Advent - God Knows What He's AboutSample

Simeon Blesses God For Jesus

December 23 finds our family in transition every year. It is usually a day that we are wrapping things up at home before we travel to the homes of distant family or a day we feverishly finish cleaning the house getting ready to host blessed guests. Our kids refer to December 23 as Christmas Adam because Adam came just before Eve. (They also refer to it as Festivus, but that’s not important right now.)

Today’s reading finds us nearing the end of Luke’s Gospel narrative about the birth of Christ. Luke stands apart from the other Gospels in his use of songs. The first and second chapters of Luke are a musical. The book pulses with tunes and soars with songs from Mary’s family to our current reading, the song of Simeon. 

Simeon was an old man who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would one day see the Messiah. He stood watch, awaiting the promised one. This elderly sentinel (a century sentry?) was the sailor in the crow’s nest looking for land, the night watchman awaiting dawn, the student furtively looking at the clock during class. Unlike the shepherds, who weren’t waiting for anything, Simeon waited expectantly due to the Holy Spirit. In Luke’s telling, we find him bursting into song when his long waiting days are over. After all of these years, he has finally seen the Christ child!

But Simeon’s song takes us by surprise. Where the earlier songs of Mary, Zacharias, and others sing of pure joy at the new news, Simeon sings a song of experience, a somber song. Simeon sings in a minor key. You see, Simeon was waiting for (as he put it) the “consolation of Israel”. Israel had been battered and bruised by empire and felt abandoned by God and longed for consolement and for healing. Israel bore a burden that only the Messiah could ease. The Holy Spirit guided Simeon to rightly understand that consolation would ultimately come from Messiah. Few, if any, of the first Christmas celebrants understood all that Messiah would mean. Simeon may have been the first to fully grasp that the visit of the Messiah would be a time of challenge and difficulty, not one simply of all conquering joy. 

Simeon’s blessing of the infant Jesus is itself a prayer of thanksgiving that Simeon has lived to see “Your Salvation.”  This child would be a light of revelation to the Gentiles, as Jesus’ return overflowed the narrow banks of Israel and made a promised revelation to the Gentiles. Simeon concludes his song with a blessing to Mary. This final blessing foreshadows a darkening time, a day to come in which, Simeon says, a sword would pierce her own soul. Luke’s narrative of the birth of Christ carries in its verses joys and sorrows, songs and laments, and most importantly, mangers and crosses. 

Dr. John Vassar

Provost, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor