Sermon preach at the Sung Eucharist on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple 2025

Candlemas, for all its focus on babies, and candles, and lights to lighten nations, Candlemas, this feast, is a work of chiaroscuro; the opposition of light and dark. Artists often depict Simeon holding a shining infant, swaddled so tightly he can barely breathe, set against a background of inky darkness. And they are right, because light and dark, old and new, life and death cut through this narrative, leaving its characters, (and us, the more we engage with it) both delighted and disconcerted; comforted and cut-to-the-quick.

First, we might remember why Mary and Joseph have come to the Temple at all. Mary is here to be purified—a strange notion to us. But any shedding of blood, even in childbirth, needed to be made right before the One to whom all blood, all life, is owed. We may suspect misogyny at work here, or at the very least a story prone to misogynistic reading. But perhaps there is a special recognition here of the significant perils of childbirth, the risk to life (now as then). Any of us might need some reassurance of God’s mercy after such an ordeal, almost like returning from a battle; to reintegrate and settle us back into the covenant community after this massive physical upheaval—not quite a spa day, but a kind of spiritual decompression. Perhaps this purification is about recognising the particular risk, the special jeopardy of childbirth, which is asked only of women in the creation, and in the story of God’s people? God purifies those whom he asks to do difficult, demanding tasks—tasks that take them to the edge of what the community can stomach, in order to bless and renew that same community. Still, there is no doubt a concern about blood; the danger of some kind of hubris, or forgetfulness of the One to whom all life is owed.

And Joseph is clutching those two birds because Jesus is their firstborn, and since the death of the firstborn of Egypt, in the time of Moses and of Israel’s liberation, all firstborn males were owed to God in gratitude. There is history here: a history of glorious liberation, but also of terrible bloodshed; not just those expendable firstborn, but also the collateral damage in the Red Sea. Memory is being kept alive, and it is dark as much as it is light; there is joy, and there is also the terrible price that was paid. Again, forgetfulness and hubris are the dangers, and Mary and Joseph are obedient to the Law that mitigates against both.

But then Simeon intervenes; the old man relieved to have finally seen what he had been promised; signing-off after a lifetime of strenuous righteousness and devotion—Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace. He speaks of salvation and light and glory, not just for Israel, but for all humankind.

But then, in that disconcerting way that sometimes happens right in the middle of something lovely, Simeon is suddenly saying something rather sharp and disconcerting into Mary’s ear. It might have sounded like a disinhibited outburst from a slightly fragile mind, or like the unhinged outpouring of an old conspiracist, but it is rapier-sharp.

'This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.'

Dark stuff. Shocking. Perhaps Mary’s mind flitted back to that ointment offered to her boy by a Magus no more than a week or two earlier. Strange gift for one so recently born. Stranger still when contrasted to those words that have surrounded his birth, from angels and mortals, full of promise and hope—a light for revelation, a salvation that can be seen, the Son of the Most High, Glory to God in the highest. Simeon’s latter words to Mary provide an ominous contrast—a shaft of darkness.

We all know that everything that is born will die, but most of us don’t say it quite so early, other than perhaps the most courageous of priests at a baptism. Why couldn’t silly old Simeon just keep it to himself? What use is this terrible prediction to his poor, poor mother? She can hardly protect herself, even less prepare.

But before I turn Simeon into an unfeeling monster, he will not be the last person openly to predict opposition, rejection, and suffering. Jesus himself will say such things, and his disciples will be equally appalled, scandalised, horrified. The suffering and death of the Son of God is what makes the gospel compelling—it implies that this story has something to do with us, who also suffer and die; who live in the same sharp interplay of light and dark.

(Jesus) had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest.

As we heard in the epistle.

We all find this chiaroscuro hard to manage; the staggering beauty and the consuming horror. We don’t want to be reminded of our mortality, or the possibility of suffering, and it feels like falling off a cliff when those reminders come; when old Simeons, and solemn professionals tell us of swords that will pierce our own souls too.

It is hard sometimes not to despair at the darkness. The great spiritual teachers remind us that the darkness has much to teach us, and that there are some exquisitely fragile kinds of light that only darkness enables us to see. But even those of us who don’t support the move towards assisted suicide probably secretly wonder whether it might be quite nice to have a ‘way out’ on offer, if it all gets a bit too much; fighting darkness with oblivion, if that’s all we have to hand. The chiaroscuro is hard to manage—Simeon is twisted this way and that.

So, thank God for Anna. Thank God for this aged daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher—the name that means ‘Happy, Blessed.’

Anna bursts joyously into the scene, belying her great age and all the sorrows she has known, and becomes an early evangelist, the next after those ragged shepherds, speaking of the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. She may not have long to go in this world, but you get the sense that she will go out praising. She is the crazy, reckless voice that after the light and the dark have spoken gravely to one another insists on the victory of light. She is the resurrection of this story; the Magdalen; the one with a tale that many will dismiss as fanciful, the wish-fulfilment of a simple-minded religious nutter—all that fasting and praying night and day would surely addle the mind.

Many of us, I suspect, would be inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at Anna’s kind of faith; a faith that might seem a bit simplistic, unstudied. We might find her hard to cope with from where we are sitting; with the challenges, the darkness we are facing. We might identify much more strongly with the weary Simeon, who sees as much dark as he does light, and has perhaps just had enough. That is not to imply any moral failure or weakness of faith in Simeon or in us; that might just be who and where we are.

We live in the chiaroscuro, it is difficult, but it is light we are promised—the light that darkness cannot finally comprehend or extinguish.

We may be ‘Simeons’, but we will be ‘Annas’—called to endless praise in endless light. And we are all Marys too—we are those who live through the light and the appalling dark, whose souls are often pierced, but who are being purified, not rejected, and brought, by her Son, into the light that eternally shines. Because, as the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, he was made like us in every respect, that through his own testing, his own piercing, he might bring us with him, through death into glory.