Introduction
Today we mark a turning point in the Christian year. Today’s celebration marks the ending of the Christmas season and the beginning of our looking towards the keeping of Lent, the marking of Holy Week and the celebration of Easter. Today is the celebration of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, a celebration also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Candlemass.
Exposition
So what is it that we celebrate today?
In the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament we are told that a Jewish woman who has given birth to a male child should remain separate from her everyday life for forty days after the child’s birth. After the forty days are over she is to come to the temple and make an offering to God before resuming her normal life. For those who can afford it the offering is to be a pigeon and a lamb, but for poorer people two pigeons will suffice. In our Gospel reading today we hear of how Joseph brings Mary to the temple to make that offering forty days after the birth of Jesus. We can imagine the couple nervously entering the great temple in Jerusalem; Joseph watching carefully over Mary as she carries her baby in her arms, just another young couple coming to fulfil the laws demands.
To the temple officials it would have been just another routine moment. And yet this was a moment which had been anticipated for generations. The child that Mary carried in her arms was not just another child but the long awaited Messiah whose coming had been predicted by the prophets. More than that, in this child the God to whom this temple complex was dedicated had come in flesh amongst his people. Isaiah had spoken of a child who would be Emmanuel, God-with-us, and now in Mary’s arms that God-with-us had come at last to his temple.
As I’ve said, it was a moment which had been long anticipated. When the temple had first been built, at the time of its dedication, God had come in power and glory and filled the temple with his presence. The temple history, written in the books of Chronicles in the Old Testament, tells us “the temple was filled with the cloud of the glory of the Lord” (2 Chron 5.13).
However, before that temple was destroyed about four hundred years later the prophet Ezekiel writes of way in which God’s glory leaves the temple so that the temple becomes simply an empty shell. When the temple had been rebuilt fifty years later God’s glory did not return to it. But prophets continued to promise that one day that glory would return. So in our Old Testament reading today Malachi states “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”.
And when that moment came it came unobserved by those who were charged with the care and maintenance of the great house of God. Yet it did not go completely unobserved. There were in the temple a number of elderly people who spent their days in the temple offering their lives to God in prayer and worship. One of those was a man named Simeon. He was so close to God that he heard God speaking to him, and God had promised him that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah. When he saw the baby Jesus he took him in his arms and praised God for him. There was a prophetess too, named Anna and she too recognized the glory of God in tiny child and spoke of him to others who were looking out for him. For those who made the time, whose eyes were open God’s glory had come among them, the words of the prophets had been fulfilled and a new era had dawned. But for most of the crowds in that Temple it was business as usual. They were too important, to busy or too distracted to recognize their God in this tiny unnoticed child.
Application
And what of us? We live in a franticly busy world where there is so much to do and so much to distract us. Even when we come into Church there are friends to talk to, meetings to arrange, and information to be exchanged. We just can’t spare the space and time to recognise that Christ is among us. Yet he is. Unnoticed and un-remarked he is present in our worship and present in our daily lives if only we will make the space and time to notice him.