Today the Church celebrates the Presentation of Christ in the Temple,
also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commonly called
Candlemas. We are not quite so used to ideas of ritual purity inherent in the Thanksgiving
for a woman after Childbirth, which used to be described as the Churching of
Women. The Holy Family go to the Temple to give thanks to God and to comply
with the Law: they demonstrate obedience, they listen to what God says and do
it – as such they are a model for all Christian families to follow.
When they go to the Temple the Holy
Family encounter Simeon, a man of faith and holiness, devoted to God, and
looking for the consolation of Israel, he knows that he will not die until he
sees the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed, and the Saviour of the World. As he
takes the child Jesus in his arms he prays ‘Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word. For mine
eyes have seen : thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared : before the
face of all people; To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the
glory of thy people Israel.’ The
promise made to him by, revealed through His Holy Spirit has been fulfilled in
the six-week-old infant in his arms. As Christ was made manifest to the
Gentiles at Epiphany, so now His saving message is proclaimed, so that the
world may know that its salvation has come in the person of Jesus Christ.
Simeon speaks to Our Lord’s Mother of her Son’s future, and the pain she will
endure. Before he dies Simeon is looking to the Cross, the means by which our
salvation is wrought, the Cross at which Mary will stand to see humanity freed
from its sin through the love and mercy of God, through grace, the free gift of
God in Christ. So as Candlemas concludes our Celebration of Christmas, of the
mystery of the Incarnation, so to it points to that which gives it its true
meaning: the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
That is
why we are here this morning, to be fed by Christ, to be fed with Christ, truly
present in His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity – God whom we can touch and
taste. A God who shares His Divine Life with us, so that we can be transformed
by Him, built up as living stones as a temple to His Glory, given a foretaste
of Heaven here on Earth. This is our soul’s true food, the bread for the
journey of faith, a re-presentation of the sacrifice which sets us free to live
for Him, to live with Him, through Him and in Him.
The
significance of what is happening is not just recognised by Simeon, but also by
Anna, a holy woman, a woman of prayer, a woman who is close to God – she to recognises
what God is doing in Christ, and she proclaims it, so that God’s redemption of
His people may be known. Let us be like her, and let all of our lives,
everything which we say, or think, or do, proclaim the saving truth of God’s
love to the world. Let us burn, like the candles which God has blessed to give
light and warmth to the world, so that it may believe and give glory to God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most
right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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