Simeon and Anna and the Child in the Temple

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Picture a set of wide stone steps in the early morning, worn down in the middle by a great many feet. It has been a cold night, and the stone still holds some of it. Up the steps, one slow step at a time, comes a young woman carrying a very small baby against her shoulder, and beside her a man carrying a little wicker cage with two birds in it, who are making the sort of remarks that birds make when they have been carried up a hill at dawn.

And somewhere ahead of them, in the great courts above, an old man has just stopped in the middle of a sentence, because something inside him has said, quite quietly, that it is today.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin with a calendar.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter two, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the crowd, and the quiet conversations, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Last time we were on the hills above Bethlehem, with the shepherds, and we said that Simeon and Anna were another night. This is that night.

Luke tells us that eight days after the birth the child was circumcised and given the name Jesus, the name the angel had given before he was conceived. And then he does something that is easy to read past. He says that when the days of their purification were completed, according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.

Let us unpack that, because it is rather a lot of law for one sentence, and the law is the whole stage on which the story stands.

The law of Moses, in the book of Leviticus, says that when a woman has given birth to a son, she is set apart for a time, and that when the time is over she comes to the sanctuary to offer a sacrifice. The time, for a son, is forty days. Forty days is a good long while. Anyone who has ever had a new baby in the house knows that forty days is about how long it takes for the house to stop looking like a place where something has exploded, and for the grandmothers to stop giving advice. In the ancient world it was also a time for the mother to rest, and be looked after, and to stay close to home. So by the time Mary and Joseph set out, the little family has been in Bethlehem a month and more. It is only six miles or so from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, a morning's walk, even with a baby, and even with a mother who is not in a hurry.

The sacrifice itself is a lamb, a year old, and a young pigeon or a turtledove. That is what the law asks. But the law is a kind one, and it knows that not everyone has a lamb. So it adds a gentle clause. If she cannot afford a lamb, then she may bring two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for the burnt offering and one for the sin offering, and the priest will make atonement for her, and she shall be clean.

And here we should notice that Luke tells us what they brought. A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons. Not the lamb. It is a very small detail, tucked into the middle of a verse, and Luke says it without comment. He does not say they were poor. He simply says what they brought, and anyone in his day who knew the law would know exactly what it meant. This is a family that cannot afford a lamb. The mother of the Lord of heaven and earth is standing in the line for people who bring birds.

That is the first thing to know. The second is the other law, the law of the firstborn. In the book of Exodus, when God brought Israel out of Egypt, he told them that every firstborn son belonged to him, and that the people were to remember it ever afterwards. Every first son was to be presented, and bought back, as a sign that the whole people had been rescued on a night when the firstborn of the land were spared. So a family with a first son would bring him to the temple, and say, in effect, this child is yours, and thank you.

So there are two errands in one trip. A mother to be made clean, and a firstborn to be presented. Luke mentions both, and he mentions them in the way a person mentions what everybody is doing that morning. Because that is the thing. This is entirely ordinary. Across the whole of Jerusalem, on any morning, there are mothers with babies coming up to the temple with birds, in obedience to the law, and nobody looks twice at any of them.

And that, as we will see, is exactly the point.

We should say something about the temple, because it is a big place, and if you have only ever seen it in pictures you may imagine a quiet building. It was not. It was a vast platform, one of the biggest building works of the ancient world, with colonnades round the edges and courts rising one above another, with a great deal of gold and white stone, and it was the busiest place in the country. There were priests going about their courses, and Levites singing, and pilgrims from three continents. There were people changing money, and people selling doves, and people arguing about the price of doves. There was the smell of incense and of roasting meat and of a great many people who had been walking for days. Somewhere in the middle of it was the sanctuary itself, where only the priests went in, and all round it the courts where everyone else gathered to pray.

Luke does not tell us the name of the court, or where the family stood, or who the priest was who took their birds. Later writers have made guesses, and some of them are charming, but they are guesses. What Luke tells us is that they came, and that they did what the law required. And then he turns, very quietly, to look at someone else.

Now, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.

That is how Luke introduces him, in just those words, and then he gives us three sentences about him that are among the most carefully chosen in the whole Gospel. This man, he says, was righteous and devout. He was looking for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him.

