A Homily for Candlemas
[W]hen the days of her purification according to
the law of Moses were accomplished,
they brought [Jesus] to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord.
—S. Luke 2:22
Tonight we observe the fortieth day of Christmas, and
the last festival of the Christmas cycle Tonight is when, by immemorial
custom, the last decorations are finally put away for another year.
The seventeenth century priest and poet Robert Herrick wrote of “The Ceremonies
of Candlemas Eve”:
Down with rosemary, and so
down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas hall.
This is time of year when the Church turns from contemplation
of the mystery of Christ’s birth, and begins to look toward the greater mystery
of his passion, death, and resurrection. It is a festival with several
names, each of which has a special significance for the Church, which is to
say, for us.
The oldest name is Hypopante Kyriou, which is Greek for
“meeting of the Lord.” That is still the principal name of the festival
in the Eastern Church. But “meeting” is itself a name with more than
one meaning. It probably referred originally to the meeting of the infant
Lord Jesus with those two very old people, Anna the prophetess and Simeon
the Just, who had been waiting in the Temple for years and years to see the
fulfillment of God’s promises. Simeon, the old man, takes the baby
from his mother’s arms and proclaims: “Behold, this child is set for
the fall and rising again of many; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;
. . . that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” He prays:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, . . . for mine eyes
have seen thy salvation.” Anna, “coming in that instant gave thanks
likewise unto the Lord, and spake of [the Christ child] to all them that
looked for redemption in Jerusalem.”
But the teachers of the Eastern Church have long explained
the festival as the meeting of the Christ, the Messiah, with the Temple of
the Law. This is the meeting foretold by the prophet Malachi [in the
lesson that will be read on Sunday morning] (“the Lord, whom ye seek, shall
suddenly come to his temple”). It is the first of many visits of Jesus
to the Temple—the last will come during Holy Week, when he will drive out
the money changers who made the house of prayer into a den of thieves.
A hymn prescribed for the Vespers of this feast in the Orthodox Church
proclaims:
Today the gate of heaven swings open,
for the Word of the Father, who has no beginning,
has had a beginning in time,
without any loss of his divinity:
He is offered by a Virgin Mother,
as a child of forty days, to the Temple of the Law.
Another name for the festival is the “Presentation of
Christ in the Temple.” The baby Jesus is brought to the Temple at this
time for a specific purpose: the ritual of Pidyon ha-Ben, the redemption
of the firstborn son. In tonight’s Old Testament
lesson, from the book of Exodus, God tells Moses that he is claiming every
firstborn male in the nation of Israel as his own property: “as it is
written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be
called holy to the Lord.” God claims every firstborn male ox, and ass,
and human being.
In the book of Numbers is written the commandment that
the father must redeem the firstborn son, that is, buy him back from God,
by paying a kohen (a member of the Temple priesthood) five silver shekels.
There is an irony in this: Joseph, the foster father, stands proxy,
buying back Jesus from his own Father. (And there is an ominous foreshadowing
as well: Jesus, who tonight is redeemed from the Temple priest for five
pieces of silver will later be sold to the Temple authorities for thirty.)
As at his circumcision on the eighth day of his life,
his bar mitzvah at twelve years of age, and his baptism by John in Jordan,
so at his Pidyon ha-Ben, Jesus fulfills all that the Law, Torah, requires.
He himself would say: “I have come not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill
it.”
This is also the festival of the Purification of the
Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the commandment given by God in the
book of Leviticus, the mother of a son remained ritually unclean until the
fortieth day after his birth. At the end of that period, the woman
was to come to the Temple with a thank-offering and a sin-offering.
And so tonight, “when the days of her purification were accomplished,” our
Lady comes in obedience to Torah. For the rich, the prescribed offering
was a sheep; but for the poor, it was two turtle doves or young pigeons.
With the sacrifice of those animals and with the priest’s blessing, the woman
was readmitted to the congregation.
We Christians, who know Mary to be indeed the Theotokos,
the Mother of God, cannot help but wonder how such a birth could render any
woman unclean. Had she not heard the salutation of the angel:
“Hail, Full-of-Grace, the Lord is with thee”? Had her cousin Elizabeth
not greeted her with: “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is
the fruit of thy womb”?
Had she herself not sung: “Behold, from henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed; for he that is mighty hath magnified me”?
How then can she who was full of grace, whom all generations
shall call blessed, be purified by the slaughter of brace of squabs?
Saint Thomas Aquinas answered that question, by saying that her submission
to the ritual prescribed by Torah was to be an example to us of humility and
obedience.
The ritual purification and readmittance to the congregation
was an occasion of great joy for a woman and for her family. But for
Mary, there was an ominous word of warning. Old Simeon, taking the baby
Jesus and holding him in his arms, fixes his eye upon Mary and says:
“Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.”
Even now, even at the rejoicing of the birth of her son,
her sorrow is foretold her. She who tonight offers her turtledoves on
the Temple’s altar of sacrifice, will see her son offered up on the altar
of the cross, while she, mournful, weeping, keeps her station below.
And on a Friday evening not long hence, she will receive her son’s broken
body in her arms as another Joseph takes him down from that same cross.
Finally, the festival we observe tonight is known by
its popular name: Candlemas. In just a few minutes we will join
in the blessing of candles and in a candle-lit procession around the church.
This is not the oldest of the ceremonies of this festival; but, still, it
has been observed for more than thirteen hundred years.
Simeon, holding the infant Jesus in his arms, sang a
canticle of thanksgiving to God the Father; it is the same canticle, Nunc
dimittis, that we have just sung, and it will be repeated by the choir at
the blessing of the candles. And in his canticle, Simeon sang of Jesus:
“a light to lighten the gentiles, and the glory of [his] people Israel.”
This theme of Simeon’s song was later echoed by Saint John: “In him
was light, and that light was the life of men . . . that was the true light,
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world . . . and the light shineth
in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”
The candles that will be blessed, and lit, and carried
this night are symbols of Jesus, the light of the gentiles, the light that
is life of men, the light that the darkness cannot comprehend.
There survives a Candlemas homily preached by an Anglo-Saxon
bishop more than a thousand years ago, in which the churchgoers are exhorted
to carry their lighted candles from the church into their homes and the other
homes in their community. And in an age when almost everyone walked
to church and there were no streetlights, or stoplights, or headlights, one
can imagine the light spreading from that church building into the surrounding
countryside as folk walked home carrying their candles.
It would scarcely be practical to give the same exhortation
tonight, or at least to expect it to be literally followed. But even
if the candles we light here tonight are extinguished and left behind, it
is still up to us to carry the light of Christ with us from this place, from
the foot of the cross, into the dark world around us. In a way, we are
to become like candles, each aflame with the light of Christ. And so,
as Jesus himself said: “Let your light so shine before men that they
may see your good works, and glorify your Father, which is in heaven.”
Saint Matthew’s Church
Newport Beach, California
31 January 2003
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