In the forty days between Christmas Day and Candlemas (also known as the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple) various events in Jesus’ life get jumbled up. We get the visit of the Magi at Epiphany to the young boy Jesus promptly followed the next week by Jesus as an adult being Baptised by John. This is then followed by Jesus calling his first four disciples and beginning his ministry to the Chosen People. Then all of a sudden we are back with Jesus and his parents in the temple where he, as a baby, has been brought for blessing and his mother for purification. Christmastide is top and tailed by the events surrounding Jesus’ incarnation and the bits in the middle give us a potted history of his life before his death.
It can appear to be very confusing this dotting back and forth in Jesus’ biography and it can make one wonder what happened in those so called hidden years of Jesus’ growing up. For all we are really told is that on another visit to the temple Jesus goes missing and is eventually found sitting with the rabbis listening to them and asking questions and sharing his own interpretations of Scripture with them. Not bad for a teenaged boy, but awfully worrying for his parents nonetheless.
In all of this confusion of events Candlemas stands out as being significant. It is a commemoration today that marks the end of the Christmas celebrations (and once upon a time it was when folk took the decorations down) and firmly points us in the direction of Holy Week and Easter. Like John-the-Baptist pointing the way to Jesus as the Messiah, later in Jesus’ life, so today Simeon and Anna point the way to Jesus as Saviour and Redeemer; and like John they too indicate that his journey will not be easy and that it will cause pain to those who love him:
“34Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed 35so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” Luke 2:34-35
I have always found those words; “and a sword will pierce your own soul” heartbreaking. One can only imagine what Mary and Joseph felt when they heard those words. They would already be wondering quite whom the child they cared for actually was and then to be told that their hearts would be broken in time to come, must have almost been too much to bear. Knowing this, I can see why they got so upset when Jesus disappeared when they re-visited the temple in his teenaged years. They must have expected the worse.
As we know the worse was yet to become but what they did not know was that through the trauma something amazing and glorious would dawn on that first Easter morning.
Candlemas is fully the end of Christmastide. In it we still see the light of the infant Jesus shining in the darkness but we hold alongside it darker undertones of prophesy that point to death and resurrection. Candlemas is thus the feast that unites both Christmas and Easter.