Righteous, which means he did what was right in his dealings with other people. Devout, which means he took the worship of God seriously, the way a person takes seriously the thing they love. And looking for the consolation of Israel, which is a lovely phrase, and means that he was waiting for the day when God would comfort his people, the day the prophets had promised, the day when, as Isaiah says, the Lord would comfort his people and have compassion on his afflicted ones.

You will notice that Luke does not say Simeon was old. We think of him as old, and so did the artists, and so does the long tradition, and it is very likely right. But Luke does not say it. What Luke says is that it had been revealed to Simeon by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And a man who has been told that he will not die until something happens has, naturally, a good deal of time to wonder about it.

We are not told how this was revealed. We are not told when. It may have been years ago, or only a few months. It may have been a voice, or a certainty, or the sort of settled knowing that sometimes comes to people who have prayed for a long time. Luke does not say, and we will not make it up. We can only say what the promise was. He would not die before he had seen.

So here is a man with a promise, and a promise with no date on it.

Imagine, for a moment, that you were that man.

Every morning you would wake and think, perhaps today. You would go up to the temple, because the temple is where the promise would surely be kept, and you would look about you. You would look at the priests, and the pilgrims, and the children, and the men with their armfuls of lambs. And every evening you would go home, and sit down, and say to yourself, well, not today.

Now, that sort of waiting can go two ways. It can curdle. A person can wait so long that they stop hoping and start complaining, and begin to think the promise was a mistake, or that it was meant for somebody else. Or it can do the other thing. It can polish a person, like a stone in a stream, until all that is left is the hope, and the hope has become so smooth and so constant that it stops being a strain and becomes a way of being alive.

Luke does not say which of these happened to Simeon. But he does say that he was righteous and devout, and still looking, and we are quite sure which it was.

We might guess that he had a regular route. That he had a place in the courts where he liked to stand, and a few people he nodded to, and a particular stone that was warmer than the others in the afternoon. We might guess that he had a joke about it. That when people asked him what he was doing, he would say, oh, just waiting for a letter, and they would laugh, and he would laugh, and nobody would ask what letter. These are our guesses, and only guesses. Luke does not tell us any of it. But a man who waits for years is a man who has had to find ways to be cheerful about it.

And on this particular morning, Luke says, he came in the Spirit into the temple.

In the Spirit. He did not go in by habit. He did not go in for the hundredth time because that was what he did. He was led. Something moved him, and he got up from wherever he was, and he went, and he found himself standing in just the right place at just the right time, and he did not know why.

Down on the steps, the young family has reached the top.

We have to be careful here, because Luke is careful, and he gives us very little. But let us think about what the morning is like for them. The mother has done this walk, and then the stairs, with a baby in her arms who is forty days old. Her husband has the birds. Neither of them is in a state of high excitement. They have been through a good many strange things in the last year, and they have learned that the best way to meet strange things is to do the next ordinary thing carefully. And the next ordinary thing is to find the right place in the court, and wait their turn.

So they wait. They stand among the other families. There is a woman ahead of them with twins, who are both crying, and a man with a very large and very smelly goat. Someone is trying to sell Joseph a cushion. He politely declines. The birds, in their little cage, are looking about with deep suspicion.

And then an old man, a stranger, comes across the court toward them. He is not hurrying, exactly. But he is walking the way a person walks who knows where they are going and has only just found out.

Luke says that when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him up in his arms.

Let us stop there for a moment, because it is such a small thing and such a great one. He took him up in his arms. He did not ask the parents. Or perhaps he did, and Luke does not record it. But in the Gospel's telling, an old man, a stranger, walks up to a young mother and a carpenter and takes their baby into his arms, and they let him. We are not told why. We can only say that Luke tells us nothing about Mary or Joseph pulling back or being afraid, and that a little later he tells us that they marvelled at what was said. Whatever it was in the old man's face, it was the kind of face that you hand a baby to.

And he blessed God.

What he said, Luke gives us in full. Here it is in plain words, our own plain rendering of what is written there.

Lord, now you let your servant go in peace, according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples. A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.

That is all of it. It is only a few lines. It has been sung every evening in the Church for something like sixteen hundred years. In the Catholic Church it is sung at Night Prayer, at the end of the day, and in the Orthodox Church it is sung at Vespers, at the beginning of the evening, and the old Latin name for it, the Nunc dimittis, is known to a great many people who have forgotten what it means. It means now you let go. Now you dismiss. It is the word you would use of a sentry at the end of a long watch, who has been relieved at last, and may go home and sleep.

