Glimpsing the Glory at Candlemas

Even after its ostentatious make-over by Herod the King of Bling, the second Temple in Jerusalem was still significantly deficient, a shadow of what had gone before. Those who came home from Exile in about 500 BC built a new Temple that was spiritually decimated as well as materially shoddy: the Eternal Light, symbol of the Law, was extinguished, while the Ark of the Covenant, which had stood for four centuries in the Holy of Holies, had been hidden away by Jeremiah in some forgotten cave near Sinai, depriving the Temple ever after of the brightness of God’s glory.

It is into this black-hole absence of light and glory that the still-swaddled Jesus is Presented to God by his parents at Candlemas (2nd February), to be proclaimed by attentive old Simeon as the long-awaited One who will himself provide these blessings of glory for Israel, and light for the wider world.

But the light he brings will not all be sweetness; whatever is bright is not also bound to be beautiful. As Malachi the Messenger advises, sometimes when the Lord comes to his Temple, his light is the searing flame of the refiner’s fire; the transfiguring bleach of fullers’ soap. Stepping into this light may prove uncomfortable.

Simeon’s second prophecy suggests as much. This child, he says, will cause many to rise and fall, while a sword will pierce his mother’s soul. It is a demanding word: but what else should we expect? The light and glory revealed by Jesus will shine in our darkest places, revealing our inner thoughts and selves, removing our masks until the song-and-dance routines of our many pretences are silenced and stilled. This may well be a sword of grief to pass through us as through the soul of the Virgin. But it will perhaps be experienced more urgently as the two-edged blade of Hebrews 4, the ‘living and active word of God, sharper than any sword,’ that divides ‘soul from spirit, joints from marrow, and judges the inclinations’ of all our hearts?

Which reminds me that, in the East, today’s feast is not called Candlemas – a name said to be a triumph of mediaeval marketing to encourage gifts of winter wax for clergy and churches. To the Greeks, today is known simply as Ypapanti – the Meeting. For them, it is the Lord’s encounter with Simeon and Anna that is important, and a good evangelical reminder that we baptised do not confine ourselves to talking speculatively about God: we are to talk and listen with and to God, the transcendent yet intimate Thou to our own fearful I.

It is this coming together in engagement with each other that is striking in these populist and aggressively shouty days.

This Meeting is wholly different, and displays rather a joyful complementarity, as youth meets age; new parents talk with an old widow; and men and women are seen to be purified, to prophesy as one. There is a quiet harmony as all are drawn to the Temple together by the infant Christ. It is a beautiful and simple reminder that our Christian calling is to find life and identity through living face-to-face with Jesus, finding in his self-giving way the path of salvation. Our eyes, like the pale, watercolour eyes of old Simeon, latch onto his, visible in whichever face we find them. We are his icons, dispensing his love to each other, of whatever creed or class or colour. And the eyes of all flicker with the light of the glory of God.

It is hard, living in these murky times, not to cling to the like-minded and familiar, the algorithmically-anointed safe and sound. But maybe Candlemas can push us onto less familiar ground, incline us into a renewal of prayer and Bible-reading; to seek an increase in faith, hope, love.

The Temple may have been deficient; may have been destroyed a second and final time. Yet the light of God’s Law and the glory of God’s presence cannot be darkened or ever destroyed. They are an eternal gift, and an abiding presence; both for Israel as the Lord’s first love; and for all who follow after.