Feast of the Presentation - The Light of a Small Candle

This week we celebrate the feast of the Presentation or Candlemas Day when the child Jesus was first presented in the Temple by his parents. Given that traditionally this feast has been understood as presenting Jesus as the light of the world, I've often wondered why more hasn't been made of the feast.

When the prophet Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms, he spoke of the bitter future that awaited him. He told his parents that their son would be a sign of contradiction, a crossroads at which people would have to choose, a crucial man who would induce choices merely by standing by his word in the manner of the Hebrew prophets before him.

Now, more than two thousand years on, we are still fascinated by the person and teaching of that child. We keep going back to him because we desperately want to believe that somewhere in what he said and did lies the key to a life that offers hope and meaning. We want to make sense of the here and now - perhaps never more so than at the present time.

To be a follower of Jesus today would seem to imply that one is poor and powerless before the world. And, God knows, that's the way most of us feel today - poor and powerless. Indeed, the times are such as to demand spiritual resistance to the powers of evil and darkness in our world.

And, to make matters more difficult, there is no guarantee of success in all this. There is only the sense of "rightness", of standing within history in a way that confers hope and meaning. The bottom line is that we are called to live nonviolently, even if the social and political change worked for seems unlikely or impossible.

And what keeps us going is is what Gandhi called "soul force" and the New Testament calls Grace. The gift of grace is what enables us to keep going when we feel like packing it all in. And we get this grace from prayerful reflection on the Gospels.

Only the other day I received a brief email from a friend which made me think. He wrote: "For me, Candlemas Day is a day of beginning again. Christmas is finally over and Lent is on the horizon but we have the Light of Christ to guide us and I always remember William Temple's remark in his 'Reflections on St John"s Gospel' that the light the Gospel writer was thinking of was not a bright light but the light of a small candle which would show us one step at a time and not the whole picture."

That's surely the real meaning of this feast. Maybe we should concern ourselves less with trying to understand the bigger picture and concentrate more on taking that one step at a time in our life's journey - with the light of that small candle.

1 February 2023