Sunday, January 31, 2021

'The Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple' - Candlemas


Last year in our reflection for Palm Sunday I shared the story of Egeria, a Spanish nun and educated woman of private means who joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 383 A.D. It is from her diary - Itinerarium Egeriae - that we know many things about the Jerusalem Church of the time, and in particular how it celebrated Holy Week and other liturgical festivals.


JERUSALEM’S CANDLEMAS IN THE 300’s

Egeria based herself in Jerusalem, and travelled around the Holy Land for about three years. Writing of Candlemass (then observed on 14th February, 40 days from Epiphany - 6th January - rather than 40 days from 25th December), and apparently before the ceremony of candles had become part of the feast, Egeria says:


‘On that day, there is a procession into the Anastasis [i.e. the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre], and all assemble there for the liturgy; everything is performed in the prescribed manner with the greatest solemnity, just as on Easter Sunday. All the priests give sermons, and the bishop, too; all preach on the Gospel text describing how on the fortieth day Joseph and Mary took the Lord to the Temple, and how Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, saw him, and what words they spoke on seeing the Lord, and of the offerings which his parents brought. After all these ceremonies, the Eucharist is then celebrated, and the dismissal given.’ 


We know for certain that by the middle of the 400’s the festival was being observed with lighted candles, the custom from which the name ‘Candlemas’ evolved. We also know that in 542 it was transferred to 2nd February so as to be 40 days from the Nativity of the Lord, 25th December (even though Armenian Orthodox and a few others stayed with the old date).


THE POPULARITY OF CANDLEMAS IN ENGLAND 

If we fast-forward to Anglo-Saxon times in England, we see that by then Candlemass had become one of the pivotal celebrations of the year, in the same category as Easter, Whitsunday and All Saints’ Day. The joy of blessing and carrying lit candles in procession, celebrating Christ, ‘a light to enlighten the nations’ is reflected in this passage from Ælfric (c. 955– c.1010), Abbot of Eynsham:


‘Be it known also to everyone that it is appointed in the custom of the church that on this day we should carry our lights to church, and let them be blessed there: and that we should go afterwards with that light among the houses of God, and sing the hymn which is appointed for that. Though some people cannot sing, they can nevertheless bear the light in their hands; for on this day was the true Light, Christ, borne to the temple, who redeemed us from darkness and will bring us to that eternal light, who lives and rules for ever without end.’


In medieval England Candlemass developed further into a festival shared between village, church and home. In fact, nowhere was the Feast celebrated with more gusto and devotion. After the coldest part of winter the light and warmth of candles lifted the spirits of parishioners, and spoke to them of Jesus the light of the world. 


At Candlemas people brought to their parish church, for blessing, all the candles they would use at home throughout the coming year, together with those carried in the procession, and the year’s supply of candles for use in the church. 


The people took their own blessed candles home. They would light them and place them in windows during storms, as they prayed to be kept safe from danger. They would also light and hold them as they stood around the bed of a loved one who was dying, especially while the last Sacraments were being administered. 


Powerful indeed were the links between the mid-winter celebration of the village, the liturgy of the parish church, and the spiritual life of the family.


INCARNATIONAL ENGLISH SPIRITUALITY

In his study of English church life in the later middle ages Middle Ages and the Reformation, ‘The Stripping of the Altars’ (pp. 15-16), Eamon Duffy describes colourful Candlemas processions organized by lay guilds and devotional fraternities, involving the entire Christian community in mid-winter honouring the Light of the World. Duffy’s point is that processing around the village church with lighted candles, singing Psalm 47 and the Nunc Dimittis, all the faithful would participate in and incarnate


‘the Christmas paradoxes of the strength of the eternal God displayed in the fragility of the new-born child, of the appearance of the divine light in the darkness of human sin, of renewal and rebirth in the dead time of the year, and of the new life of Heaven manifested to Simeon’s, and the world’s, old age ... The imaginative power of all this for the laity is readily understood, for the texts of the ceremony are eloquent evocations of the universal symbolism of light, life, and renewal, themes which were carefully expounded in Candlemas sermons.’ 


(It is a sad fact that at the ‘Reformation’, candles for Candlemas, ashes for Ash Wednesday, and palms for Palm Sunday were abolished by law, to be eventually restored to the Church of England along with other ‘sacramentals’ only as a result of the Catholic Revival in the 19th century.)


