1st February 2008CANDEMAS

Fr Andrew Hammond, St John's Wood

Malachi 3.1-5 ; Heb 2.14-18 ; Luke 2.22-40

I last preached on Candlemas at a church in Cambridge, a church famous for its place in the founding of the English reformation, and recently famous for more outlandish endeavours – a Goth Eucharist, for example. Rather perversely perhaps, I decided to preach purely on the Malachi text; and especially on verse 5, with its intriguing assortment of misdemeanours on which judgement would be visited. I wanted to give the so-called modern spirituality movement some proper consideration, distinguishing between the practices (useful, though hardly modern, things like meditation, candlelight and incense) and the dubious beliefs that might go with them. So we might think of Malachi’s ‘sorcerers’ as astrologers, astrology being quite incompatible with Christianity. Little did I know that the Vicar had only two weeks earlier preached on how astrology was entirely compatible with Christianity. Oops. I hope I’m not going to commit the same faux-pas here.

This is an example of Christ’s quiet revolution, of his sidling into the world and alongside us, to dissolve that whole fight-to-win, do-down-the-other, save-yourself culture of violence and retribution. 

Of course the Malachi passage does segue beautifully and providentially into the gospel story of Christ’s Presentation. Its prophetic anticipation of that event is striking; but the flow works in both directions. We can turn back to that list of sins against which the Lord will bear witness, and look at them in the light of what the Presentation story tells us.

We are so familiar with the story, and especially Simeon’s song of course, that it is tempting to let the story speak for itself and stop there.  Mary and Joseph do their duty in bringing Jesus to the Temple, and the ancient holy man receives his own wonderful theophany; in that moment he is also given an insight into the radical and universal impact that this baby will have as the messiah – indeed, will have as ‘salvation’ itself, as he says. Mary and Joseph are thunderstruck by this, despite their own earlier revelations – especially the Annunciation. This in itself shows how even these blessed, grace-filled people were still rooted in their inherited Jewish expectations.

The prevailing culture in which those expectations variously flourished was the culture of the many local synagogues and the one national Temple, the latter very much an establishment place. In his most recent book, ‘Undergoing God’, the ever-astonishing Dominican thinker James Alison re-tells the Presentation from the point of view of someone who happened to be in the Temple that day – one of the thousands each day who would go for whatever major celebrations were scheduled. Alison calls this the ‘majority report’: someone there that day might have noticed, in passing, a poor couple bringing in their baby for the usual little ritual. They might also notice not one but two of the age-old religious nuts you always saw there, joining in. Then they’d look away and almost immediately forget.

But it is the ‘minority report’ that we get from Luke. What was actually happening was the fulfilment of Malachi. The Lord whom they sought had indeed suddenly come to his temple. It’s just that only two people noticed, the sort of people whose constant utterances on matters religious meant that they would be ignored by everyone else.

Alison nicely described this:

..the shape of the arrival of God on the scene, the God to whose worship the Temple was dedicated, was that of a tiny off-stage interruption, scarcely to be noticed.

The Temple authorities had been ‘completely blindsided by God’, he goes on, and to an extent that they wouldn’t realise till much later.

This is an example of Christ’s quiet revolution, of his sidling into the world and alongside us, to dissolve that whole fight-to-win, do-down-the-other, save-yourself culture of violence and retribution. James Alison has a very particular way of expounding this, and it makes for the most stimulating reading. One beautiful aspect of this is how he sees the ethical outworking of Christ’s reconciling of the world to God. In the way that the Fathers of the Church painstakingly made their way through specific layers of meaning in scripture, from the literal, through the theological and spiritual, to the moral; so we are always right to ask, as we ponder the Word revealed to us in the readings, ‘what should we do?’. That’s why I said earlier that today we are moved to go back to Malachi and look at those things which will attract judgement – sorcery, adultery, false oaths, the oppression of employees, widows, orphans and foreigners.

But Alison begs us not to imagine this territory of the moral life too narrowly. It grows out of a shift of perspective, analogous to the shift from looking at the main event in the Temple to what was happening around the poor baby. It is a shift away from self-absorption and self-definition over-against the ‘other’, to generosity and inter-dependence. And this isn’t some joyless self-laceration either. We open ourselves to creation, which we receive in reconciliation; and thereby

… as we allow ourselves to be stretched into this spaciousness, there comes a greatness of heart, a magnanimity that is playful, because trusting, since we have discovered, rather despite ourselves, that there is no greater victory than the mutual enrichment of those who are not frightened of losing themselves in the other…

Let us pray then that God will open our hearts to his reconciliation, to his re-creation, and thus to our neighbours – especially orphans, widows and refugees. And that our magnanimity will indeed be playful and spacious, not crabbed and earnest, so that we might be lights in the world, little glowing revelations of His glory.


Amen