That is rather what Simeon is saying. Lord, I have been on watch a long time, and you have told me I would see it, and I have seen it. Now you may let me go in peace.

Notice what he does not say. He does not say that the child will do this or that. He does not give a list of what the child will accomplish. He says my eyes have seen. It is a holding of the thing itself. It is as if he said, I was waiting for a kind of light, and I have it in my arms, and it weighs about as much as a loaf of bread.

And there is a second thing in the words that is easy to miss. This salvation, he says, is prepared in the sight of all peoples. A light for revelation to the Gentiles. That is, not only for his own people, but for everyone else too, the whole wide world beyond Israel. It is a very large thought to say over a small baby in a crowded court, and he says it without raising his voice. The prophet Isaiah had spoken of a light to the nations, and a servant who would bring it, and Simeon's words recall that, and most readers have heard the echo, and we give it as a reading and no more. What Luke gives us is the words themselves.

And the child's father and mother marvelled at what was said about him.

That is a wonderful sentence, and quite a funny one, in its way. They marvelled. These are people who have had an angel appear to Mary, and a dream for Joseph, and a visit from shepherds in the night. If anyone might have been past surprise, it was they. And still they marvel. It tells us something that we should perhaps take to heart, which is that the marvelling does not wear out. You can be told a thing, and told again, and each time hear it newly. Luke does not say they doubted. He says they marvelled. It is the difference between not believing a thing and being astonished by it again.

Then Simeon blessed them.

He blessed both of them, Luke says, and then he said something to Mary, and it is the hardest thing in the passage, and Luke does not soften it.

He said, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed. And a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.

Let us go slowly here, because it is bedtime, and this is a heavy line, and it deserves care.

First, what is plain. Simeon says that the child will be a dividing sign. Some will fall over him and some will rise because of him. People will argue about him. They will speak against him. And when they do, the secret thoughts of a great many hearts will come to light, because it is hard to be neutral about a child like this, and what people do when he is in front of them will show what is in them.

And then, to Mary, almost in passing, and yet in the middle of a blessing, is the sentence about the sword. A sword will pierce through your own soul also.

It is not explained. Luke does not tell us what it means, or when. Christian readers across the centuries have understood it in different ways, and most of them have heard in it the sorrow of a mother who would one day stand near the cross. The Church has kept a devotion to that sorrow, and it is old and tender, and we honour it. But we will not try to say more than Simeon says. We will say only that he does not hide it. At the very moment of joy, in the middle of the blessing, an old man tells a young mother plainly that it will not be easy.

And here is a thing worth noticing. She does not answer. Luke gives us no reply from Mary. He does not tell us she wept, or protested, or asked what he meant. She has already learned how to receive a hard word. She received one at Nazareth from an angel, and she said, let it be to me according to your word. Here, as we heard on the hill, she keeps these things and ponders them in her heart. The silence is part of her answer.

It is not a comfortable word. But it is an honest one. Simeon was not there to flatter anyone. He was there to say what he had been shown, and to say it in love, and then to hand back the baby.

Now, while all this is happening, there is someone else in the court.

Luke says that there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, and had lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.

There is a little puzzle in that last phrase, and we should name it. In Luke's Greek it can be read two ways. It can mean that she was a widow for eighty-four years, in which case she would be well over a hundred. Or it can mean that she was a widow, and that she was now eighty-four years old. Careful readers have taken both, and nothing in the story turns on it. Either way she is very old, and has been alone a very long time.

Let us look at the little we are given.

First, her name. Anna. It is the same name as Hannah, whom we met some episodes ago, praying at the sanctuary at Shiloh and moving her lips without a sound. It is a good name for a woman who prays.

Second, her father, Phanuel, and her tribe, Asher. This is a remarkable detail. Asher was one of the northern tribes, and in her day the northern tribes had been scattered for something like seven hundred years. Most people had long forgotten who belonged to which. And yet Luke tells us that this woman knew her tribe, and her father's name, and it appears she kept them. In a world that had lost most of its family trees, someone had kept hers. It makes you wonder who told it to her, and how many times, and who she told in turn. We shall never know. But it tells us that she belonged to a people with a long memory, and that she was one of the people who did the remembering.

Third, she was a prophetess. Luke simply says it. We are not told what she prophesied, or to whom, or how often. We are told only that the title belonged to her.

