Presentation of Christ in the temple (Luke 2:22-40)

 This week we have a 'guest preacher': Revd Dr Susan Durber.

Here are her sermon notes

On Zion’s Hill

I know that life is hard and tough in all sorts of ways. And that we’re not all always ‘fine!’. But sometimes there are moments in our lives when we are so blissfully happy, or so contented and fulfilled, that we find ourselves thinking – well I could go now and I wouldn’t mind … Sometimes there comes a moment when we know that we’ve seen life, we’ve known the deepest joy or peace and if we didn’t live another day it would all have been worth it! That’s the kind of experience we are going to meet today in our Bible story – about Simeon – who met the holy family in the Temple. And that perhaps is the kind of life and death that we would all like!

I’m getting some help with this sermon – from someone who lived and died a while ago – the painter Rembrandt. He’s someone who changed the way that people painted the Bible – and he even changed his own way of painting Bible stories. 

 

You have in your hand two different paintings of the story we have just heard from Luke’s Gospel. He had painted it several times and it was a very popular subject for artists. The first one – in black and white.  It’s a very busy picture,. The Temple very busy… crowds of people, theatrically costumed; a gesticulating High Priest and sceptical Pharisees looking on. It looks like a picture of a place very far away – a different culture, a different time… And as we look at the painting we are outside it… spectators at a distance… It’s a painting somehow about the story, but not really in it… But there is another picture, much later in Rembrandt’s life… a final version - very different. Let me tell you the story of this one…

 

In 1669, in old age, the painter Rembrandt died at home. He did not have much money and so when he died his widow was anxious about how the funeral was to be paid for. Officials came to search the house for anything which could be sold. Fortunately, they found a bag of money hidden away which had just enough in it to pay the expenses for a very basic poor man’s funeral. But they also found in Rembrandt’s rooms thirteen paintings which had never been seen before. They were judged ‘unfinished’, though it’s hard to know whether anyone there was qualified to judge. Among these thirteen paintings was the one called ‘Simeon in the Temple with the Christ child’. It is the most remarkable, significant and beautiful painting. I think it’s now hanging in a gallery in Stockholm – I’d love to go there one day.

In this painting, all the clutter of the other characters and buildings and drapes has gone. There are no temple crowds or priests in the background. There is just Simeon and the baby. Even the woman seems not to be a real part of what is going on.

And nobody seems sure about even who she is. Neil McGregor says that she must be Anna the prophetess. But Simon Schama assumes that she is the Virgin Mary!  Is this Anna, who according to Luke, was a very old widow who spent all her time in the Temple and who came up at that very moment to give thanks to God? Or is it Mary - who had brought her first born to the Temple to present him to God and to make the offering as stated in the law? Is she, looking on, pondering all these things in her heart? We don’t know…But, whatever the answer to this mystery, I am with those who suspect that she has been added into the painting later. Because what Rembrandt has done is painted Simeon’s moment, the moment at which this man, upright and devout, one who watched and waited for the restoration of Israel, took the Christ child into his arms, and knew that God had kept the promise and would be with the people – and he’s so happy he says ‘Well, God you can take me now!’. Simeon is old and frail. His eyes are all but closed with blindness. He is near the end of his days. But he sees clearly with the eyes of his heart and sees a blessing from God. In this beautiful painting his hands are immense, exaggerated even, held as if in deepest prayer - and yet holding the precious child. All around is darkness, but between this tiny baby, barely a week old and this old man at the end of his days, is a light to lighten any dark. It’s as though Rembrandt shows him physically blind – but spiritually really seeing… full of insight.

I can’t help but think of someone I used to know when I think of this story. His name was Albert Tomlinson and he was upright and devout, like Simeon, a church secretary for decades in a little chapel in the Oxfordshire countryside. One Christmas day he told me that he thought this the finest of the Christmas stories.  I had not even really thought of it as a Christmas story, let alone compared it with any of the others.  Well, said Albert, all the rest, the shepherds, the wise men, even Mary and Joseph, none of them really knew what was going on… but that old man did, didn’t he. He knew what God was doing, was blessed with the deepest kind of wisdom known to humankind, and, as Luke tells us, ‘the Holy Spirit was upon him’.

