“Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” [Mark 4: 21-22]
When the Son of God, the light of the world, was sent by God into this world, He arrived in a surprising, even hidden, way. Rather than manifesting power, He embraced smallness and dependency, becoming an infant, a child of the Virgin Mary. This unspectacular entrance upon the world scene meant that, without jubilant angels singing before shepherds and miraculous stars drawing astronomers from the East, the presence of the Redeemer among us would have gone almost entirely unnoticed. Today’s celebration is the capstone on what used to be called “Epiphanytide,” that period of time after January 6 in which the Church meditates on the various ways in which Jesus Christ’s divinity was revealed in the flesh.
This points to an important reality about the Gospel, and in fact, the entire created cosmos: it is a revelation of things previously hidden. The inner meaning of the human person is only fully understood in the discovery that we are meant to share life with God, just as food and drink, bread and wine, find their full meaning in the Holy Eucharist, God feeding us with His own life.
In theory, God could have saved us without our knowing. There is something potentially mischievous, even manipulative, in that idea. What we see, rather, is that God invites us to be His coworkers in bringing mercy and healing to the world. For this to happen, we need to recognize His presence, how to read “the signs of the times.” The “ true light which enlightens every man” has entered the world, and now illuminates all of God’s creatures from within. The Word of God, through Whom all things were made, is revealed to be the life within all things, making them holy and lovable.
When the aged and devout prophet Simeon takes the infant in his arms, he not only proclaims Him to be the long-awaited salvation of Israel, but “a light for revelation to the Gentiles [Luke 2: 32].” Salvation and reconciliation with the great Creator of the cosmos is being offered to all, though it is Israel’s special “glory” to be the nation that prepared the way and who calls Jesus a son of the tribe of Judah.
Let’s turn to another aspect of today’s mystery. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was removed from the temple. What happened to it remains an unsolved riddle–Indiana Jones’s adventures notwithstanding. When the temple was rebuilt, the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies (when the Roman general Pompey entered the Holy of Holies after taking Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he was puzzled to find it empty of any idols or statues). God was not entirely absent; nor yet had He fully returned after His dramatic departure narrated at the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophecy, dating from the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Malachi, writing perhaps in the fifth century B.C., indicated the God would suddenly appear in the temple. In the arrival of the Virgin Mary and the boy Jesus, the early Church saw the return of the true Ark of the Covenant (the Mother of God, whose womb was God’s resting place for nine months), and the long-awaited sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment for which holy Simeon and Anna had kept vigil with such love for God.
In the second antiphon from First Vespers of today’s feast, this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel: “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king; him whom the Virgin conceived, the Virgin has brought forth; after giving birth, the Virgin adores him whom she bore.” Now, if we remember back to the Exodus, and God’s claim on all first-born sons, we see that this espousal is intimately connected with Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. He returns to claim His bride, at the cost of His own blood. There is indeed a certain sorrow to this, but it is that of those who sow in tears, only to reap in joy. In the Presentation is encapsulated the whole of the story of salvation. God the Father, in receiving back the Son of Mary, liberates not only Israel, but through her, all humanity—and not from political slavery in Egypt, but from spiritual slavery to sin. It is significant that, at today’s Mass, we bear candles in procession, just as we will at the Easter Vigil. It is one and the same Passover that we celebrate, from differing perspectives. As such, today’s feast marks the perfect nodal point between the Incarnation and Christmas, and the Paschal Triduum that looms in the future.