Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Hebrews 2. 14-18; Matthew 2. 22-40
“…a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
Today’s Gospel reading is set in a time when faith was thin and political realities were grim. Corruption and oppression reigned in the land but those most committed to change were often fanatical and violent. Religious leaders seemed more interested in power and privilege than praising God. It was a time and a place, in other words, like many others and not entirely different from our own.
Some did keep faith in these difficult circumstances – Mary and Joseph were two such people, presenting their baby son in the Temple for purification on the fortieth day after His birth as the Law of Moses required. The idea that ritual purification after birth might be important has become remote to us in recent generations. It can therefore surprise us that Candlemas, which we keep today as the feast that commemorates Christ being presented in the Temple, was one of the earliest Christian festivals and remains one of the most important.
Giotto, The Presentation of Christ (c. 1311).
Mary and Joseph were not the only people keeping the faith in those hard times. Simeon and Anna spent their lives deep in prayer and close to God. So much so that Simeon was led by the Holy Spirit to the infant Christ and knew he was the long-promised Messiah; Anna also knew the child was specially sent by God without anyone telling her. It is interesting that they were both very elderly, given that the elderly are often held to be of not much account in a world that is obsessed with vigour and power and achievement; but God has a more generous standard than the world of who is valuable and who is fit to do His work. The old are as valuable to Him as the young.
The marginal are also as valuable to God as those in the centre of things. God chose to become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ – not as a king, and not in one of the world’s power centres, but as the son of a woman who became pregnant in suspicious circumstances, to be raised as the son of an artisan, belonging to a people under a foreign occupation they bitterly resented.
God became one of us in hard times, through people who were often on the wrong end of the Wheel of Fortune. Christianity is a realistic faith for a world that can be a very rough place. We heard other examples of that in our Candlemas Gospel. Mary is warned that her son “will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” — and that a sword will also pierce her own soul. This story doesn’t tell us that Jesus will magically make everybody kind and everything lovely. This infant may be the Son of God, but He will suffer in His earthly journey and so will those who love Him most.
As this morning’s epistle reading from the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, we human beings are creatures of flesh and blood, subject to disease, and frailty, and death, as we in this Benefice know only too well. We are also subject to sin; not just to the random cruelties of fate and nature but to the evils we inflict on one another, and the evils that each of inflicts on ourselves from time-to-time.
All this becomes obvious to us as we grow up. I wonder if, in our desire to be welcoming and positive, we leave ourselves presenting a version of Christianity that is unrealistic in this sometimes hard world. One that’s well-meaning but doesn’t deal with the reality that the world is aflame with both beauty and suffering, or with the reality that all of us do bad things some of the time, despite our best efforts, and that some people do genuinely monstrous things? When I work in primary schools I’m struck by wonderfully natural and often surprisingly sophisticated faith that some of the older children have. Yet I know that most of them will have abandoned it by their third year in secondary school. I’ve found myself pondering recently whether in our quest to make people’s encounters with Christianity attractive, we’ve rendered it an unconvincing explanation of the real world people see around them – full of wonder and love, yes, indeed, but also full of wickedness and pain.
If that were the whole story, it might be a little depressing. Yet, remember that God came to us in Christ, in this messy world, at a time of little hope, and in a troubled place. Jesus became a human being in every way as we are except without sinning, and so put Himself at the mercy of the created order of disease and death, and to being at the wrong end of human sin. It was human sin that would lead to His death – yet, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, precisely that enabled Christ to destroy death and open the way to eternal life for us.
This passage of Hebrews uses a very interesting phrase – that Christ died to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death”. The fear of death can paralyse us from actually living, something that seems to have afflicted some people profoundly towards the end of the pandemic. That fear can affect institutions as well as individuals. The Church of England and its sister churches in this country are terrified of their obvious decline and potential disappearance. Fear of putting off newcomers at a time of decline goes a long way to explaining why we are often tempted to present those superficially attractive but unrealistic pastiches of Christianity that leave the hard parts out, and which ironically convince no-one. Fear of institutional death is also why we are so embarrassed at our disproportionately elderly congregations — an embarrassment shared by most elderly Christians — forgetting that God often works through the Simeons and Annas of this world and not necessarily those that conventional wisdom identifies as being men and women of vigour and action.
Fear of death can lead us to lose our trust that Christ has indeed destroyed death, and instead seek to bargain with the being identified by Letter to the Hebrews as having power over death, that is the Devil. We should neither dismiss the Devil as primitive superstition, as too many Christians are inclined to do, but nor should we get carried away with the Devil’s power. Of course, the Devil stalks the world and the Church, mostly unacknowledged, and He represents the case that the universe would be a better place if humans and angels rebelled against God and took charge themselves. He’s been doing very well in recent times. Yet he is, at the end of the day, just a fallen angel, and therefore ultimately subject to God’s power. The Devil exists by God’s permission – have a read of the dialogues between God and the Devil in the Book of Job if you doubt that. Acknowledging the Devil’s existence is another step in being honest about the darkness that is part of the world.
That acknowledgement matters most of all because ultimately, it is only when we acknowledge the darkness that we can see how bright the light is. Christ has destroyed death and opened the way to eternal life to us. He did this by becoming one of us and suffering as we do, by enduring the worst of the darkness and transcending it into eternal light. Pray that He sends us light when the darkness seems to overwhelm us, and that we may be humbly obedient like Him so that, when we receive His light, we share it with others.
And now let glory and honour, dominion and power, be ascribed to God the Father who holds dominion over all; God the infant child in the Temple; and God the Holy Spirit who led Simeon to Jesus; as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
