Candlemas

 

This coming Sunday is a pivot-point in the year, forty days on from Christmas, when we turn away from celebrating Jesus’ birth and turn towards remembering his agonising suffering, death, and glorious resurrection, in Holy Week and Easter.

This coming Sunday we recall the occasion, forty days after his birth, when Jesus’ parents presented him before God at the Temple in Jerusalem. This coming Sunday we bless candles — the ritual lighting of which symbolises our deepest moments of sorrow and of joy; and of recognition that God, who is invisible, is with us.

When a Jewish woman gave birth, she entered niddah, a period of seclusion and abstinence from intimacy with her husband she entered whenever she bled, in menstruation or in childbirth. Niddah lasted around seven days (or, seven days after the bleeding stopped) after which she would take a ritual bath before being reunited with her husband. (In recent years there has been a renaissance of this practice of withdrawal and reunion among Jewish women, as a beautiful gift of self-care, and a means of sustaining intimacy over time.)

After giving birth to a son, a woman entered niddah for seven days, followed by thirty-three days before she returned to public life, marked by presenting her son before God. After giving birth to a daughter, the periods were doubled — fourteen days of niddah, followed by sixty-six days before returning to public life.

This much is set out in the law of Moses, though no reason is given for why it should be thirty-three days for a son and sixty-six for a daughter — leading to much speculation. My own speculation (no more than that) is this. In Genesis 46 we read about the family of Jacob — grandson of father Abraham, and whom God had re-named Israel — who went with him down to Egypt to find salvation from a lengthy, region-wide famine. Jacob had twelve sons — who would give their names to the twelve tribes of Israel — and a daughter, by four different women, his wives Leah and Rachel, and their slaves Zilpah and Bilhah. We read that the number of his offspring, those belonging to him, his sons and their children, by his first wife Leah — beginning with his firstborn son, Reuben — numbered thirty-three; and the total number by all four women came to sixty-six. (The list of names and the accompanying numbers don’t exactly match; but these are symbolic numbers, not literal ones.)

I would suggest that to wait thirty-three days before presenting a son before God, and sixty-six days before presenting a daughter, is a means of including them in the family of Israel. Every son extends the family into the next generation. Every daughter completes the family again. Thirty-three. Sixty-six. This one, too, belongs to Israel. This one, too, takes their place within the family who are saved from famine, and, later, saved again, from enslavement. This one, too, is numbered.

So, Mary and Joseph bring Jesus, forty days on — seven, plus thirty-three — to take his place within the story of his people.

And there, there will be a reversal, a pivot-point, a turning. For the old man Simeon will bless Mary with a strange blessing: ‘and a sword shall pierce your heart, too.’

This points us to the cross, where a spear is thrust into Jesus’ heart to establish that he is, truly, dead; and the blood that has pooled there, and separated out into red and white blood cells, pours forth as blood and water. And a sword shall pierce your heart, too. Mary, at the foot of the cross. Her heart pierced, in the personal pain of any mother who witnesses the violent death of her son. But also, a symbolic union. Mary, who is the Church, the family of Jesus, shares in his piercing, in his death — and in his resurrection.

Just as Jesus is brought into the story of the family of Jacob/Israel, so, now, Mary — and all future generations to come — are brought into the story of the family of Jesus (which is a continuation, and a fulfilment, of the family of Israel).

This is the story into which the Church enters, participated in, down through the generations. A share in Christ’s suffering, dying, rising in glory. This is the life we are called to live in the world, not seeking to shield ourselves from pain but to know pain transformed, to bear faithful witness to, first, evil, and then, good — and truth, and beauty — rising from the bloody ground.

This is the story we enter into, symbolically — in embodied ways — in observing Christmas and Holy Week and Easter; and in observing the pivot-point between them, this Sunday, with the blessing of candles, which we light in times of great joy and sorrow.