After All These Years
Rembrandt, Simeon In The Temple, 1669
Some of you may have noticed I’ve been away from my blog for a few months. I’ve been very busy, teaching a number of courses, chairing the committee to bring a new senior pastor to our church, and just managing life with all its various challenges. I find I have only so much creative energy left when things get busy. My blog writing suffers. I’ve missed it.
But I am back, with new energy, new focus. I am launching a new season for my blog. I call it After All These Years. How do you like that? Take a good look at all the changes. After some sixteen years of writing my blog, I am ready to say a few things. This is happening mostly because new things are going on in my life. It’s been a period of illumination, as I like to call it, a kind of transformation.
I have been teaching from the prophets lately, especially Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalms. This extraordinary writing, some of the best ever written, is anchored by expectation. Through Isaiah, God says
18 Stop dwelling on past events
and brooding over days gone by.
19 I am about to do something new;
this moment it will unfold.
Can you not perceive it? Isaiah 43:18-19 (REB)
As I look out over our world, and as I examine my own worrying, I am often gripped these days by fear and anxiety about what’s going on. As Paul Kingsnorth has said recently in his new book, we look out and “you just know that something is wrong.” Don’t you feel that as well?
I found myself thinking, where should I turn? How can I find my way out of this mess in which we are living? Don’t we need a whole new narrative? Are we really doomed, as we hear each evening in our nightly news?
And so I went searching. I landed on the prophets. I located there plenty of pain and suffering and uncertainty that sounds so familiar. But mainly I felt from these great writers a profound sense that God is doing something new. Right now. Don’t you see it? Stay attentive. Listen to God’s voice in moments of quietness. In fact, God tells his prophets he will be sending someone who will make all things right. That’s what we celebrate in this season of Advent.
And that’s where we encounter Simeon’s song in the Gospel of Luke. Rembrandt too contemplated Simeon in his marvelous painting Simeon In The Temple, painted in 1669, the year he died. I have pondered this story and this painting for many years. I have written and taught about them both. This is a story of that moment of illumination, a transformation, both in the life of Simeon and the painter. It is nothing less than the pivot point for a new world God is creating through this baby.
Simeon, of course, has read his prophets. He knew this moment was coming. He was anticipating someone new. And here he is. He is holding this fresh start in his arms. He warns the mother Mary there will still be pain that will pierce her heart, but know this, that God has done something utterly new in your baby. This baby will change everything. In the end, “the child grew big and strong and full of wisdom; and God’s favour was upon him.”
Over recent days and months of brooding on the mess in which we live, I too have come closer to the promise of Simeon’s song. It is my only way to counter the worry in the middle of the night. It’s Simeon’s answer. It is my answer too. We look into Simeon’s face and we see the “radiance over the goodness of the Lord,” as Jeremiah calls it. I want to shine that radiance too.
Something new is going on, folks. Some people call it a quiet revival. Could it be, as the prophets foretold, that Jesus is in our midst? Right now! Don’t you see it? Could it be that a new encounter with this Jesus shakes us to the core? Just what happened to Simeon. Yes, we just know something is wrong, but this Jesus changes everything.