest for a minute in the course of a long country walk. It is very much part of that walk. Part of the whole journey, the whole pilgrimage we undertake as Christians.
The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, concludes around four hundred years before the event we are celebrating today. The final book of that testament, the Book of Malachi, can be seen to contain, as one commentator has described it, a note of boredom, I would say even frustration. When will God act like he said he would? Like a child being dragged round the shops our forebears seem to be saying: "Come on. This is boring. Hurry up. You promised we could go to the pictures."
The Hebrew people had returned from an excruciatingly painful, humiliating and identity-sapping exile about two hundred years before. The great hope that this return was the start of a new and real and eternally fulfilling relationship with God was dwindling fast. They were about to be, culturally at least, consumed by the Greek Empire. Apart from a false start with a number of spurious messiahs, especially during the time of the Maccabees, the Hebrew people were starting to believe that nothing, really was going to happen. God was either not going to keep his promises or, if he had, no-one had noticed. So they turned to religion. A religion of legalistic Observances and Rituals that began, eventually, for many, to obscure what it really was they truly believed in.
Then a little child is born. To poor parents in a humble stable. Largely un-noticed by the vast majority of the populace. It is clear that dutifully, according to their religion, but importantly clearly resulting from what they had experienced over what we know as the whole Christmas narrative - the parents present that child in the Temple. At that precise moment, the whole history of humankind is stilled. Silent. Waiting. It is, what the French call the Point Vierge. The pure unsullied moment. A moment at the very turning point when night turns to dawn. When the tiniest glimmer of silvering appears in the east and another day begins.
And, if you listen very carefully to Luke at this point vierge in his recording of the events at the Temple, you can hear the whole of the Old Testament and the whole of the New Testament rushing to converge. There at the Presentation of Christ, in Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna, we hear echoes of Abraham and Sarah, Eli and Hannah with Samuel, as well as Zechariah and Elizabeth. In Simeon’s great poetic blessing we hear all the Prophets, especially Isaiah and indeed Malachi, and their prophesies coming to fruition. All the pain and the dismay and the waiting meeting the hope they had clung on to over the centuries.
All the great traditions of the Hebrew Law, the Torah are met in that temple in that moment. The great Law that the eight day old child had come not to destroy but to fulfil. And in that eight day old child we also find the meeting of the new temple with the old. Just as Simeon would die, now that he had encountered the Messiah, so the old temple would fall, now that it had encountered the new temple. A new temple that would be built over the three days of Easter. A new temple built of flesh and blood and the spirit of God. A new temple that was to be formed also of a new people. Us, formed in the body and likeness of that infant, through communion with him.
Candlemas for we Christians is therefore much more than just another day to mark down in the calendar in our progress from Christmas to Easter. Perhaps we, too, in our waiting for the Kingdom which is to come wonder sometimes whether God will keep his promises. Perhaps we might, too, sometimes turn to a religion simply of Observances and Rituals that could risk obscuring what it really is Christians believe in. Which is why it is always important to read, mark and inwardly digest what it is we are celebrating in any given feast or festival in the Church’s year.
Candlemas today, as it did two thousand years ago, marks the point at which the old and the new meet. It is the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning. And, if you like, we are part of the new temple, the body of Christ, by which, and in which, and through which God, Father Son and Holy Spirit intends to bring it about.
Thanks be to God, Amen.