My wife is away for the week, spending some time with her daughter Becky and classmate friends. And since my flight to Haiti, once scheduled to leave this morning, was cancelled, I now have the opportunity to be more by myself than usual. This brief “hermiting” means that my days are now more fully open to prayer, lectio divina, walking, and feeding Mitzy, the neighbor’s brown lab who wears a generous splash of white around her neck. This afternoon I went over the library in Jackson and brought home Robert Alter’s The Book of Psalms, a distinctly Jewish reading of the Psalter that I plan to enjoy immensely.
On this Eve of The Feast of the Presentation of our Lord, I feel privileged to see the parents of Jesus bring their son into the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time.
Evening Prayer, which I said about 5:00, was especially enjoyable, believing as I do that prayer time with God is to be thoroughly enjoyed whenever the opportunity arrives. The appointed psalm was 84, and I quietly sung it twice so as to enter its beautiful going into God’s temple, the temple into which Blessed Mary and Joseph brought their infant son, forty days old. One of my prayer books includes a number of icons appropriate for each season, and I was particularly struck with the theological loveliness of The Icon of the Presentation of Our Lord(albeit reproduced in black and white). The editor of this prayer book, Frederick J. Schumacher, himself an iconophil, provided a helpful commentary on the icon, and I would like to share it with you, this time, however, with a reproduction of the icon in color, The Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple as written by St Andrei Rublyov. In the sharing that follows, I lightly edit Schumacher’s commentary inasmuch as some details of Rublyov’s icon differ slightly from the reproduction in my prayer book:
The first known image of the Presentation of our Lord dates from the fifth century and represents St. Luke’s account (2.22-38) of the occasion when Mary and Joseph went to the temple in Jerusalem for the purification of Mary forth days after the birth of Jesus (Leviticus 12.6-8) and the consecration of him to God as her first-born son (Exodus 13.2).
Here we see the very author of the law himself who gave it to Moses on Mt. Sinai coming with the mother of God to fulfill the law pertaining to her and to himself.
As Luke records, we see that the meeting takes place in the temple, at an altar which is covered by a canopy. In most icons there is a book or scroll on the table, symbolic of the Old Covenant, or else a cross foreshadowing the words spoken by Simeon to Mary that “a sword will pierce through your own soul also (Luke 2.35).
Mary is on the left side of the altar and extending her hands which are covered, symbolic of adoration and respect, as is the case in many icons in which something is being presented, here the very Son of God. To the right of the altar Simeon, who was looking for the “consolation of Israel” and was “told by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ” (Luke 2.25-26) is leaning forward as he has received the offering of the child and now hold him in his hands which are also covered (as are Joseph’s). Jesus seems to be seated in the arms of Simeon as on a throne, and one can wonder—as some icons more vividly show—whether Simeon holds the child or the child holds Simeon. This is expressed in the Orthodox tradition in the singing of Ode 9 of Matins where Jesus says, “I am not held by the old man; it is I Who hold him, for he asks Me forgiveness.”
One can imagine Simeon saying the words known as the Nunc Dimittis in reponse to his hope that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s Messiah:
Lord, now you let your servant go in peace;
your word has been fulfilled.
My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have
prepared in the sight of every people:
a light to real you to the nations and the glory of
your people Israel
Here as Moses had once received the tablets of the law, Simeon now received the very one who with God the Father gave the law and is now present among his people in the flesh.
Joseph is following Mary, carrying the offering of “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons,” the offering of poor parents as prescribed in Leviticus 12.8. Behind Simeon is the prophetess Anna, “who was of great age.” She looks up in an expression of prayer which Luke tells us she engaged in day and night, not leaving the temple. She also looks as though she is giving prophetic utterance that she “spoke of him for all who were for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2.36-38).
In its totality, the icon presents us with the message Luke proclaimed: that here two representatives of the Old Covenant meet the Savior who comes in fulfillment of the promise to Israel and to be a light to the whole world. In the fifth century in Jerusalem this feast associated with Jesus as the light given to lighten the Gentiles was celebrated with the people holding candles. From this tradition has come the other name for the day of Presentation in the western church, Candlemas.
