By Fr. George Dorbarakis
After forty days had passed since the saving Incarnation of the Lord — His birth without a man from the Holy Ever-Virgin Mary — on this most venerable day, His all-pure Mother and the righteous Joseph brought our Lord Jesus Christ into the Temple, according to the custom of the shadowy and lawful letter of the Mosaic Law. At that time the aged and elderly Symeon also came, he who had received a revelation from the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen Christ the Lord. He received Him into his arms, and after giving thanks and confessing God, he cried out: ‘Now You let Your servant depart, O Master, according to Your word;’ that is, now You may take Your servant, O Lord, in peace. And then, filled with joy, he departed from this life, exchanging earthly things for the heavenly and eternal.
All the hymnography of this great feast of the Lord and of the Theotokos moves within an atmosphere of awe and mystery: “what appears is earthly, but what is understood is heavenly.” The hymns indeed emphasize the historical reality — the coming of the holy family to the Temple when the forty days from the Lord’s Nativity were completed, and His meeting with the elder Symeon — but they also open the eyes of our soul in the Spirit, so that we may see the “depth” of this reality: the astonished stance of the holy angels, who are unable to comprehend what is taking place on earth, as they behold the Creator of man being carried as an infant, the uncontainable and infinite God being confined within the arms of an old man, the indescribable Son and Word of God, consubstantial with the Father, willingly becoming circumscribed as a human being. And the only explanation they can give for these incomprehensible things is the love of God for mankind.
“Let us hasten to the Theotokos, all who desire to behold her Son being brought to Symeon; Him whom the Bodiless Ones, seeing from heaven, were astonished, saying: We now behold wondrous and paradoxical things, incomprehensible and ineffable. He who created Adam is carried as an infant; the uncontainable is contained in the arms of the elder; He who dwells indescribably in the bosom of His Father is willingly circumscribed in the flesh, not in His divinity, the only lover of mankind.”
In this great mystery — which is regarded as a continuation of the Nativity and the Circumcision of the Lord, and therefore as an intensification of the proclamation that Christ our God appeared in the world as man not in theory or imagination, but truly and in reality (“not seemingly nor in fantasy, but appearing to the world in truth”) — the elder Symeon takes part. He is initiated into this mystery (“and being initiated into these things, Symeon recognized Him as God who appeared in the flesh”) and is granted a vision of God greater and clearer even than that of Moses on Mount Sinai (“For Moses was deemed worthy to behold God through darkness and a faint voice… but Symeon held in his arms the pre-eternal Word of the Father made flesh and revealed to the nations the Light, the Cross, and the Resurrection”).
This initiation and vision of God granted to Symeon through the mystery of his reception with the forty-day-old Christ constitutes the greatest event of his life. For on the one hand, his aged arms become the throne of Almighty God; and on the other, precisely because of this, he reaches the point of complete freedom,that is, the desire to depart joyfully from this world.
“He who rides upon the Cherubim and is hymned by the Seraphim is today, according to the Law, offered in the divine Temple and is enthroned in the arms of an elder.”
“Tell us, Symeon: whom do you carry in your arms and rejoice in the Temple? To whom do you cry and shout? Now I am set free, for I have seen my Savior.”
Symeon’s desire to depart from this world — a desire accompanied by great joy (“And Symeon the righteous, having received Him and seeing the fulfillment of his release, cried out with gladness”) — marks the boundary of holiness. Only the saint wishes to depart from this life not because he has grown weary of it or fallen into despair (which would define unbelief), but because he has lived and lives the fullness of his relationship with Christ in this life, and awaits the perfection of that relationship after his departure from the world. As the Apostle Paul says: “I desire to depart and be with Christ.” The other saints of our Church affirm the same, such as Saint John of the Ladder, who notes: “The saint awaits his death every day.”
Indeed, the hymns of the feast also reveal a dimension of Symeon’s joyful desire to leave this world that is not widely known among the faithful people: he wishes to depart quickly because he cannot bear not to go and announce to the first-created ones, Adam and Eve, the joyful message that what God promised them after their fall into sin — that He would one day come as man to save the human race — has now become reality. In this respect, Symeon precedes John the Forerunner, who also prepared the way of the Messiah in Hades.
“I depart to reveal myself to Adam who dwells in Hades, and to bring glad tidings to Eve,” cried Symeon.
It is evident that the meeting of Saint Symeon with the forty-day-old Lord also functions for us in an exemplary way, as the hymnography itself points out. For no event of the Lord’s earthly presence is meant only for one era or for one person alone. This means that just as Saint Symeon met Christ then, so we too are called to meet Him within the life of our Church and through her prayers — to receive Him as our Savior and to worship Him as our God.
“Come, let us also, with inspired hymns, meet Christ and receive Him, whose salvation Symeon beheld. This is He whom David proclaimed; this is He who spoke through the prophets; He who was incarnate for us and speaks through the Law. Let us worship Him.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