And fourth, the part that matters most. She did not depart from the temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day.

Night and day. For something like decades, perhaps, she spent her life there. We are not told she lived in a room within the temple, and the way Luke puts it may be a way of speaking, as we might say of a very faithful person that they never leave the church. But the picture is clear. If you came early, she was there. If you came late, she was there. She was praying for something, and she had been at it a very long time, and her whole life had narrowed to a single point.

What was she praying for? Luke tells us in the end. She was among those who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. Which is to say that she and Simeon were looking for the same thing, in their different ways, over the same long years, in the same busy building, and may not even have known each other well. Or perhaps they did. Perhaps they nodded across the courts every morning for twenty years. Luke does not say. All we are told is that the two of them were watching for the same morning, and that it came on the same day for both.

Anna came up at that very hour.

Think about those words. At that very hour. Not a minute earlier, nor a day later. She had been there for decades, and the exact hour she came to the right spot was the hour that Simeon had the child in his arms.

We might say that this is a coincidence. Luke would not. He tells us this the way he tells everything in his Gospel, as part of a pattern, that the God who has been preparing for a very long time knows precisely when the hour will come, and arranges for the people to be standing in the right place. It is not, in Luke's telling, luck. It is more like a piece of music, in which the instruments that have been waiting through many bars come in together on the note.

And what does she do?

She gave thanks to God. And she spoke of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

There it is. No speech, no reported words, nothing at all that she said. We do not have her little hymn. Simeon gets a song, and Anna gets a mission. She had given her life to watching, and now she has been given something to tell, and so she tells it. She goes to everyone in the courts she knows, all the others who have been waiting too, and she says, it has happened. He is here.

We might imagine that she did this with the quiet and tireless persistence of a woman who has spent her whole life praying. We might imagine that people in the court were a little surprised, because she was not given to chatter. And we might imagine that some of them listened, and some did not, as is the way. But all of that is ours, and not Luke's. Luke gives us only the one sentence, and it is enough. She gave thanks, and she told.

There is something lovely in the pair of them. One is a man who holds the child and sings. One is a woman who does not hold him, so far as we are told, and who tells. Between them they do what one does with good news. First you receive it, and say thank you. Then you pass it on.

Now let us leave the temple for a moment, and think about what has happened.

Nothing has happened, in a way. No crowd has gathered. No priest has stopped his work. No trumpet has sounded. The great machine of the temple has gone on, and the traders have gone on selling doves, and the man with the goat has gone on being smelled. The child was presented, as all firstborn sons were. The birds were offered, as all poor mothers' birds were. The priest said the words, and wrote down what he wrote, or whatever he did.

And yet two very old people had seen what they had waited for, and gone home to their lives content.

This is a thing that Luke seems to love. The greatest event in the history of the world is happening, and it is happening in the cracks of an ordinary morning. The people who see it are not the people in the front row. They are not the high priests or the kings or the scholars. They are a worn old man, a very old widow who lives on prayer, a couple too poor for a lamb, and a baby too small to know what is going on. The big world does not notice. The small world, the faithful, watchful, patient little world of people who have been waiting, notices at once.

When they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, Luke tells us, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.

That is all. After the song and the sword and the old woman's thanks, there is no pause for effect. They finish the errand. They do everything the law requires, every last bit, and then they go home. It is exactly what you would do if you had just completed the paperwork on a perfectly ordinary morning. They go back to the house, and the workshop, and the neighbours, and the long years of a boy growing up.

And Luke ends the passage with a sentence about the child that is as plain as bread. And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favour of God was upon him.

He grew. That is the thing about a baby. However much is said over him, in the end he has to be fed, and put to bed, and watched while he learns to walk. Whatever has been promised, it will be kept through the slow business of a child becoming a boy. Simeon would never see it. He had seen what he was promised to see, and he went, we hope, in peace. But the child grew without him, and the favour of God was on him, and that was enough.

Now, what became of Simeon and Anna?

We have to say plainly that Luke tells us nothing. They appear in this one scene and they never appear again. We do not hear of Simeon's death, though his own words suggest he expected it soon. We do not hear of Anna's. They simply walk out of the Gospel as they walked in, quietly, having done the one thing they were there to do.