CANDLEMAS TODAY - AND IN THE PANDEMIC

Forty days after the birth of Jesus, today’s Mass is often regarded as rounding off the Christmas/ Epiphany cycle of the Church’s year. I notice that here in England more people are rediscovering Candlemas, even many who have drifted from the church’s life. Especially this year with all of its gloom, it is not uncommon to find people who have kept their Christmas decorations going until now.

 

In Australia, in the parish where I learned the Faith in my teens, and then later in my own parishes, at the start of Mass we had the blessing of candles, (including the boxes of candles to be used in the church over the next twelve months) and the procession. 


Later, when everyone had received Holy Communion, we would again experience the connection between Christmas, Candlemas, Calvary (‘the three C’s’ as we taught the children!) and Jesus the Light of the world, by singing slowly and quietly to him in the Blessed Sacrament on the Altar, 


       ‘O come, all ye faithful . . . 

        O come, let us adore him, 

  Christ the Lord.’ 


All that’s as it should be, because while the readings and prayers for Candlemas take us back to the birth of Jesus, they also beckon us forward to his suffering and death. 


This morning at Mass - as with so many areas of our life during this pandemic - the traditional Candlemas ceremonies had to be pruned back to avoid multi-handling of objects (i.e. candles!), but in our own way we acknowledged the meaning of the feast, by blessing candles and then blessing the people with those candles.  


INSIGHTS FROM TODAY’S READINGS 

For Jew and Gentile alike: 

The Gospel reading (Luke 2:22-39) tells of Mary and Joseph going to the temple with the baby Jesus, for their ritual purification ‘according to the Law,’ and for Jesus to be consecrated to the Lord. The old man Simeon, full of the Holy Spirit, discerns Jesus to be God’s Messiah, ‘the light to enlighten the (gentile) nations and to be the glory of his people Israel’. 


One of the themes in S. Luke’s Gospel is that Jesus came not just to fulfil God’s promises to Israel (although he certainly does that!). He came also to draw in the ‘outsiders’, and there are a lot of them in S. Luke’s Gospel. Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis proclaims this loudly and clearly. Jesus came to give his light to Jew and Gentile alike. 


Another elderly person, Anna, a prophetess, who had worshipped, prayed and fasted every day of her long widowhood in expectation of the ‘redemption of Jerusalem’, saw Jesus and began to tell the crowds in the hustle and bustle of the temple about him.


Today’s first reading from the prophet Malachi (quoted also in the Entrance Antiphon) contains the words: 


‘The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.’ (Malachi 3:1)


The Church has always seen Mary and Joseph presenting the Lord in the temple, and the encounter with Simeon and Anna, as fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy.


A real encounter 

Eastern Orthodox Christians call today’s feast ‘Hypapante’ (which means ‘the meeting’ or ‘the encounter’), seeing in the juxtaposition of the Child and the old man, the encounter of the fading age of the Old Covenant and that of the New, the era of Jesus and his Church. It is also a meeting of the themes of birth, sacrifice and death, as well as light and darkness.  


The shadow of the Cross cast over Mary 

So, it should not surprise us that in the midst of this joyful festival to hear old Simeon’s enigmatic remark to Our Lady - ‘a sword shall pierce your own soul, too’ -, reminding us of her participation in the suffering of Jesus for our redemption. This was not just as Mary stood at the foot of the cross. It was there in different ways throughout her life, especially as she experienced her ‘alone-ness’ from Jesus as he goes about ‘his Father’s business’. With this word about the sword piercing her soul on account of her Son, Candlemas truly does become a day that looks back to Christmas and forward to Calvary.

 

The only Lamb that really matters 

This is further echoed in a detail of the story in which there is more than a little irony. According to the Law of Moses, the poor, if they couldn’t afford a lamb to offer in sacrifice and thanksgiving, could bring a pair of turtle doves or even pigeons. We are told in the Gospel reading quite explicitly that Mary and Joseph brought ‘turtle doves or pigeons’. We know, however, that they did actually bring a Lamb - the only Lamb that has ever really mattered: Jesus, ‘Mary’s little Lamb’, the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. 


LET IT SHINE! 

Today is our feast of candles, with their light and warmth pointing to Jesus, the light of the world.


Normally at Candlemas each of us is given a candle as a reminder that having received the light of Jesus, which at the very beginning of creation pierced the darkness, and which no darkness can overpower, we are to shine in the darkness of our own time that others may find him and be set free to walk in his light. Although today we were not literally given candles, let us nonetheless resolve to live and walk in the light of Christ, and to help others experience that same wonderful light in their lives.



