The light that invites
“And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come into his Temple”- Malachi 3
If you believe Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about: and that is not being talked about. At least, that’s what Lord Henry Wotton tells us in A Picture of Dorian Gray. And though Wilde paints Lord Henry as perhaps not the best of guides, the saying does reveal a psychological truth. Being talked about, being noticed, is to be recognised, to have impact. That, if we are honest, is at least part of why we have our Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams, because we prefer the option of being known – even if there are downsides – to that of going wholly unnoticed.
In today’s account of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple, St Luke is likewise interested in who does - and who does not - notice Jesus on the day he is taken to Jerusalem. The Temple, we might think, is the place where Jesus will be most welcomed, most recognised, sure to get a fanfare. And yet Luke has a plot twist in store. Today the Lord finally enters his temple, that long-awaited moment in the history of Israel - but almost nobody notices. No priest, no scribe: just a couple of old people. There is no suggestion that the priest who accepted Joseph and Mary’s offering saw anything special whatsoever in Jesus. His parents were poor, no real social clout, strange accent too, not the sort of people he was really that interested in associating with. So Jesus goes unnoticed by the clerics of the temple. He had no special sign, no tattoo like Harry Potter. He came in the form of the totally ordinary, a simple human baby. That was something the temple hierarchy wasn’t expecting: and they missed him.
Two individuals, however, do not miss him. Simeon and Anna are ordinary people, mind you, not priests, not temple officials. Yet they, by contrast, do perceive the significance of the Christ Child. We see here the unveiling of what you might call a sacred secularity in Luke’s Gospel: God in Jesus is being revealed not in the proclamations of a religious institution, nor in some external sign, but in and through ordinary human people, often on the margins, who are open to the unexpected unfolding of grace.
This Feast of the Presentation of Jesus has various names around the world. For us, of course, it is Candlemas; for German speakers it is Lichtmess - Mass of Light; the French call it “Chandeleur” –almost exactly the same word as ‘chandelier’, which can make it sound somewhat like a liturgy for worshipping baroque ceiling furniture. But in fact, wherever the Presentation is celebrated, and whatever its name, we do the same thing worldwide, in direct link with the words of Simeon two thousand years ago. We light candles to mark our hope in the One who is the light to enlighten us; the one who, as we will say in the Creed in a few moments, is God from God, light from light.
But what kind of light is Jesus? Simeon’s message is about more than candles – if we pay attention, what he says is provocative, indeed even revolutionary. Simeon is after all standing in the Temple. Though it no longer exists, thanks to the Books of Kings we have a good record of what it looked like. The Temple was a place of worship; but it was also undeniably a place where hierarchies of exclusion took visible architectural form. If you were a Gentile, for example, the only part of the Temple you could ever access was the absolute outer part, called “The Court of the Nations”. You were literally “on the outer” and barred by high walls from getting further. But even if you were a Jew, the interior precincts of the temple were stratified too. There was a court for women, and a separate court only for men, the men’s one – surprise surprise – closer to the altar and the action. Even if you were a Jewish man, there were then further divisions for you. Only the priestly caste could offer sacrifices at the altar and even they could not enter into the Holy of Holies: the High Priest alone could do that and even he only once per year. And so we are in a context of strict exclusivity and separation. It is that context that makes Simeon’s statement on seeing Jesus so provocative. “Mine eyes, Lord have seen thy salvation, to be a light to lighten the Gentiles”. “The who?” you might have heard from any pious person standing nearby. “The Gentiles? Those foreigners, those outsiders, the ones we don’t let in, the ones who don’t believe in our God, the ones we look down on, and even curse - God is salvation for them?” And then, as if Simeon wasn’t trouble enough, a woman gets in on the act too! Anna joins the scene and begins to prophesy too about the child.
Of course, they aren’t saying God is not there for the Jews: as Simeon adds, Jesus will also be “the glory of his people Israel”. But what we are seeing in Simeon’s prediction is a God of radical inclusion: someone who will reach to outsiders and treat them as insiders; who will blow away the entrenched ethnic, religious, and social boundaries that seemed so certain to the religiously correct: and to say to people long told they were unacceptable that they were in fact, very much acceptable to God, and invited into relationship with him.
That applies to you and me too. We are by Simeon’s outburst confronted by a shocking truth: whether or not we accept ourselves, God accepts us. Full stop, no ifs, no buts. He accepts you and he accepts me just as we are right here and now. Accepts our whole self, not just the good bit, not just the bit we show others. The whole me. For God there is no such thing as an outsider. That doesn’t mean we are perfect, it means God loves us despite the fact that we are not.
You might have noticed that after Simeon speaks his prophecy, something funny happens: he appears to walk off and is never spoken of again in the Gospel: Now O Lord, he says, thou lettest thy servant depart in peace. Religion as he had known it has been permanently changed; so much so that he doesn’t need to be in the Temple anymore. More daringly, we might say – as early Christians, particularly St Paul, did say – that with Jesus the whole allure of ancient religion, what gave it its power – is over. The ancient religions promised believers some kind of limited contact with God: offer this animal sacrifice, obey these rules, pray this prayer, and God might just let you approach: but the onus was on you. By contrast, in Jesus what happens is the reverse: instead of us trying to appease God, God comes to embrace us. In the Incarnation God has irrevocably affirmed humanity in a manner so strong, so total, and so universal that no limited act from our side, religious or not, can ever come close in significance or power. In the light of Jesus’ Incarnation, there is nothing that the old religions offer that has not already been more than provided for in much greater depth.
The French philosopher Marcel Gauchet famously shocked by saying that “Christianity is the religion of exit from religion”. He means that Christian faith at its heart involves dropping the old ideas of what religion is, and adopting a wholly different relationship with the divine, one in which religion is fundamentally not dependent anymore on any act, or any things: any offering, any book, any human priest or any temple. All of that is replaced by a Person. That person is Jesus Christ, who is the only priest and whose body is now the only temple, whose light is the inextinguishable light.
So as we now celebrate Candlemas of the God who was noticed by Simeon, let us ask for the grace to notice God in the ordinary events and people passing through our lives; to know that we are ever kindly, compassionately noticed and welcomed by God who loves us as we are and wishes us maximum light and life; and seeing both these things, to say, with Simeon, that we have seen his salvation.