Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Presentation - Wednesday, February 2, 2022
It’s not enough to simply celebrate Simeon receiving the child Jesus in his arms. If that’s all this feast is about, then we have bound it to a long-ago time and a faraway place, with not much to do with our lives. The truth of this story transcends its history. While there is historical truth to it, there is also a truth that is not limited by time and place. This is an archetypal experience that is happening in all times and places for all people. It is as much our story as it is Simeon’s.
Knowing more about Simeon can help us understand and claim it. Tradition says he was one of the seventy translators of the Septuagint, the Hebrew scriptures in Greek. That translation is supposed to have begun around the third century before Christ and was completed in the year 132 before Christ. One strand of the tradition says Simeon was 270 years old and blind when Jesus was presented in the temple. He had been promised that he would see the Messiah, the Christ. 270 years is a very long time to wait. It must certainly have required decades of hope, trust, expectation, and anticipation.
We all know what it’s like to wait. We wait and hope for all sorts of things– waiting for life to change, for grief to go away, for a prayer to be answered, for healing, for joy, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for clarity, meaning, and purpose. We have all sorts of hopes and expectations that God is present and working in our lives and our world. Even when we can’t see or understand it, like Simeon, we show up and wait. Simeon continued to show up. He continued to be vigilant and attentive. He continued to trust the promise. Sometimes showing up is the most difficult thing we can do, and it takes all we have to be awake and vigilant, to live with hope and trust. Showing up is the means through which God fulfills the promise to Simeon and to us.
Ephrem of Edessa, a mystic and poet, described a deeper truth of this encounter in one of his poems:
“Simeon, the priest, when he took Him up in his arms to present Him before God, understood that he was not presenting Him, but was himself being presented.” Simeon thought he was waiting for the child to show up, but it was really Jesus waiting for Simeon to show up. Simeon thought he was presenting the child to God, but it was really the child presenting the faithful old man to God.
For us the presentation of Jesus doesn’t happen in the Jerusalem temple but in the temple of our lives. It requires and happens amid waiting. It happens every time we show up to the reality of our lives. Those are the moments in our lives when our senses awaken and our seeing gives way to recognizing a deeper and more profound reality. They are the moments of presentation, of meeting, when divinity and humanity touch and are joined. That’s what this day is about. In those moments we catch a glimpse of what blind Simeon saw with the eyes of his heart. We’ve all had those moments, times when we’ve never wanted them to end. It wasn’t about time passing. It was about presence. We were fully present to the moment, acknowledging that all the pieces of our life made sense. It happens when we are immersed in what we are doing, when we lose all track of time because we’ve opened ourselves to the eternal. This is a moment of presentation, a moment of meeting with a presence greater than us. It seems as if that moment is presenting itself to us, but I think the truth is that we are being presented to the moment. God’s Spirit takes us to that place of meeting, which is greater than our physical senses can experience or understand.
Behind the legalities of this event was longing. Jesus is brought to the temple, not as a passive baby but as the embodiment of God’s longing for humanity. There’s also the longing of the parents, Simeon, and Anna. This Feast is, at its core, a feast of longing, longings to know and be known. Longing is not an absence or emptiness waiting to be filled, but a presence and fullness waiting to be expressed. People don’t long for each other because they are apart but because they are in love.
We are sometimes too quick to quench the longing, to satisfy the desire, keeping life superficial. Fear and ignorance can keep us blind to the truth of ourselves and our lives, through shame or guilt, sorrow, or confusion. Longing, if trusted and followed, always takes us to the temple, the place of meeting. It reveals the longing between humanity and divinity, that can only ever happen in relationship to God. This isn’t about gathering information or learning about God. This kind of knowing is of the heart not the intellect. It’s about the union that sets us free, the oneness that gives us peace, and the relationship that makes us whole. For this to happen we must live with and offer the fragility, vulnerability, and joy of an open and longing heart. That heart is the temple of meeting, the place where we find the Christ, who fills and frees us to go in peace just as God promised, making Simeon’s song our song.
+Amen
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