Later tradition has said a good deal more, and it is worth knowing what, and being careful with it. A tradition, found in the East and the West, holds that Simeon was very old when he held the child, and that he died soon afterward. That is probably a reasonable inference from his words, but it is an inference. Another old story says that he was a priest, though Luke does not call him one. A still later story says he was one of the seventy scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, two hundred years before, and was promised a long life to see the Christ. That story is a charming one, but it is a legend, and it cannot be right as it stands, because of the dates. The Greek Old Testament was translated a couple of centuries before, and no one could be that old. We mention it only so you will know it when you meet it.

What the Church has kept is the thing Luke gave us. Simeon is called, in the Orthodox tradition, the God-receiver, because he received the child into his arms. And in both the East and the West his song has been sung at the end of the day, at the point where the lamps are lit, or at the very moment before sleep.

And for Anna, the Church has remembered her as the one who prayed, and the one who told. She is honoured in the Orthodox calendar on the day after the feast, the third of February, together with Simeon, and she is named in the hymns of both traditions as a witness. She is not very well known, perhaps. But she has a quiet place in the Church's memory, as a woman who stayed.

The feast of this day has many names. In the Catholic Church it is the Presentation of the Lord, kept on the second of February, forty days after the twenty-fifth of December. In the Orthodox Church it is the Meeting of the Lord, and it is one of the twelve great feasts of the year, kept on the same date by the calendars they follow, which for some falls on the fifteenth of February. In English-speaking lands it has long been called Candlemas, because on that day candles are blessed and carried in procession. And that is why Saints by Candlelight has a particular fondness for it.

The custom is old. The candles are carried because Simeon called the child a light. A light for revelation. In a church on the second of February, in the middle of winter, when the days are still short, people come in with their candles, and the church is dim, and the candles are lit one from another, and the light passes down the rows. It is a simple thing, but it holds the whole of the story. An old man looked at a child and said light. And we, on the coldest days of the year, carry small flames across a dark church.

If you are lying there in the dark, and your day has been long, and there is something you have been waiting for and it has not come, you might think of Simeon. He did not know when. He did not know how. He knew only that he had been promised, and that the promise had a person in it, and that the person would come.

You do not have to understand how long you have to wait. You do not have to be sure of the hour. You only have to keep going to the place where the promise was made, and keep your eyes open, and be ready to put your arms out.

And you might think of Anna, who waited too, for longer, and who did not wait alone, and who, when it came, did not keep it to herself.

Now, some notes for the curious, before we go.

Everything we have told you about Simeon and Anna comes from one place, the second chapter of Luke, verses twenty-two to thirty-eight. No other book of the Bible mentions either of them. Luke is also the one who tells the story of the shepherds, and of the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, and the two are meant to be read together, as the opening chapters of a single book about who this child is.

What is Scripture, and told straight, is the coming up to Jerusalem when the days of purification were complete, the presenting of the child to the Lord, the offering of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons, Simeon, righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, the Holy Spirit upon him, the revelation that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ, his coming in the Spirit into the temple, his taking the child in his arms, his blessing of God and the words of his song, the marvelling of the parents, his blessing and his words to Mary, Anna the prophetess, daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, her great age, her long widowhood, her never leaving the temple but worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day, her coming up at that very hour, her thanks to God and her speaking of the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, the return to Nazareth, and the growing of the child.

What we have not claimed as fact is that Simeon was very old, that he was a priest, or that he was one of the translators of the Greek Old Testament. These are traditions, the first reasonable and the last impossible. We have not said where in the temple the family stood. We have not said how many years Anna had been a widow, because Luke's Greek allows two readings and we keep both. And we have not tried to explain the sword, which Luke does not explain. We have also left out the payment that the law of Exodus describes for the redemption of the firstborn, because Luke does not mention it, and we would rather say nothing than guess.

What we invented are the steps, the cold stone, the birds' remarks, the twins, the goat, the cushion, Simeon's habits and jokes, the guesses about how he and Anna may have known each other, and the way the court looked and smelled. None of them are in Luke, and none of them change a single thing that Luke says.

That's the story of Simeon and Anna for tonight. The Presentation of the Lord is kept by Catholics on the second of February, and the Meeting of the Lord by the Orthodox on the same day by their own calendars, which for some falls on the fifteenth of February. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And now, in the old words, Lord, now let your servant go in peace, according to your word. May the light that Simeon held keep you through the night, may it be a lamp for whatever you are waiting for, and may you wake to a morning of peace. Goodnight, and God bless.

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