Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
Today we mark the Feast of the Presentation. It comes forty days after Christmas. The forty days is from the Jewish law that imposed forty days of ritual uncleanness on new mothers; so this was the first time that Mary was allowed back in the Temple. We Protestants do not typically observe the Feast of the Presentation, and I haven’t preached on it in thirty years, but it happens to fall on a Sunday this year, so our lectionary insert observes it, and that’s why we end up observing it too.
You might notice that Luke’s Gospel never mentions the Visit of the Magi or the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt. Those are all reported by Matthew, and it is difficult to harmonize their two accounts. I’m not going to try. But there are parallels. In both accounts, two or three people surprise Mary and Joseph with strange news about their baby’s identity, which they wonder at, and the glory of that news brings with it danger, division, and the sword. Here already is the hint of tragedy, the underlying tension, and the intimation of great sacrifice.
“This child is destined for the falling and 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.” That’s what Simeon says to Mary! What a year it’s been for her, ten months and a week, from when the angel Gabriel first told her of her pregnancy. Then she visited her cousin Elizabeth, and she sang her song, the Magnificat, in which she already prophesied the falling and rising of many. Then was her forced journey to Bethlehem, and the birth, and the shepherds, who told her of the concert of the angels, which confirmed what Gabriel had told her. Now this encounter in the Temple, two months short of a year.
In that time the characters sang four new songs, the new birth songs, the Canticles of Luke: the Magnificat by Mary, the Benedictus by Zechariah, the Gloria in Excelsis of the angels to the shepherds, and now the final one, the Nunc Dimittis, the Song of Simeon.
These four canticles have come to frame the day in the tradition of daily prayer. At Morning Prayer you say the Benedictus, at Midday Eucharist the Gloria, at Evening Prayer the Magnificat, and at Compline, at bedtime, the Nunc Dimittis. The four canticles have been set to music so many times in so many ways that the history of Western Music is inconceivable without them.
The Song of Simeon was given a lovely tune by the Calvinists, and I used to sing it in Hungarian at funerals in my first congregation. It’s a shame we’ve lost it in America. And I’m sorry that our lectionary insert does not set it out as poetry, but we can tell it’s poetry by its strophic lines and by its terse and suggestive language. Robert Frost once said that poetry is that which is lost in translation. I am no poet, but let me try to do better than our insert does with it:
“Now let go your slave, Master,
by your word, in peace,
as my eyes have seen your salvation,
that you prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to nations,
and glory to your people Israel.”
Those words amazed the father and the mother when they heard it. Of course they already knew their boy was special. Mary had been told by Gabriel that her son would be the Messiah. But to call him the “glory of Israel” was to put him inside God’s own glory. And to call him “a light for revelation to nations” was to open up new vistas with the Gentiles that they could hardly yet imagine.
Simeon holds the baby in his arms as he lifts his eyes to heaven and chants his poem. Then he blesses them both, and he hands their baby back to them and he says that prophecy of falling and rising and the sword, and I can imagine Mary holding her baby close to protect him from the future. Joseph is carrying their two turtledoves, to be killed, and they can smell the other sacrificial animals, and they can hear the chanting of the Levites and the bleating and shrieking of the animals as the Levites pierce them with their knives, a Slaughter of the Innocents. Mary holds on to the baby she loves in the midst of terrors larger than herself.
The piercing of Mary is the consolation of Simeon. He has seen what God had promised him, and he can die in peace. He will not have to see what Mary will witness in her life. She will see the rising opposition to her son. She will see the division of her people on his account and even her own family. She will see the dark thoughts of many revealed because of him. And she will watch him being killed and the piercing of his side. The are dark powers out there that she cannot save him from.
The piercing and the consolation, the comfort and the sacrifice—is this the way that God desires it, or is it rather that God is so much “with us” that God accommodates the way of the world in the misery of its rebellion? Does God’s own heart get pierced—like mother, like father? Does mother Mary stand for God the Father? God’s piercing for our consolation. Do our grief and consolation probe the heart of God, and is God “with us” in our grief about the pain and evil in the world?
We are always dealing with powers of evil out there that are bigger than our sins and that leverage our sins and cause us grief. One of those powers is what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls the devil, which, in that epistle’s theology, has the power of death. Maybe so. And in that epistle’s theology, the so-called “atonement” is God’s moral exchange of good and evil that frees us from our slavery to the fear of death. Is it possible to grieve without the fear of death? I believe so, and I invite you to believe that the final word is God’s consolation, and for all the peoples of the world.
The last time I sang the Song of Simeon in Hungarian was in 1985, at the funeral of an old man that I loved, Csatari Janos. I had been with him and his grandson at his death, at home, just behind our parsonage. At his funeral I began to sing it, and at the second line I broke down and I couldn’t finish it. I had never cried in church before. Why was I crying? Well, for Csatari Janos, and for his family that I loved, and I think also for my grandmother, my favorite person in the world, who had died just a month before, and whose funeral had been cold and correct and unemotional.
But I think I was also crying for myself, because I was feeling hurt by God, and I wanted God to let me go. I had just been turned down for two different promotions in the Reformed Church, one of them at the seminary and one at the Collegiate Church, and though I knew it was partly my fault, I still felt it was unfair, and there were powers at work too big for me. I was pierced in my heart, and I’d had about enough of God, and I needed to grieve, and this Song of Simeon brought it all out of me. “Now master, let go of your slave.” I was sorely aggrieved at God.
None of us like to have our hearts revealed. We don’t like to be exposed. You like it that no one can read your mind. But I needed to have my inner thoughts revealed, at least to myself, and even to my congregation in the form of my tears. I needed to be pierced, and opposed, and fall, and rise. I needed to face the truth about myself, but also find some consolation.
It turned out that the funeral was marvelous, and very Hungarian, with two days afterward of feasting and dancing with the family that I loved. Even at death, we were freed from slavery to death. And I was comforted. It was my consolation.
Was God behind that consolation? Maybe so. Did I have to go through falling and rising and encounter opposition? Apparently so, to be freed from my slavery to myself. Did my inner thoughts have to be revealed? I’m glad they were. It is God’s way with us.
It is God’s way to take us through falling and rising and opposition to be freed from our worst slavery, which is to ourselves, and then it is God’s way to make us an offer: the offer to be servants of love. I invite you to accept this calling for yourself, to be a servant of the love of God.
Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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