The Light of Christ

February 02, 2021

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple - Candlemas

Six years after the seventh and final season of The West Wing, the highly regarded screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin brought another series to the TV screens of the world, called The Newsroom. With Jeff Daniels as a news anchor who reinvents himself from inoffensively bland to aggressively honest, Sorkin gave his audience a worthy successor to the fictional President Bartlett and his team.

The Newsroom never achieved the level of fame and success of The West Wing, but the first six or seven minutes of the very first episode - which play out before credits or anything else - have achieved something of a cult status, based around a powerful and unexpected monologue by Daniels’ fictional character Will McAvoy.

The scene is a lecture theater in a university, where a professor has been hosting a Q&A session for two politicians and Daniels’ news anchor. To end the evening, the panelists are asked by a naïve undergraduate to state in one sentence ‘or less’ why America is the greatest country in the world. “Diversity and opportunity” responds the Democrat; “Freedom and freedom” counters the Republican. Daniels’ character tries to get away with combining both those answers to be his own, until something snaps inside him, and he delivers a powerful speech in which he makes plain his views of the shortcomings of the United States, claiming that the US now leads the world in only three things: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, Adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending - making the point that America was spending more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.

To a silent, stunned audience, who have never seen this man express an opinion of any depth before, he concludes that while America might once have, indeed, been the greatest country in the world, it isn’t anymore. That scene was broadcast in June, 2012, but, given how frequently it has been referenced on social media in recent weeks, it clearly continues to feel relevant for many people. The problem is that former President Trump attracted the highest number of votes ever recorded for a sitting president, from which we may assume that a good proportion of the 70 million who voted for him thought he was doing good work in making America regain its greatness. But, on the other hand, another 75 million cast their vote for President Biden, and it is clear that in this constituency, many think that one of the new president’s tasks is also to make America great again - but to do so despite, and not because, of the legacy of his predecessor.

The prophet Haggai could probably have related to the current political situation of the United States, despite living and ministering about 2600 years ago, in a Jerusalem slowly recovering from its near destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Forget the separation of church and state. For the obscure characters of our first reading, for Haggai, for King Darius, for Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, the governor of Judah, Temple and state were intimately connected, and it was plain, at least to the prophet Haggai, that Israel - now a vassal state and not a kingdom - needed to be made great again.

And, iconic of this need, he believed that this must start with the rebuilding of the Temple, so that, ‘the latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former’ - and in so doing, he provided generations of bass soloists with the most splendid of recitatives in the opening movements of Messiah, as he describes how the Lord will ‘shake all the nations’ to provide the necessary treasure required to realize this vision. But, of course, it did not work out exactly as these characters of the late sixth century before Christ had hoped. The rebuilding of the Second Temple was inappropriately slow, and the Israelites seemed more concerned with their own wealth and vanity than providing a truly fitting home for the Lord of hosts. And the new Temple was only to reach its greatest architectural high spot some five hundred years later, when Herod the Great decided to create what was almost entirely a brand new building, to be a fitting and lasting tribute, not really to God, but to himself.

But the true glory of any religious building is its function, and not its architecture - a point very clearly in the mind of Jesus in the incident about which we heard in our second reading. Whether it is merely the use of the Temple as a ‘marketplace’, or the synoptic writers’ more vivid turn of phrase that is has become a ‘den of robbers’, Jesus is clear that the situation is anything but ‘great’. And it is interesting to note that for the author of the Fourth Gospel, this incident occurs on Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem and the Temple. For Saint John, this is the stuff of manifesto, that informs the subsequent narrative of the entire gospel story. However, despite our choice of readings in this Choral Evensong, today we are more concerned with the first visit Jesus makes to the Temple not in John’s account of his life, but in that written by Luke. For this is our second liturgy celebrating the feast of Jesus’ ‘presentation’ in the Temple as an infant, a ritual undertaken to fulfil the law of Moses - our first liturgy having been the celebration of the Eucharist we held on Sunday morning, which was when we read Luke’s beautiful story of the baby Jesus and the old man Simeon, who proclaims him as the light of the
world.

The readings at this service were chosen by the church precisely to be used when there has already been a ‘principal celebration’ of this great feast, and what we hear this evening is theological commentary on the Temple and the presence of God therein. Because the Johannine Jesus we encounter this evening in the account of the so-called ‘cleansing’ of the Temple is - as he makes plain - more interested in ‘the temple of his body’ than he is in the Temple building. And thus, the message comes to us that, if we are to take seriously our commitment to Christ, we, too, should focus on making great the temple of Christ’s body - which, of course, is us - the church.

And it is this beautiful feast of Candlemas which reminds us that it is the role of the Church of God to shine the light of Christ in the dark places of the world. That may include helping make America great, if that means making it more Christ-like - and, frankly, that is the only tool to measure greatness in which you or I should have any interest. But it also means providing prayerful witness, commentary and action motivated by the lack of greatness we see in other countries of the world - such as the treatment of Alexei Navalny in Russia and the implications for democracy in that country, or the treatment of the Uighurs in China and the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong.

It means ensuring that we try and bring that light of Christ into the places of violence and hunger in our own city. It means bringing the light of Christ into the pastoral nightmare of this ongoing pandemic which has left well more than 400,000 people dead just in this country. For at its worst, over 2000 years of Christianity, the church has been corrupt, inward-looking, discriminatory and self-serving. But at its best - when we rise from sinfulness and live out the fulness of our baptismal covenant, we are uniquely placed to be the Body of Christ in this world, living out a call to mission and ministry that is inclusive and loving, and which enlightens the peoples of this planet and glorifies the God who created us all. And thus, as we will pray in our final hymn, we are bold to say:

O Light of all the earth, the children wait for thee! Come to thy temples here, that we from sin set free, before thy Father’s face my all presented be.