Father THOMAS IDERGARD SJ

Homily for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord – Candlemas

2025-02-02

Malachi 3:1-4; Ps 130; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40

St. Lars Catholic Church, Uppsala (English Mass)

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

To ancient Jews, the temple of Jerusalem was the most important place in the world. A meeting place between God and humanity where humans were strengthened in the service of God’s will. It expressed the vision of how God through his covenant with the Jewish people would carry his light to all nations, gathering all of humanity, scattered and divided by sin, in a kingdom of peace and justice. Beginning here and fulfilled in eternity.

The real approach of the people and their leaders however differed from this vision. Israel’s prophets appeared, pointing out that the people had left the right worship of God. The sacrificial cult of the temple, the sign of the human will to reconciliation, had been reduced to empty rituals without significance in people’s lives. The clergy allowed themselves to be corrupted by the desire for money and by toning and watering down preaching so as not to challenge secular rulers and opinions. One of the prophets, Ezekiel, even claimed that God’s glory had left the temple completely.

But as we heard in our first reading from the prophet Malachi, in the same prophetic tradition, God promised that he one day “would enter his temple” again and “purify” and “refine” his people, enabling them to “make the offering to the Lord as it should be made” to realise his will in their lives, which is the sense of right worship.

When the Christ child enters the Jerusalem temple with our Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the definitive fulfilment of God’s promise has begun. God never fulfils his promises the way we think it should be done, but always exceeds what we can imagine, as God considers what is our best in eternity, where we stay focused on what we think is best in space and time. An important prayer is therefore that we might see when and how God acts, follow God’s will and give thanks. Or as we say in the “Our Father”: “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.

This is how both Simeon and Anna in the temple lived. They allowed God’s Holy Spirit to lead them to see something else, something more than what they would have seen on their own. And so, they recognized Israel’s and the world’s salvation in a little child, despite what probably was a quite big crowd in the temple. Anna was a person of prayer. Simeon trusted the tradition of prophecy that both condemned sin and promised salvation.

Prayer and trust in tradition. These are also two guiding stars for us Catholics. Prayer is our communication with the living God, incarnate in Jesus Christ as mediated by the unchanged teaching of the Church from the apostles, ensuring that the Christ we invoke and want to follow, is the same Christ that the eyewitnesses met risen from the dead – not a creation of our imagination and limited wishes.

Jesus Christ is the union between divine and human, and thus the sole enabler of humanity’s communion with God. When the Christ child enters the temple, it is not only God, in human body and soul, entering his own temple of stone, but the true, living, and eternal temple, as Jesus later will designate his own body, becoming visible.

By coming to the temple in human form, “completely like” us, as our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews stated, God acts both as someone who will perform a sacrifice, i.e. as a priest, and as the concrete sacrificial matter, in which humans can partake by faith. Unlike all other foregoing animal sacrifices in the temple, being mere symbols, God’s own sacrifice truly accomplishes its aim: liberation from the grip and the power of the devil, of sin and death, and reconciliation and a given share in God’s eternal life, starting here and now for the one who wants to believe.

Thus, we see the inner unity of today’s feast and the Holy Eucharist, where the one and final sacrifice brought about by Jesus Christ on the cross becomes truly present to nourish us with his communion with the Father in Holy Spirit. And so, enable us to increasingly offer what we have and are at the service of God’s kingdom.

“Eucharist” comes from the Greek word “Eucharistia”, meaning “thanksgiving”. And this is precisely what Anna in the temple expresses, as she begins to “praise God”. But Anna does something more linked to thanksgiving. She speaks “of the child to all”. There is a continuation of the reception of the Lord in his self-giving in the Eucharist, into our flesh, our matter, through the new temple, Christ’s Church. And this continuation is mission, evangelisation. To speak of him to all, in words and deeds, and, if nothing else, actively pray for others to acknowledge Jesus Christ. This is what he wants us to do!

And for this, we are prepared by Simeon’s prophecy that the Christ child “is destined for the fall and for the rising of many … to be a sign that is rejected”. Today, it can be provocative to profess faith in Jesus Christ, not as a “nice guy”, “a cool influencer”, saying “nice things” about peace and love for the feelgood of being confirmed in all our views, but as the one he claims to be; the one our historical sources, i.e. the New Testament, testify about and the Church proclaims and worships: God who reveals himself to us.

Reluctancy or hesitation towards Christ as he truly is, is often a resistance to the change and transformation he wants to bring about: of each one of us and therethrough of the world; never from the world to us. A change and transformation into more of holiness, a life more profoundly with and for God. Helped by the Light that also reveals which corners of our life we need to clean more properly.

With the final words of the Mass, “go forth, the Mass is ended”, in its different versions, we are being sent like the apostles, to carry the eternal light of Christ to the world, in all its dark corners, as our thanksgiving, our “Eucharistia”. Let us pray that this Holy Eucharist may strengthen our mission for Christ’s light. And let us pray that we may always, wherever we go, keep this light high, as our and the world’s true and only hope. Amen.