1648 was quite a year. Britain was in turmoil as the Second Civil War began in England. It was the last year of the king's life: on 30th January 1649 Charles I would step onto the scaffold in Whitehall with the words, "God's judgments are just," on his lips.
Things weren't much better in France, which Cardinal Richelieu, who had died just six years earlier, had made into the greatest power in Europe. That country was contending with its own civil war, with the outbreak of the first Fronde.
Elsewhere in Europe though,the Treaty of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Years War, and the Peace of MŸnster led to Spain recognizing Dutch independence. War and peace; it was ever thus.
Doubtless there were pivotal events of equal importance happening elsewhere in the world in 1648, but when I was at school, history was pretty much confined to Britain and Western Europe.
Back in England in 1648, the Vicar of Dean Prior in the county of Devonshire, published a collection of his writings entitled Hesperides, or, the Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick. That collection contains this poem, entitled 'Ceremonies for Candlemasse Eve':
Down with the Rosemary and Bayes,
Down with the Mistletoe;
Instead of Holly, now up-raise
The greener Box (for show).
The Holly hitherto did sway;
Let Box now domineere;
untill the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter's Eve appeare.
Then youthful Box which now hath grae,
Your houses to renew;
Grown old, surrender must his place,
Unto the crispéd Yew.
When Yew is out, then Birch comes in,
And many Flowers beside;
Both of a fresh, and fragrant kinne
To honour Whitsontide.
Green Rushes then, and sweetest Bents,
With cooler Oken boughs;
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
Herrick's words, as he contemplated the Eve of Candlemas, could serve as a comment on the events in Europe, as much as on the movement of the seasons, both inside and outside the Church, with which his poem is concerned. New things succeed, as former things grow old. For Herrick seems to understand the pivotal nature of this Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.
In the liturgy for this day, the celebrant speaks these words:
Dear friends: forty days ago we celebrated the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now we recall the day on which he was presented in the Temple... In this Eucharist, we celebrate both the joy of his coming and his searching judgment, looking back to the day of his birth and forward to the coming days of his Passion.
This is a pivotal moment; we can feel the turning of the Church's year, we can sense a shift in focus. New things succeed, as former things grow old. In the Christian year Candlemas is a pivotal time. It is here, now, that the shadow of the cross begins to fall upon the joy of Christmas. Now is the time when we begin to understand Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents as a prefiguring of Calvary.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
Almost exactly three hundred years after Herrick published Hesperides, between the autumn of 1941 and the summer of 1942, when the world was deep in the bloody conflict of the Second World War, another English poet, W H Auden, was engaged in writing his Christmas Oratorio, entitled For the Time Being.
Towards the end, the Narrator speaks these lines, echoing Herrick's meditation on the changing seasons:
Well, so that is that. Now we must
dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their
cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken - and carrying them
up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken
down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school...
A little further on, the Narrator continues:
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension
at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot,
after all now
Be very far off.
And Lent is not very far off at all. At Candlemas, the shadow of the cross begins fall upon the joy of Christmas. In the Temple, the shadow of the cross begins to fall upon the life of Mary, for as Simeon says to her, And a sword will pierce through your own soul also.
Motherhood invariably begins in pain. But for Mary, the greater pain was yet to come, as she saw her son go out into a life full of risk and danger, a life moving on to a catastrophe she could neither prevent nor fully understand.
Religious reverence, looking at Mary, has seen in her the symbol of vicarious suffering. Innumerable Christians, passing through darkness of their own, have been comforted by the knowledge that their suffering was not unique but had been endured by the mother of the Lord herself. It is perhaps as 'Our Lady of Sorrows' that Mary has been venerated most.
At Candlemas, the shadow of the cross begins to fall upon the joy of Christmas. At Candlemas, the image of the Christ Child in his mother's arms, the image of so many Christmas cards, begins to dissolve into the thirteenth Station of the Cross, where the mother holds the lifeless body of her son in her arms.
Holly gives way to Box; Box gives way to Yew; Yew to Birch; and so on. The Incarnation leads to the Crucifixion; Bethlehem leads to Calvary. Mary's 'Yes' to God, leads to something more costly still: the son she brought to birth, the son she presented in the Temple, becomes the son nailed to the cross.
How many of us, with Auden's narrator, are
Vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension
at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday?
Candlemas calls us to confront the suffering in our own lives, in the lives of those we know and love, and in the lives of the countless millions we shall never know. Candlemas calls us to confront the sorrow and the pain in the world, as Mary glimpsed it in the Temple.
But let us not forget that in letting go her child into the ways of God, Mary released new life into the world. Let us not forget that the road which lead from Bethlehem to Calvary continues on to the Garden of the Resurrection. Let us not forget that faith involves a journey for each one of us, a journey which will be more or less costly, a journey from Christmas, through Candlemas and Good Friday to Herrick's 'dancing Easter-day.' And let us not forget that by undertaking this journey in faith, we too can release new life into the world.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
Sermon by: Jonathan Mason