“ … my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel ...”
Sunday is Candlemas, the presentation of Jesus in the Temple.
We Baptists don’t observe Candlemas, so the symbolism requires a bit of explication.
For candle, read light.
Candles seem mundane enough now, even inconsequential. As an old Disney buff, my first candle-oriented thoughts are of Lumière, the comical figure voiced by Jerry Orbach in Beauty and the Beast. If I want to think of candles in a grandiose way, I envision the candelabra on Liberace’s piano.
But in darker ages candles were a primary source of light and a vivid symbol of Jesus, “a light for revelation … and for glory.”
The Lutheran liturgy, courtesy of Augsburg Fortress Press, summarizes the passage in Luke as follows:
This story is a study in contrasts: the infant Jesus with the aged prophets; the joy of birth with the ominous words of Simeon to Mary; the faithful fulfilling of the law with the presentation of the one who will release its hold over us. Through it all, we see the light of God's salvation revealed to the world.
And there is an even starker contrast. Mary, the virgin mother, and Jesus the son of God, are in the temple to purge a contaminate that makes them unpresentable in polite society. They are there to wash away the uncleanness of a mother who has given birth to her first male child.
Given who they are, this seems an unnecessary rite, just as Jesus’ baptism by John seems unnecessary. Who could be more perfectly immaculate than the virgin mother and God’s own son?
Yet Mary and Jesus conducted themselves as good Jews throughout their time on earth, and they gladly embraced the cleansing rituals of their religion.
Of course we Christians have rarely questioned these rituals because so many of us think the body is impure, hedonistic, and unsuited as a vessel for the soul.
That’s one reason some well-meaning Christians – even today – scourge their bodies to deny them pleasures that tempt their spirits away from God.
Ten years ago, the retired bishop of Capetown, South Africa, put it this way:
“Long, long ago, very clever people decided that the human body, flesh, all material things, that all of these were in and of themselves, evil, intrinsically, inherently and always,” said Desmond Tutu in a sermon prepared for Candlemas. “So there was no way that the good, the pure, the sublime and, by definition, the perfectly good spirit could be united with the material.”
In modern times, we Christians still tend to regard the pleasures of the body as threats to the soul.
“Have we not sometimes been embarrassed with our physicality,” Tutu asks, “when we have found it attractive to engage in the familiar dichotomies as between the sacred and the secular, the profane and the holy? When we have thought that Original Sin, must somehow have had to do with the facts of life, we snigger a little bit, wink, wink, as if when God said to Adam and Eve, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ God meant that they would do so by perhaps looking into each others’ eyes!”
Tutu, who with his wife Leah has brought four children into the world by means other than eye gazing, also warns of dangers that arise when the body and soul are kept separate.
This artificial dichotomy of body and soul is too often interpreted as “never mix religion and politics,” Tutu said. This leads to pure evil as good people and politicians fail to recognize God’s will in society.
“The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority,” said Tutu in words now famous. “I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing – their race – and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about – their gender, and hence my support inter alia, for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate.
“And equally, I could not myself keep quiet whilst people were being penalized for something about which they could do nothing, their sexuality … To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as Apartheid ever was.”
Tutu makes it clear that the spiritual and physical dimensions of life are inseparable. God’s light for revelation enlightens our souls to the truth of God’s justice, and the same light calls us to oppose injustice, even when it means putting our bodies in its way.
Until Christ returns, the burden is on each of us to assure God's justice for all people.
Saint Teresa of Avila made the same point in verse nearly 500 years ago:
Christ
has no body but yours,
No
hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours
are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours
are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours
are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours
are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours
are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ
has no body now but yours,
No
hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours
are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ
has no body now on earth but yours.
But the human body is an uncomfortable thing to carry around with you, and the time we spend keeping it washed, fed, and satisfied often distracts us from the needs of others.
Candlemas – the presentation of Jesus in the Temple – is a a time to sort out all the challenges our bodies and souls face in a lifetime.
We will all, if we are granted the biblical span of three score and ten, pass through all the life stages represented by the dramatis personae in this temple scene: the baby and the old man; the teen-age mother and the old woman; the hopefulness of joy in new life; the pang of knowing how quickly injustice and mishap will bring suffering into all our lives.
Which brings us back to the basic purpose of the presentation of the baby in the temple: to purify the new mother from the physical contamination of having born baby boy.
The ritual was thousands of years old. Yet the ceremony also reminds us that if the body is the source of all sin and corruption and physical pleasure is damning, God would not have taken on flesh in the first place.
Indeed, in contrast to many other religions, Christianity welcomes sensuality as a signpost that points to the joys of the spirit.
Jesus did not scourge or starve his body to purify his soul. He loved to eat and drink, and he loved to be with people who were eating and drinking. He talked of heaven as a banquet. He used humor and irony to make people laugh during his sermons. His disciples thought he spent too much time schmoozing with women. He luxuriated in the pleasures of fragrant oils when they anointed his feet or his brow.
But when Jesus was presented in the temple in the first few days of his life, where his existence was celebrated amid warnings of a turbulent future, it was clear to both Simeon and Anna that he was the manifestation of God’s light in the world.
And it was also clear that this incandescence would require living a life that combined body and soul with a fullness unmatched in human history. For it is only through this partnership of body and spirit that we can fully comprehend why God created us as physical creatures for a earthly pilgrimage that leads to eternal life of the soul.
That pilgrimage includes joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, ecstasy and agony. And in comes with some caveats, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory:
“Indeed,” Lewis wrote, “if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.
“We are,” said Lewis, “half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
The sin in sex and prestige is not in their intrinsic evilness but in their power to distract us from the fullness of life that leads to the rewards God has promised us.
Nor, as Simeon warned, will divine prerogative or sex and prestige insulate us from the suffering, grief, and injustice that infiltrate all our lives.
But as we behold the modest candle flames on our altars today, let us rejoice in the coming of God’s light into the world, and repeat together:
“ … my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
No comments:
Post a Comment