Candlemas 2025

8:00am - Holy Communion

11:00am - Sung Eucharist

Candlemas, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, comes at the end of the cycle of the year which runs from Advent to the end of Epiphany and focuses on the Incarnation, Christ’s coming into the world for us and for our salvation.

So here we are in our Gospel, in the temple, in Jerusalem, with Simeon and Anna, the baby Jesus and his parents. Simeon gives thanks because he has seen his salvation and can go in peace.

The story is only told in Luke’s Gospel. Luke is the only one of the Gospel writers who we can be fairly certain was a non-Jew, a Gentile. As a Gentile he would not have been allowed into the temple himself, but like many God-fearing Gentiles he was fascinated by the Jewish temple. He certainly writes about it more than the other Gospel writers. One of the strangest things about the Jewish temple for Gentiles was that it had no vast statue representing the deity. Just a space, where the image should have been: the Holy of Holies. Yet in other ways the Jewish temple was like any other, bigger than many, as it had recently been vastly extended and expanded in the reign of Herod the Great, the Herod who was visited by the Wise Men. So the Temple was a magnificent edifice, stretching over Mount Zion. If you go to Jerusalem you can see how impressive it must have been.

The temple had a treasury and its own coinage. Huge amounts of money were exchanged every day. And it would have smelt like an abattoir, with the constant shedding of blood: sacrifice in the morning, sacrifice in the evening, sacrifices offered all day by visitors like Mary and Joseph, who could only afford the cheapest offering, two small birds. No wonder they needed incense to disguise the smell of blood.

Yet here they Joseph and Mary, with the infant Jesus, at the heart of Jewish life: think Westminster Abbey, the National Bank and Smithfield meat market all rolled into one. Power, glory, money, blood.

And in the shadows, Simeon and Anna. Two old survivors, who lurk about the Holy Place saying their prayers and not being noticed. Yet they are the ones who recognise Jesus as the light to lighten the Gentiles and prophesy that he will be for the fall and rising of many in Israel.

We could leave the story there with a few helpful remarks about the role of the elderly Simeon and Anna in maintaining the faith, or the example of Joseph and Mary in offering what they can afford.

But Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is a feast which looks two ways, as we begin the turn from the incarnation to the Passion. If you come here to the cathedral tomorrow our crib will have gone. And if you come to the Carol Service tonight, you will mark that turn from Christmas towards Lent.

The temple comes again into Luke’s Gospel again as he tells us of Jesus going to Jerusalem as a boy of 12, and again he is with Mary and Joseph. On this occasion Jesus misses the moment to set off for home and stays on in the temple to talk to the temple clergy. Here we can imagine, are the priests and the lawyers, the theological, liturgical and ritual experts. Jesus, only twelve, is eventually found in their company, listening to them and asking them questions, questions and answers and more questions, and he seems rather annoyed to be interrupted by his anxious parents, ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s House?’ he asks, rather peremptorily, I always think. But that’s teenagers for you. The story foreshadows what is to come, because later in the Gospel Jesus often teaches by asking questions, devastating questions, though they appear so simple and direct,

Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm?

Where is your faith?

Why do you call me good?

What is written in the law, what do you read there?

David calls him Lord: so how can he be his Son?

Whose head and title does this coin bear?

These are questions that rock the foundations, questions that question the whole priestly, sacrificial and financial system. And as Jesus asks questions he is also becoming a question, Who do you say that I am? Who do you say that I am?

The third time Jesus visits the temple is after his entry into Jerusalem when he overturns the tables of the money changers, and sets himself up in the temple precincts, teaching, challenging, getting into argument, noticing the poor widow with her two copper coins, and then, to the horror of his listeners; prophesying that the temple would be destroyed.

There are many scholars of the New Testament who believe that this is what finally did for Jesus because this prophecy was a bombshell under the foundations of faith and nationhood, heresy, blasphemy and sedition all in one. And as we recall that, we might remember Simeon giving the baby Jesus back into the arms of Mary, blessing them, and warning Mary that the time would come when a sword would pierce her heart.

Luke sees it all in his Gospel. And as we listen today we discover that though the way to glory may begin at the cradle but the way to glory only reaches home via Calvary.

The warning for us is what we already half know. We do not come to fulfilment except by way of challenge and suffering, that there is an unavoidable stripping of the soul in our ordinary mortal living and dying. That the end is mercy.

We have learnt a lot recently about corruption and sinfulness in all our institutions including the Church. We have seen that aspects of ‘the temple’: our political, financial and religious establishment, are rotten to the core. But it is you, the worshippers who perhaps quite often lurk in the shadows like Simeon and Anna and perhaps don’t feel you have much to contribute, who even in the midst of the corruption can still see and live in the light who is the light to the nations and the glory of God’s own people.

The strength to endure, not only in faith, but in joy and surrender is given to us in this Eucharist: ‘Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee..’ or in the words of our Collect: ‘Grant that we may be presented to you with pure and clean hearts by your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’. He offers us himself, we offer ourselves to him and through him, today with a look back to the mystery of Christmas and tomorrow with a look forward to the mystery of Easter.

Angela Tilby