Photo credit: Carla J Roth
Luke 2: 22-40, Hebrews 2: 14-18, Malachi 3: 1-4
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, just and devout… and the Holy Spirit rested upon him (Luke 2: 25).
ACCORDING TO TRADITIONS that go back to the fourth and fifth centuries in the Eastern church, it is the festival of Candlemas – marking the formal presentation of the new-born Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem – which finally brings the Christmas season to an end [1], following the sequence set out in chapter two of Luke’s Gospel. The name Candlemas, unsurprisingly, developed from the tradition of celebrating it with the lighting and parading of candles, symbolising Christ as the Light of God to all peoples.
In Luke’s account of the Presentation, Christ is both the anticipated deliverer of the people from captivity, but also a stumbling block for ‘business as usual’ as far as religion and nationhood are concerned. At the centre of Luke’s story are two figures, Simeon and Anna. The prophetess Anna speaks of the child with the voice of those living in expectation of the deliverance of Jerusalem from Roman occupation.
Simeon is simply described as “a devout and just man” living in Jerusalem. He is pointedly neither a member of the wealthy priestly caste that ran the temple, nor of Judea’s regular upper-class citizenry whose members sought to emulate the Roman aristocracy and who lived in the shadow of Herod’s opulent mansion to the west in the Upper City. Instead, as is so often the case in the gospels, it is an otherwise marginal figure who finds himself the vehicle of divine insight into the true meaning and destiny of this child from Nazareth.
As we read: “Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘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’.’” (Luke 2: 34, 35a). He goes on to describe Christ as a light to the Gentiles, to those well outside his own tribe and nation, as well as a blessing and honour to his own people. As Simeon rightly discerns in his words, Jesus the Light of the World will always be a stumbling block and a problem those who wish to preserve the ethnic and religious purity of their own, to exclude those they deem impure and alien, or to restrict God’s love to kith and kin.
Divine love challenges the distinctions we make between insiders and outsiders. This message is echoed again and again throughout the gospels. When religion denies people dignity, forsakes the marginalised, and restricts our concerns to those who are like us, it abandons the God made known to us in the flesh – the one who is described as “merciful and faithful” in our reading from the Epistle, and who ministers to humanity in and through suffering (Hebrews 2:18).
Over the past few weeks we have seen how this radical gospel of love, mercy and justice for strangers as well as siblings, outsiders as well as insiders, enemies as well as friends, still has the capacity to shock and anger some who love to shout “Lord, Lord” – but who in doing so reduce Christ to a tribal deity by refusing to acknowledge that through him (to quote St John) “God so loved the world”, not simply those they favour.
First, the 47th US President and his supporters were outraged at Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s application of the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes, recorded in Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” She could equally have been preaching from Luke, incidentally, which has the width of divine mercy – compassion to, and identification with, those in need – as one of its leitmotifs. In this context, it is worth quoting the bishop’s words in full.
Have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.
May God grant us all the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and with God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world. [2]
Does it not astonish us that such words could be construed as hateful and un-Christian (as some suggested on social media), and that the human empathy they embody could be described as ‘evil’ by a US pastor? Sadly, it should not. For as Simeon foresaw, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel” (and the US, and Britain, and any other nation or group you may like to mention) “and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”
Following on from the row over Bishop Budde’s sermon, a couple of days later the US Vice President revealed his own inner thoughts. He sought to reinterpret love of neighbour as concentric circles of favour and feeling focussed primarily on our own family, people and nation. He tried to support this by misusing Augustine’s ordo amoris (order of love) [3]. The VP’s outlook is actually based not on the words and actions of Jesus, but on the Roman rhetorician Cicero.
Imperial theology is what the gospel contends, rather than affirms. JD Vance is using a hierarchy of concern and affection to demean ‘foreigners’ and to justify policies like the mass deportations of migrants. As was pointed out in response to him (by commentator Rory Stewart, among others [4]) the message of Christ, in contrast, is about a love that breaks barriers rather than erecting them. It actively welcomes those the world (and not infrequently the religious) deem alien or surplus to requirements, rather than dismissing them.
In Luke’s famous rendition of the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is the religious and ethnic other who is the test of whether our humanity is capable of being moved beyond self-preservation and self-justification towards a love of neighbour which is about the need and vulnerability of who is in front of us, not who is convenient or sympathetic to us. That is part of the deep conversion of the heart and will that the gospel calls us to, both personally and even more so as a community of the baptised.
As philosopher, theologian and activist Cornel West aptly puts it: “Just as tenderness is what love looks like in private, so justice is what love looks like in public.” The true church, the one that seeks first God’s realm and the challenging way of Christ, will therefore always see the global in the local and the local in the global. That, I think, is what we are trying to do here at St James, in seeking to offer support and welcome both to those in our neighbourhood and to those whose need for love, mercy and justice comes to us from many unexpected parts of a tormented world.
Turning back to the account of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple in Luke, we cannot but note how inherited religious understandings of purity and purification are set aside. First, see what is downplayed. Ritual purification in the Temple arose from the belief that women were rendered unclean by the birth of a child. For 40 days after the birth of a boy, and 60 days after a girl, women were not allowed to worship in the temple. At the end of this time, they were brought there, or to a synagogue, to be purified and their child dedicated to the service of the temple. Only after this ceremony they were allowed to take part in religious observance again.
Luke’s narrative effectively bypasses these inherited ideas of purity and impurity. Instead, he employs the words of Simeon and Anna to make Jesus the purifier of the temple (that is, the human religious institution) rather than the other way round. To adapt the words of Malachi, God’s messenger, the Messiah, “is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap (a harsh, alkaline substance used to clean cloth) “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them.” The Levites – Jewish males claiming patrilineal descent from Jacob and the Tribe of Levi – were part of the priestly elite who ran the temple. In Luke chapter 19 Jesus the refiner goes on to confront imperial power by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and in the very same movement he overturns the tables of the money-changers in the temple. What he is challenging here, by the way, is not some aberration of a twinned system of politics and religion. It is the system itself.
So where does such a gospel or radical love and mercy leave us today? Where it leaves the organised church and much of what passes for Christianity right now, I believe (not just in America, but here too), is in need of purification by the Spirit of Christ through those he came to minister to. The last who Jesus puts first. The outcasts, the refugees, the sick, the suffering, the despised, the abused: all those rejected by a world organised around greed rather than need. For in our age, as much as in his own time, “this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many.” The point and promise of the gospel, however, is that in repentance for our continual falling and failing, we can and will be raised again and again. Let that be our prayer and our commitment.
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NOTES
[1] In 542 the Byzantine Emperor Justinian decreed that this festival should be moved back from 40 days after Epiphany, then celebrated as Christ’s birthday, to 2nd February, 40 days after 25 December.
[2] The full sermon, preached at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on 21 January 2025, is reproduced here.
[3] For a short guide to Augustine’s actual argument, see Dawson Vosburg, ‘Wait, What does Vance think Augustine said about love?’ published in Sojourners, 5 February 2025.
[4] See commentary from Novara Media on the Vance-Stewart argument. Vance disposes love as a feeling, and therefore prioritises the felt relationships of kith and kin. In the gospel, love is the re-ordering of relationships beyond ‘the natural’, and therefore extends even to the stranger, the alien and the enemy.
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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is slightly adapted from a sermon preached for Candlemas at St James, Leith, on 2 February 2025.