whom? And as we Anglicans bicker and posture, what kind of a clouded epiphany are we offering to today’s ‘Gentiles’?
And what of the wise men’s gifts? It is unlikely that Matthew meant each one to mean something, but of course what Matthew meant no longer matters. Matthew entrusts his marvellous story to us to make of it what we will. That is not to say that any interpretation goes. It is to insist that such an inexhaustibly suggestive story requires imaginative reading. So, yes, we may see gold as a tribute to a king, incense as a present for our great high priest, and myrrh as a grim gift for one who must suffer and die. But such interpretations are all too familiar.
I hope that one day I’ll have another opportunity to produce a Christmas play I wrote long ago with the title ‘The cactus, the cuckoo-clock, and the big red balloon’. The point of that frolic was to reflect laterally on an entirely serious question. ‘What can I give him, poor as I am?’
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple
2 FEBRUARY
Malachi 3.1–5; Hebrews 2.14–18; Luke 2.22–40
UNCOMFORTING CONSOLATION
We tend to treat the Nunc Dimittis – Simeon’s song with the infant Jesus in his arms – like a mug of Ovaltine, as a nightcap guaranteeing a good night’s sleep. It’s what we sing at Evensong when the day’s work’s done and at Compline when it’s time for bed. The familiar cadences are like gentle lullabies, easing us into dreamless slumber.
‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Simeon is satisfied that all he has longed for is now fulfilled in the child in his arms. He’s an old man. His life is now as light as a feather on the back of his hand and one puff of wind will blow it away (‘A Song for Simeon’, T. S. Eliot). Now he can contentedly take his leave in the sure knowledge that his saviour has come. As we sing his words we catch his mood and our own worries begin to drain away. All’s well. We can curl up and go to sleep.
Simeon, we read, was looking forward to ‘the consolation of Israel’. This term was used to describe the Messianic age. It takes up the cry by which an unnamed prophet announced his message of hope to the exiles in Babylon, ‘Comfort, comfort, my people’ (Isaiah 40.1). Simeon had craved that promised comfort. Now salvation is in sight, not only for his own people but for the Gentiles too. Now at last he can go to God with a serene heart.
But if our impression of Simeon himself is of a contented figure with an unequivocally comforting message, then we’ve mistaken our man. We have sung his song too often and with too little regard to its setting. ‘The Song of Simeon’ ceases to sound like soothing mood-music if we return it to its context and take account of what he actually says about the child he is holding. His words to Mary paint a darker picture. People believed that the promised ‘consolation’ would follow the path mapped by the prophet. Theirs would be the destiny he had foretold. They too would rise in triumph from bitter servitude. For them too the wilderness would rejoice and the desert blossom. They too would exult over their oppressors, who would watch this mighty act of God in abject awe.
Simeon foresees an altogether different fate for Israel, not a sunlit highway but the valley of the shadow of death. The end may be glorious, but the path will be a via dolorosa. The doom of Israel is presaged in this baby, born to be a crucified king. Simeon speaks of light and glory, but also of the ‘falling’ as well as the ‘rising’ of ‘many in Israel’. It will be, as Eliot has it, ‘the time of cords and scourges and lamentation’. Simeon’s words anticipate what this child himself will one day say, ‘The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10.45). For Mary herself, there is little comfort in Simeon’s words. The sword, thrust into her son’s side, will pierce her heart too.
Simeon turns out to be a much less reassuring figure than we have made him out to be, and ‘the Presentation in the Temple’ an altogether more disturbing event than we had supposed. A truer account of Simeon’s meeting with the child and his mother is given by the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. Venice Bellini wrestled with the significance of the story of Jesus as few artists have done other than Rembrandt himself. His study of the Presentation, now in Venice’s Querini Stampalia Gallery, is a great masterpiece. Looking at it, we see this scene as for the first time.
An unsmiling Simeon reaches out to take the infant Christ. We are unused to seeing babies swaddled and to us the bands, which bind him so tightly, seem like cerements. He appears to be already prepared for burial – which in a way he was. Mary seems abstracted, as if continuing to ‘ponder in her heart’ what had been told her concerning her child. Two women standing by are lost in their own thoughts. One of them is turning away. Is she unaware of what unfolds beside her? Or is the burden of it too much? Joseph – it must be Joseph – stares intently, almost angrily, at us from out of the picture. He seems to say, ‘Do not for one moment suppose that you understand what is happening here.’
Simeon sought consolation. But there is pain beyond consoling, as Mary found. Others, such as C. S. Lewis, have found that to be so.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. (A Grief Observed, Faber, 1961)
The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary
25 MARCH
Isaiah 7.10–14; Hebrews 10.4–10; Luke 1.26–38
IT IS WHAT IT IS, SAYS LOVE
The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth is an immense pile. It is also a remarkably ugly building. It was built in the 1960s – the decade when many daft things were done – to replace the more modest church which previously had stood on the site. Many pilgrims feel that such a brutalist structure altogether misrepresents the unassuming and gentle woman it purports to honour. The symbol of Mary is the lily. Fittingly, the vast dome that surmounts a building that gets it all wrong is in the form of an upside-down lily.
Several earlier buildings preceded the present church. Neither the sumptuous Byzantine basilica nor the splendid Crusader church that succeeded it could be described as faithful in spirit to the self-effacing Mary. By the time the Crusaders arrived the Byzantine building had collapsed. In 1187 there was a particularly nasty battle between the Crusaders and the Muslims. (‘Militant Muslims’, we would call them today, but they were no less militant than the bloodthirsty Crusaders.) After the battle, in which the Crusaders were defeated, the Christian inhabitants of Nazareth took refuge in the church. They were pursued into it and slaughtered. The Crusader church was sacked and razed to the ground by an emir of the Sultan of Egypt in the thirteenth century. Eventually what was left of it became a garbage tip.
The recent history of Nazareth has not testified any more clearly to the good news of the Prince of Peace. Today Nazareth’s Christians fear Moslem extremism. A dispute which dragged on for years, until quashed by the Israeli authorities, centred on a provocative proposal to build a mosque next to the Basilica of the Annunciation. Nazareth, like the rest of West Bank, is under harsh occupation. The modern Jewish settlement of Nazareth, Illit, overlooking ancient Nazareth, prospers at the expense of the old city. Nazareth’s Christians, looking for a future, look for it somewhere else. Some say that in a couple of generations there will be no Christians left in the city where Jesus grew up.
The story of Nazareth is a sad record of the ungodly mess we mortals have made of things. Beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation is a crypt and in the crypt is an altar and beneath the altar is an inscription. The inscription makes an absurd claim: Verbum caro hic factum est – ‘Here the Word became flesh’. Here of all places – here where this preposterous building now stands,
