Lord, now let your servant

The hymn I’ve chosen for today is “Lord, now let your servant go his way in peace”. The title is from Luke 2:29 and part of the chapter of Luke’s gospel that tells the story of Jesus from his birth to adolescence and is nearly all we know about his early life.  The text is very familiar to anyone who enjoys Evensong in the Church of England.  It is one of the Church’s shortest canticles (Bible passages that are usually sung rather than spoken) known by its Latin title “nunc dimittis” and is a setting of the song of Simeon, an elderly Jewish priest. The hymn is James Seddon’s four-part setting of the canticle to a regular metrical tune.

The occasion of Simeon’s song was the ‘presentation’ of Jesus in the Temple, an old Jewish ritual that allowed a woman to be proclaimed ritually clean forty days after giving birth to her son (for a girl it was twice as long -eighty days, see Leviticus chapter 12). With the birth of Jesus arbitrarily celebrated on 25 December, that makes 2 February the occasion to remember this ceremony, known as Candlemas because candles are lit as a sign of revelation (enlightenment).

Simeon’s revelation from God at some time in his life was that before he died he would see the “hope of Israel” (that is the promised saviour, also known as the Messiah or Christ) although this hymn doesn’t actually use that phrase.  By the same revelation from God, he recognised in the infant Jesus someone who in later life would be this hope, the one who would rescue the Jewish people. 

But rescue them from what?  It’s generally assumed that people in his day were hoping for a military or diplomatic leader who would save them from subjugation as part of the Roman empire and give them the independence under God that they longed for.  But it turned out that Jesus understood his mission much more in terms of saving them from the twin evils of secularism (ignoring God altogether) and legalism (trying to follow the letter of the religious law while ignoring the basic principles of fairness, justice and mercy, the fault of the Pharisees). He was sent to ‘redeem’ (literally ‘buy back’ God’s people for God.  Later Christian thought has added further layers of understanding to this concept of redemption, but now isn’t the time to go into those.

But there’s more to the story than that. Simeon saw more than the hope of Israel in this baby.  He hailed him also as the “light of revelation to the Gentiles shown and light of Israel’s glory to the world made known” in the words of the hymn – other translations are available.  Jesus is God’s gift not just to the Jewish people but to the whole world.  Mary had known that ever since the annunciation, the shepherds at Bethlehem knew it.  But when Simeon proclaimed it in the Temple, the secret was out.  The people of Jerusalem may have forgotten this incident thirty years later, until the Messiah returned to fulfil his destiny.

For us, Candlemas is a time to recognise the light that Jesus brings to our lives. That might be a recognition of having forgotten God’s call and living life without reference to his standards, or living by obsolete rituals that are holding us back from living life as God intended (like the Pharisees), or offering a way out of some kind of darkness in our life (perhaps depression, addiction, or being controlled by someone else).   Or it might be a time to remember a promise that God once made that we have not yet seen fulfilled, or failed to grasp fully, and ask him to fulfil it now.  Go your way in peace, God’s word has been fulfilled.