A recent Taylor Swift song opens with the defiant statement: “We could leave the Christmas lights up ‘til
January // This is our place; we make the rules.” Only, I’m not really sure
quite what she thinks she’s defying. Of course you can, Taylor, it’s still
Christmas in early January. While Christmas Day being on December 25th
has been pretty consistent throughout Christian history, quite when the
Christmas season ends has varied a little. Currently, in the Roman Catholic Calendar,
as reformed in 1970, the Christmas Season ends with the feast of the Baptism of
the Lord, which is normally the early side of mid-January. We celebrated that
on the twelfth this year. For a long time before that, about four hundred years
prior to 1970, the Christmas season ended on Epiphany which was always twelve
days after Christmas. I went to a great twelfth night party just under a month
ago, where we had a King Cake and a rosca de reyes, which are really variants
of each other, but both great ways to celebrate Epiphany. Anyway, before the
reforms that followed the council of Trent that standardized Epiphany as the last
day of the Christmas season, in some places, including parts of England, the
last day of the Christmas Season was today, or rather, tomorrow, February 2nd,
the Feast of the Presentation, or Candlemas as it’s also known. So, if somebody
could let Taylor know… if she becomes a super-old-fashioned pre-Tridentine
Catholic, she can leave the Christmas lights up ‘til February!
Think about
how joyous the good news is that God has taken on human flesh in Christ, has
become a babe in a manger to feed a hungry people. Isn’t that joyous enough to
be worth forty days of feasting, shortly before we begin our forty days of
penitence and fasting for Lent? The Feast we’re celebrating today, tomorrow’s
feast, is always February 2nd, because that’s forty days after
Christmas, and that’s precisely the timing according to the Law to which Mary was
obedient, that you go for your purification forty days after the birth of a
boy. This is the last feast of the Church year which derives its date from last
Christmas. You actually don’t have to wait that long for the first feast which
takes its date from next Christmas. On March 25th, the day before
Opening Day this year, we celebrate the Annunciation, Jesus’ conception, nine
months before next Christmas.
But, enough
of calendars. What happens when the Holy Family actually come to the Temple for
this observance? They meet Simeon, who recognizes Jesus for who he is. He takes
him in his arms and sings out, “Lord, I’m ready to die now, because I’ve held
the Messiah in my arms!” He recognizes that Jesus is the light of the world, and
that’s why this is a traditional day to bless candles. Most importantly, he
recognizes that, while he is truly the glory of his people Israel, he is light
not to them alone, but to the whole world. Luke doesn’t talk about the magi coming,
Gentiles coming to worship Jesus. What Matthew shows in that story, Luke tells
in this prophetic song that Simeon sings, that was doubtless amplified in the
thanksgiving that Anna the prophet offered right afterwards, that unfortunately
we don’t get a text for.
Friends, we
hold the Messiah too. All of us at Mass receive Jesus, the Word of God, when we
hear the scripture, the word about the Word, proclaimed and broken open. In a
special way, if we’re receiving communion today, we hold Christ with our
bodies. The Church offers two ways to receive the host, on the tongue or in the
hands. On the tongue has a wonderful directness to it, but if we choose to
receive in the hands, there’s a wonderful closeness with Simeon who took Jesus
in his arms and was moved to joy-filled prophetic speech. The church father St.
Cyril, who was bishop of Jerusalem, spoke to his church about receiving
communion, and he spoke of how they made of their hands a throne to hold, but
briefly, their God. For in that moment, we receive Christ, body, blood, soul,
and divinity, and we embrace and consume, being led to something even more
intimate than Simeon knew. But it is still a foretaste. Our embrace of Christ
is but a foretaste of that day we all hope for, when Christ will embrace us and
welcome us into the halls of heaven, the place he has prepared for us. We can
pray, in our preparation for each communion, and in our thanksgiving after each
communion, that this communion would prepare us for the next, conscious that
the next might be that heavenly reception where Christ will receive and embrace
us.
But let’s
not get ahead of ourselves. The road to resurrection leads through the cross,
the cross on which Jesus, priest and victim, offered the perfect sacrifice,
re-presented to us here today in this Mass, and the cross he bids us, his
disciples, take up as we come and follow him. I’m sure Simeon didn’t know the
details of how Jesus would offer his life for the life of the world. But he
knew that dynamic. He told Mary that a sword would pierce her heart too. St.
Bernard of Clairvaux describes Mary as “more than a martyr,” because she consented
to know much sorrow. She stayed at the foot of the cross, and joined her grief with
Jesus’ pain. She stands with us when we suffer, and she bids us stand with
others on their crosses.
The founder
of my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross, entrusted his
religious to the patronage of Our Lady under the title, Our Lady of Sorrows, that
is Our Lady who let her heart be pierced by loving a Son who sacrificed himself
for us. I’d like to close with a few words from our Constitutions that speak of
the role she plays:
There
stood by the cross of Jesus his mother Mary, who knew grief and was a Lady of
Sorrows…. To her may sons and daughters, whose devotions ought to bring them
often to her side, she tells much of this daily cross and its daily hope.
If we
drink the cup each of us is poured and given, we servants will fare not better
than our master. But if we shirk the cross, gone too will be our hope. It is in
fidelity to what we once pledged that we will find the dying and rising equally
assured. … It is the Lord Jesus calling us. “Come. Follow me.”
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