As it is often noted, Christmas seems to begin earlier and earlier every year: certain newspapers can be almost guaranteed to have a letter sometime in the autumn expressing incredulity at the Christmas display the writer has seen on the local high street. One consequence of this is that as soon as we get past Boxing Day – St Stephen’s Day, that is – everyone is heartily sick of the whole thing, while for Christians the Christmas period has only just begun.
Here at Holy Cross, Leicester, we resist this firmly. The Magi have made their way across the sanctuary to the crib in the north transept, and that crib will remain in situ until the Feast of the Presentation. It is with this cel-ebration, otherwise known as Candlemas, that February begins (nearly), and we might think of it as the last hurrah of Christmas. At the same time, Lent is only around the corner, and there is a little shadow of Lenten dark-ness even on this feast of light, when the prophet Simeon tells Jesus’s mother that he is “destined to be a sign that is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own soul too”. It is a foreshadowing of the sorrows of Our Lady at the foot of the Cross.
Nevertheless, this is fundamentally a feast of light: a day when by tradition the church candles are blessed for another year, remind-ing us that every lighted candle symbolises the presence of Christ among his people and, particularly in churches, his especial presence in his holy temple. Simeon’s prayer of thanksgiving to God, the Nunc Dimittis, is a recognition that the humanity of Jesus is, from the very beginning of his life among us, a fulfilment of the hope of Israel and indeed the vocation of Israel, that she should be “a light to enlighten the pagans”. Simeon here echoes the prophecy of Isaiah, who several times speaks of all the peoples of the earth being drawn to Israel as to a light.
For example, in Isaiah 60 we read “the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn” (Is 60:2f). Earlier we see “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Is 49:6). It might be objected that this passage is addressed not to the whole of Israel but to the prophet himself, but this is one of the many passages in Isaiah, especially the latter part of the book, where the identity of the prophet and of the Israel that he addresses seem to blur and merge.
The meaning of this merger only becomes clear with the coming of Christ: it was always the vocation of Israel to be the light of the world, her temple a city set on a hilltop not to be hidden from the nations but to draw them to its light; but it was only in the person of Jesus that Israel truly seized this vocation. That temple in which Jesus was presented comprised several segregated areas: the Court of Gentiles, the Court of Women, the Court of Israel, the Court of Priests and so on, with the very centre, the Holy of Holies, cut off by a veil from the sight of anyone. What should have been a lamp set on a lampstand instead was like a candle covered over by many bushels!
But Jesus’s first appearance in the temple, in which he was recognised as the true light, foreshadowed how he would tear down the divides that separated humanity from God. As St Paul says, in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek … there is no longer male and female” (Gal 3:28). And as he died on the Cross, his mother looking on in sorrow, the veil of the temple was torn in two.
This is why the two themes of light and temple are interwoven in this feast, which simultaneously celebrates the Incarnation and anticipates the Crucifixion. Jesus is the true light and the true temple, the dwelling of God among humanity who comes to draw all people to God and to invite them to share in his life. Whenever we light a candle in church, we remind ourselves not only of who Jesus is but also of that invitation to share, by our participation in his divine life, in his identity as the light of the world.
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