Light Cuts to the Quick

[A reflection on today's reading of the Gospel for the Mass of the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas), which readings may be found here (click the link).]

The Prophet Isaiah wrote, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light," and the people of Israel living in First Century Judea certainly thought they were walking in darkness. Having won freedom from their Greek oppressors, they were then betrayed by their Roman allies to become a client state under Rome's iron rule. Taxes were high, the governing officials capricious, contemptuous, and hostile to the Jewish way of life and Jewish faith. Dark times indeed.

Living among that darkness was a man, now ruinously old, who walked closely with the God of his ancestors, so closely in fact that the Spirit of his God and he were on speaking terms. God told Simeon to be patient, that before he died he would see the light of his people's deliverance. Then one day God prompted Simeon to head into the Temple, an errand with which he gladly complied, and there he found a man with his young wife and a child no more than forty days old, a child which God whispered in Simeon's ear, "That's the one."

Filled with God's Spirit, the old man to the family's surprise proclaimed this child to be not only the hope of Israel's salvation, but the light to illuminate the nations, who also walked in considerable darkness. True to any light, however, this child would lay bare the inner thoughts of all, revealing to anyone who would see who would turn and reconcile with God...and those who would not and who would bitterly oppose this child. Even the child's mother would be cut to the quick by all this.

Even today the light that is Jesus of Nazareth, God's anointed, cuts us to the quick, laying bare to any who would see the inner secrets of our hearts. An encounter with Him leaves no one untouched, and by their reactions to Him and His teaching reveals whether they accept the reconciliation with God he offers, or rejects it either through bland indifference or outright hostility. So it has been for the past two thousand years, so it is now, and so it shall be in the days to come. He shall be the occasion of the rise and fall of many. May we embrace the light and be reconciled and eschew the darkness.