The baby looks up at Simeon with that expression typical of small babies -  the one that seems to suggest that they know everything at birth and only forget it later. And there’s Simeon himself, with his blind eyes, yet seeing what others could not, and so content with the knowledge he had now been given that his life is in a sense complete, his hope fulfilled.

And now Rembrandt is not somehow outside the story, but right inside it. There are those who say that this is one of Rembrandt’s many self portraits. He has moved from being a spectator of the story to being absolutely in the story. Perhaps he was struggling with his own eyesight… a tragedy for a painter. He was, we know, struggling to make ends meet. He was, it turns out, near his own death. And what he paints here is not a public scene – but a very intimate one. It’s as if he is telling us that what counts is not what we think about the Bible story, but where we find ourselves in it. The point is not what we think about God at a distance, but whether we can receive God within us. And so he celebrates the story of someone, many of whose faculties are going, who yet has found the deepest wisdom of all.

I remember once knowing someone who told me that as he got older he realised that he believed less and less but believed it more and more. And maybe that’s what this picture offers us – a sense of what faith is like when it’s stripped back to its essentials – all the background stuff gone, just you and God. Simeon is someone who is waiting to see God’s presence, and he trusts that he will be given this gift before his death. And he knows that having received it he would be ready, and indeed very content, to die. He has one of those moments in life when we can feel that it would be OK to go, because life is complete. He has found what life is about. It’s OK now – all shall be well. And he says to God, something like, ‘Now I’m at peace with it all, I’m ready for you’.

Simeon had spent his life watching and waiting for God’s salvation to come. He is a good example of a faithful dedicated life, a life lived open to the Holy Spirit, watching always for the fulfilment of God’s promise.

Simeon had one thing he hoped to do before he died and he made it - to see the Lord’s Messiah. It’s hard to know what exactly he saw in this child that day. But, on the other hand, we all of us know what this story is about. We all know that there are many things we will not achieve or see or discover before our days, however long or short, are over. But perhaps we might dare to hope that we will be able to close our eyes whenever it comes knowing that we have met with God and seen at least a glimpse of ‘the light’. Compared with this, what would riches, fame or power be? The completeness of a human life is not to be measured by the size of the out-tray or the bank balance, but by something much harder to quantify - the peace that comes from being close to God and knowing that God is with you. It is this I think that makes this story of an old man in the Temple with a baby in his arms so deeply stirring.

And I think the picture tells us something about worship – in this picture of a man only dimly seeing yet knowing somehow that he was in the presence of holiness in a way he had not known before even in the sacred place of the Temple. And this mystery is revealed by Rembrandt far more tellingly in the simplicity of this final picture than in the theatrical versions of this story he had painted before.

We can imagine that within a few days Simeon was seen no more in the Temple, that having seen what God had promised, he closed his eyes forever - his life complete at last. And I think it must be significant that this painting was found among those last thirteen, that it was obviously painted as Rembrandt himself was nearing the end of his life. Did he identify with the old man in the Temple and his song, taking his leave of life, knowing that at last, even in the thickest darkness, he had seen the light of life? His paintings have certainly helped many of us ‘see the light’. Like the identity of the woman in the painting, some things are never to be known. But the story offers us an encouragement that it is possible for us to know God as intimately as this, and that we too can be at peace. In the simplicity of this encounter – God is made known. Into the ordinary spaces of even our lives, God is made known.

I wonder whether you can find an echo of Rembrandt’s story – and of Simeon’s story – in your own life? Have you had moments in your life when you have felt the kind of contentment that means you are at peace with life? Have you found yourself moving from knowing about God to knowing God? Simeon took the child Jesus into his arms -  have you received God into your very self – the God who holds you in everlasting arms?

If you go to a Protestant church in many parts of the world – it will often be called a temple … Behind this lies the trust that God’s presence can be known, intimately known, not only on Mount Zion – (on Zion’s Hill) – but wherever we are. We too can be Simeon or Anna. We took can experience such joy and completeness that death holds no fear. May that be so among us here today… may this be the temple of the Lord… and may you be able to join in the words of Simeon’s song. Amen.