A SERMON FOR CANDLEMAS
If I were to ask what the name of
today’s feast is, there would be three completely different but equally correct
answers to this question. In our missals
we see today listed as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin
Mary. And yet it is also, and equally
importantly the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the
temple, the fourth of the joyful mysteries of the Rosary. And last but probably most commonly of all,
we know today’s feastday as simply “Candlemas”.
In order to sort out this
overabundance of names today, let us remember firstly that the Christ Child was
born to be the Light of the World. He comes
not to confuse us, but to illuminate the dark recesses of our mind, increasing
our knowledge about the things of God. All
these names for February 2nd,, therefore, are not an occasion for bewilderment,
but for coming closer to God so we can know him, love him, and serve him
better.
Like all the events in Holy
Scripture, this one contains a lesson for us to learn. Something we can meditate on and come to a
greater understanding of who God is and what he wants from us. So let’s go back to the days following Our
Blessed Saviour’s birth in the stable of Bethlehem. We can imagine how the parents of the divine
Infant came to the realization that their Son had been born in a town very near
the Holy City of Jerusalem. The day he
was born they knew that it would be only another forty days before the law
demanded that the Child’s Mother present herself at the temple in Jerusalem to
be ritually purified, and that they offer sacrifice at the selfsame temple for
the birth of their Firstborn Son. The
laws of Moses were clear, and they were so close to Jerusalem that they could
easily make the journey and perform their duties.
Finally the day came. Forty days after the birth of the Christ
Child, Our Lady and St. Joseph arrived at the temple with their baby, and the
age-old rites of purification were accomplished, fulfilling the law, in spite
of the fact that Mary, full of grace, had no need of being purified. Then the old man Simeon took up the Christ
Child in his arms, prophesying that this infant would be for the rise and fall
of many in Israel, and that a sword should pierce Our Lady’s heart. The story is comforting because we know it so
well, and we welcome the familiar words of Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace
according to thy word. For mine eyes
have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all
people.” We recognize that great things
were happening that day, old prophecies were being fulfilled, new prophecies
were being made.
But peel back the surface of this
story. Go beyond the words, the faces,
the events. Go to the truth of the
everlasting hills that lies beneath.
Purification, and Presentation.
First Our Lady is ritually purified, then she presents her Son as a gift
to God. And one must come before the
other. Only after her ritual
purification is Mary considered in Jewish law, God’s own law given to Moses, as
worthy of giving anything to God. And what
is true for Our Lady who was already all-pure even before the ceremonies, who
had been hailed as full of grace by the Angel Gabriel, then that purification
is all the more demanded of us. We are
asked by God to offer sacrifice to him.
But only after we have been purified.
Remember what it was that Our
Lady and St. Joseph presented to God today.
It was no less than God himself.
Holy things unto the holy. God
the Son unto God the Father. It was the
perfect and acceptable offering, the precursor of the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass: their newborn baby who was God
made man, was offered to God the Father who begat him.
And how are we to follow their
example? What can we possibly give to
God, when he created all things? How
much more imperfect must be our own offering.
And yet God demands it of us. So
let us make it the best offering we can.
Let us present to God on this feast of the Presentation, something as
close to the perfect Christ Child that we can possibly find in ourselves. We can begin by purifying ourselves from all
stain of sin. This we started at baptism
when the stain of original sin was removed from our souls. Now it is in the sacrament of penance that we
are absolved from all the stains of our actual sins.
But it is not enough simply to be
free from sin. Perfection hardly consists
in merely not being bad. Goodness is more than the absence of evil. We must progress further, beyond that first necessary
step, and purify ourselves from all attachment to earthly, material objects. We must make sure that we love God above any
of the creatures he made. Then and only
then can we finally turn to our inmost self.
We must now purify that self not from what we have any more, but from what we are. We peel back our own character, with all its
flaws and imperfections, all its grudges, its vices, its appetites and hopes
and fears. We take all this and go
beyond to what lies beneath. Deep down
beneath the surface, until we find the divine light, that spark, that essence
of divinity that God implanted with his grace, that silent and unspeakable
presence of God within us that makes us something more than the sum of our
parts, that makes us more than mortal, that image of the eternal God within us
that is our immortal soul. And when we learn to purify this our very essence,
of whatever is displeasing to God, then and only then can we present ourselves
before God, giving him not of the things we have,
but of who and what we are.
It is interesting to note that
when Mary and Joseph offered to God the gift of their Son, they were offering
him in the form of a mere infant. And
yet how perfectly appropriate that image is.
After all, think about what it is to be an infant. To be so perfectly pure of heart, someone who
is sinless, who hasn’t had time to build attachments to earthly things, who has
no grudges, no vices, none of those human disorders that detach the rest of us
from God. It is the newly born infant,
or to be more precise, the newly baptized infant, who is surely the purest form
of humanity that exists. This is why the
image of the Christ Child at Candlemas has such a hold on us. And it’s why we worship Christ the King in
the form of the Divine Infant of Prague.
And make no mistake, it’s also why it’s such a horrendous crime to
destroy the life of an infant, especially before it has even had the chance to
be born and to attain to this most perfect state of the newly baptized. The crime of abortion is a crime not just against
our fellow human beings, but against humanity in its most pure form, its most
perfect reflection of the image and likeness of God himself. It is a crime against God himself.
God allows us to see this pure
perfection in the eyes of the newborn baby. We recognize that here is someone as worthy as
he can possibly be to present to God.
And so we bring him to the temple to be baptized. Take the opportunity to remind yourselves that
this most perfect little human, pure in his lack of attachment to the earthly,
without sin, is what we must model ourselves on. “A little child shall lead them”, said the
Prophet Isaiah, and this is the reason why.
The baptized infant is the purest example we can have to follow. We must be as purified from our attachments as the Christ Child of
Candlemas, as any little child. We must seek in the infant at baptism that
light of divinity that we need to find in ourselves, that we may always do
God’s will and not our own.
To remind ourselves of this
purification, we burn candles today. For
we are purified as the silver is purified in the fire. Fire purifies. It burns away all those attachments to the
earthly and material, and if you don’t allow it to burn them away in this life,
the fires of Purgatory will surely purge and purify you in the hereafter. The heat of the burning candle reminds us of
this, and the light of the candle reflects that spark of divinity we search for
within us. “Let your light so shine
before men,” said Our Lord, “that they may see your good works, and glorify
your Father which is in heaven.” You are the light of the world. And that spark of divinity must shine forth, not only for you
yourself to find, but for all men to see, and so that you may present it, an
unblemished and immaculate sacrifice, to God in heaven.
