2 February 2024 Luke 2:22-40 Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
The story of St. Simeon is often read alongside Malachi 3:1-4: “But who can endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire…and he will purify the sons of Levi….” (Malachi 3:2-3).
This is where we say, “Uh oh.”
Simeon had spent his whole life waiting for the “consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25), and it had not been an easy waiting. Around 63 B.C. the Roman general Pompey had desecrated the Holy of Holies (in fact, he had merely entered and looked at the holy place, but because he was a pagan Roman, and not the High Priest on Yom Kippur, that was a deep abomination). There had been corrupt kings and corrupt rulers, there had been teachers who had made the Law of Moses a burden no one could lift rather than a comfort to struggling people.
Irrationality, impurity, insecurity, indolence had become so normal that the only way of return was going to feel like walking on broken glass, like standing in a lake of fire.
That is why Simeon warned Mary and Joseph, “Behold, this child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel” (Luke 2:34). The return to the Lord, he said, was going to sting. Many will have to fall down, hard, before they can get up again, and even if they get up, many won’t be happy. Behold, this child is a “sign that will be contradicted” (2:24), and the thoughts He reveals will not always be kindly ones (2:35). Nobody likes stinging.
Simeon was describing the experience of repentance, and repentance is no picnic. In Henryk Sienkiewicz’s classic novel, Quo Vadis, a Roman, Vinicius, who has fallen in love with the Christian woman Lygia, is taken to a meeting where he hears the preaching of Peter, and his response was sobering: “He felt that if he wished to follow that teaching, he would have to place on a burning pile all his thoughts, habits and character, his whole nature up to that point, burn them into ashes, and then fill himself with a life altogether different, an entirely new soul.”
Vinicius spotted something deeply authentic. How could he do it?
The Bishop in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables similarly describes the effect he often had on the unrepentant: “I always bothered them,” he said. “For through me the outside air came at them; my presence in their company made them feel as if a door had been left open, and they were in a draft.” Making a difference doesn’t mean you create just light. You also create shadows, contrasts. It’s what “making a difference” means. Noticing darkness isn’t always nice, isn’t even usually nice.
The Bishop spotted something deeply authentic. How could he help?
C.S. Lewis says that repentance requires “unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing a part of yourself…. This willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death is not something God demands of you before he will take you back…. It is simply a description of what going back to him is like” (Mere Christianity, p. 55). It is the pain of an injection, of setting a broken bone, of removing a faulty organ, of replacing a decaying joint. It hurts, but it is the kind of pain that ultimately heals.
He will purify the sons of Levi, and they will, in the end, make offerings of righteousness (Malachi 3:3), but they are going to have to go through some pain and anger first. Enduring that without stopping, without veering from the hard way and the narrow gate (Matthew 7:14), will require people to walk with them who understand, who can help them process the pain and anger into a kind of wisdom, and finally peace. It will require people who have already repented, and know how it sometimes stings. That is the mission of the Church, especially of the lay faithful.
St. Simeon departed in peace, but we haven’t been dismissed yet. There are still too many falling down who don’t understand their pain. We do.
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