Candlemas

Sermon preached by the Reverend Olga Fabrikant-Burke

Today we celebrate an ancient feast, known to us perhaps most familiarly as Candlemas, but also as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ or, alternatively, as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. The feast is the same, but each name brings out a different dimension of this occasion. The word “Candlemas”, literally the feast of the candles, draws our attention firmly to the striking words uttered by the aged Simeon. In the infant Christ, Simeon discerns the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation, “a light to lighten the Gentiles”. On the other hand, the seemingly mundane presentation and purification pick up on the opening words of our Gospel reading which cast the whole episode as the fulfilment of the core Mosaic rules and regulations. Candlemas, in other words, highlights the universal dimension of this feast—Jesus as light to the world—while Presentation and Purification foreground the particular—Jesus as the fulfilment of the law of Moses given to the people of Israel. 

But if that was not enough, this elusive feast goes by yet another name that I would like to commend to you. Today, you see, is among the most ancient feasts of the Christian Church, and it is common both to the Church in the West and the Church in the East. The East, as is often the case, has put its own subtle spin on it. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is usually called the Meeting of Christ in the Temple. In fact, it is often shortened to simply Hypapantḗ, which literally means “meeting” in Greek (Ὑπαπαντή). So today we celebrate the Meeting of Christ in the Temple or simply the Meeting. For me, it is the word “meeting”, “encounter”, that powerfully captures the essence of what we are marking today. Not just any encounter or meeting, to be sure, but one that brings together and heals divisions, reconciles and gives hope. 

Through the window of our Gospel today, we bear witness to a whole host of transforming encounters. In the first instance, Luke tells us of a poignant meeting between the young and the old. The infant Jesus meets the elderly Simeon and Anna. There is a meeting between the old law of Moses and the new law of Christ, the law and the gospel. There is a meeting between the Son, the second person of the Trinity, and the Father, to whom the Son is presented in the Temple. There is a meeting, of course, between the incarnate God, the Lord Jesus Christ, with his people, Israel, represented by the man Simeon and the woman Anna. There is a meeting between God and humanity. 

But there is another meeting that is unfolding before us, which we can see just out of the corner of our eye. It is a meeting between the particular and the universal. In 

Luke’s Gospel, these binary opposites—the particular and the universal, the local and the global, the nation and the world, the self and humanity—meet together, even collide perhaps, to be ultimately reconciled and redeemed. Or we might say that today is a meeting between the universality-affirming feast of Candlemas on the one hand and the particularity-stressing feasts of the Presentation and Purification on the other. And the two are joined together in the feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple. 

The issue of universalism and particularism could not be more pressing, of course. Having exited the European Union, Britain now faces the formidable task of striking the right balance between the particular and the universal, the local and the global in her own political, social, and cultural life. I ordered a parcel from an Italian website the other day and was faced with a hefty customs bill. The reality of Brexit is kicking in. The ongoing vaccine roll-out puts nations, not least Britain and the EU, in a difficult situation of having to balance commitments to one’s own people with wider business and humanitarian obligations to international partners. The tension between the universal and the particular lies at the heart of contemporary politics, society, and culture, and it is a tension that cuts across the old divides between the left and the right. 

But this tug of war between the universal and the particular is far from a purely political issue. Instead, it is a struggle we experience in our everyday lives. Think of the modern world of technology. The universal has never been closer; the global is, quite literally, at our fingertips. We can follow the events in New Zealand, at the opposite end of the world, with as much detail as we can monitor the happenings in St Bene’t’s Street. What does “community” even mean in this universal age? Conversely, the particular and the local have never been louder. There is nothing preventing us from retreating to our parochial echo chambers on the Internet and putting the rest of the world on mute. Increasingly, we are beginning to see the natural outworking of such online tribalism in our society at large. 

So where should our true centre of gravity be? Our passage today, by masterfully interweaving the particular and the universal, offers us a vision of the two in their interdependence and indivisibility, charting a course beyond false dilemmas and rigid dichotomies. 

On the one hand, God reaches the universal through the particular. In fact, we would be hard pressed to find a more “particular” story in the New Testament, where its historical and cultural specificity is more obvious and more vividly depicted. The whole episode takes place at the Jerusalem Temple, the supreme religious centre of the Jewish people. Jesus is brought there in fulfilment of the laws of Leviticus, given as a divine gift exclusively to the Jews. Yes, Simeon refers to Jesus as “a light to lighten 

the Gentiles”, but the pertinent point is that the Gentiles are still called Gentiles. There is no hint of a generic brotherhood of man here. Salvation comes to the whole world through a Jewish Messiah, the perfect Israelite, and one day, we are told, he will glorify his people Israel. 

God, then, embraces and honours the particular; he is not disdainful of it. The gospel becomes rooted in the specific particularities of our cultural, social, and political lives. We live out our Christian callings within specific contexts, with their own peculiar sets of challenges and opportunities. Called to serve particular places and people, we are equipped with particular gifts and passions, unique voices and have original contributions to make. 

It is, arguably, an important and inescapable feature of the human condition that we comprehend and express the global through the local, the universal through the particular, the human through the individual. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says, “The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours”. Or in the punchy words of Dostoevsky, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love people in particular”. 

And yet, throughout this episode in the Temple, in all its particularity, the universal is relentlessly bursting through. Although both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel, they both become instruments in service of something that is universal and global, and meant for all. “For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles”. 

The reality is that we worship a universal God on a universal mission. Paradoxically, the national, particular destiny of Israel is to bless the whole world. The particular has to make room for the universal, in obedience to the divine purposes that propel Israel, and all of us listening today, beyond ourselves, beyond the narrow confines of self-interest and insular pursuits. The gospel has a universal force that links all human beings everywhere, in all generations and in all nations, quite apart from our particular languages, cultures, or backgrounds, as significant and precious as those are. 

So, where does all this leave us? Alas, when it comes to the universal and the particular, Luke provides us with neither ready-made solutions nor easy paths to success. But I find myself returning to the word “meeting”: the meeting, the coming 

together, of often opposing forces, in an encounter that reconciles and restores harmony where discord reigned supreme. 

It seems to me that our Gospel this morning challenges us to hold together what the world around us wants to tear asunder: the law and the gospel, humanity and God, the old and the young, and, indeed, the universal and the particular. It is not an easy task to bring these two together, but it is a task to which we are called and of which we are reminded as we celebrate the Meeting of our Lord in the Temple. Amen.