[Today]…Christians keep the feast of Candlemas, 40 days after Christmas. For some it will be kept this Sunday. Candlemas, with its candle procession and theme of light, commemorates the story in St Luke’s Gospel of the child Jesus being brought to the Temple in Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord. As Mary and Joseph carry the child into the Temple, two old and devout people, Simeon and Anna, meet them. Simeon, Luke tells us, has looked for “the consolation of Israel”. The word translated consolation is the word that St John uses for the Holy Spirit ”” “the Paraclete”, a word that means advocate, comforter, even goader. Simeon is longing for transformation and deliverance, for God’s salvation to come to his people. He longs for liberation in a land that is occupied territory, he longs for transformation and renewal, which is the “paracleting”, the Holy Spiriting of his people.
Simeon, with his rheumy eyes, encounters a child carried in by two poor parents. Suddenly he sees in this child the salvation he desires. He bursts out into the great cry of thanksgiving that we know as the Nunc Dimittis. “Lord, now you can let your servant go in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation!” This song of Simeon, rightly used at funerals, is often heard as a lament, a gentle commendation, but in the story of the Presentation in the Temple, as Luke tells it, is rather a great cry of triumph. In the same way at the end of the Creed Christians “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”. This is no casual glancing forward, but the burning hope that waits with longing expectation for the transfiguring of our earthly bodies and the fulfilment of eternal life.