Wednesday, January 13, 2021

The Divinity of Christ

I keep an eye on just a handful of blogs. One of them I really value is the work of Canon John Twisleton.

Appropriately, for St Hilary’s day, he put on his blog this talk on the divinity of Christ from today’s Eucharist at St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath. It is such an inspiring message for these times.  So, I have decided to share the post with you in its entirety, and encourage you to check Fr Twisleton’s blog from thime to time.


I want to share something about the divinity of Christ picking up on our readings and our saint for today, St Hilary of Poitier who lived in the 4th century. 


In his day there was widespread denial of the divinity of Christ. Bishop Hilary’s contending with great grace against this error is celebrated in the collect or prayer for today: ‘Everlasting God, whose servant Hilary steadfastly confessed your Son Jesus Christ to be both human and divine: grant us his gentle courtesy to bring to all the message of redemption in the incarnate Christ’.


HOW DO PEOPLE SEE JESUS? 


In today’s Gospel from Mark 1:29-39 we heard of Our Lord preaching and healing in Galilee. The healings and miracles are seen as pointers to his divinity. We also heard from the letter to the Hebrews of his humanity, of how ‘he [became] completely like (us) so that he could… atone for human sins…’ (Hebrews 2:17)


How do we see Jesus? The Church sees him as truly God and truly human. Without his divinity the Cross would be emptied of power to save. Without his humanity, Our Lord’s becoming like us, the saving work of his dying and rising would not reach into our lives as it has into the lives of half the world’s population today.


How do people see Jesus? Muslims have their answer - Jesus, Isa, peace be upon him, is the human prophet waiting with Allah to judge the world on the last day. Hindus see Jesus as a god among the many gods they honour. Buddhists honour Jesus as a teacher. The question ‘who do you think Jesus is?’ has many answers but it’s worth encouraging people to ask it and helping them attain the full picture.


‘The name of Jesus is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world’ wrote philosopher Ralph Emerson.


William Lecky the Irish historian of rationalism wrote: ‘Christ has exerted so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists’


To get a perspective on the universality of Jesus we can follow endless tributes from people far from the Christian fold who cannot begrudge the universal significance of Jesus. Napoleon Bonaparte in Elba, after much study of the life and character of Jesus, wrote ‘From first to last, Jesus is the same; always the same - majestic and simple, infinitely severe and infinitely gentle..... I know men; and I tell you that Jesus is not a man. Everything in Him amazes me… He is truly a being by Himself...great with a greatness that crushes me. I defy you to cite another life like that of Christ’.


In the words of Victor Hugo ‘Pythagoras, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, these are the torches of the world; Christ is the light of day.’ With the coming of Jesus the world has experienced something unique that twenty centuries have yet to plumb the depths of.


‘It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus’ as someone put it, reflecting that in measuring this Man we find ourselves lost for a standard in human terms.


The atheist Rousseau admitted that ‘It would have been a greater miracle to invent such a life as Christ’s than to be it’.


‘Christ is not valued at all unless he is valued above all’ wrote St. Augustine of Hippo echoing his 4th century contemporary, today’s Saint Hilary of Poitiers, who reflecting on the person of Christ wrote: ‘The One who comes from the perfect, is perfect because he has all, he has given all’.


The novelist Dostoyevsky wrote ‘there has never been anyone lovelier, deeper or more sympathetic than Jesus’. The unique warmth, simplicity and humanity of Jesus challenge anyone who picks up a Bible. Is there any figure in history to rival Jesus?  Even the atheist Rousseau said: ‘it would have been a greater miracle to invent such a life as Christ’s than to be it’.


In his book ‘What the Bible teaches’ R.A.Torrey gives this summary: ‘Jesus Christ is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-present. He is from all eternity, always the same, in the form of God. In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in a bodily way. Jesus is linked to our creation, preservation, the forgiveness of sin, the raising of the dead, judgement and the bestowal of eternal life. Jesus Christ is a person to be worshipped by angels and mortals, even as God the Father is worshipped.’


As we offer the eucharist on this feast of St Hilary we pray for the Holy Spirit to confirm this faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man in us and use us as the collect prayed ‘to bring to all the message of redemption in the incarnate Christ’.


‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ John 3:16