My favorite character in the Christmas story is one who rarely shows up in pageants—an elderly man named Simeon.
Simeon has spent his long decades of life waiting for the restoration of Israel. To be fair, so had many, many others before him. Centuries had passed with the people of Israel in exile, dominated, oppressed, buried in rubble and memories. The prophets who spoke for God had been silent for hundreds of years. Whole generations had lived and died without seeing any significant sign of God’s presence. Even the most faithful must have sometimes wondered if God had given them up and walked away.
But then one day, perhaps rather late in his long life, Simeon hears a whisper. He recognizes the voice from a lifetime of careful listening—it is the quiet voice of God’s Spirit within him. God’s Spirit whispers that Simeon will be among that lucky generation who will get to see it—will actually get to see God’s promises kept. He will see with his own eyes the one God has chosen to lead the restoration project.
It must have been hard, almost impossible, to credit. After so many centuries of silence? Could it really be true that the time was now? Why not earlier, so many years or centuries before? For that matter, why not later?
But Simeon is on alert now. And when the day comes that he feels a subtle tap on his shoulder, he walked on trembling legs out to the public floor of the temple. He scans side to side, not sure what exactly he is looking for. Then his eyes align on a baby, resting in his mother’s arms. And something in Simeon knows: This is it. This is him. This is the beginning of the turning of the tide of history. This is the beginning of all God’s promises fulfilled.
The realization causes such an earthquake in Simeon’s soul that he erupts in prayer and prophecy. He declares that he can die now, happy and at peace. There is nothing more left that he could ask for. For every hope has been fulfilled beyond his wildest dreams.
Every year I think of Simeon, of his long lifetime of waiting and longing before this one glimpse came. I think of the generations before him who had no glimpse at all. I think of the author of Hebrews, who calls the roll of several thousand years of faithful people and says, “All these people died in faith without receiving the promises, but they saw the promises from a distance and welcomed them” (Hebrews 11:13).
In a way, it seems strange that we who live on the other side of Jesus’ birth should resonate so deeply with the feelings of those who lived before it. But Christmas catches us in an odd between-position. On the one hand, we identify with the ache of waiting and not seeing. With the frustration and impatience. With the questions and the doubts. With the painful passing of unfulfilled time. In Simeon, we find a companion for our weary waiting and wondering, for our doubts, for our fears of hoping.
On the other hand, Christmas invites us to share of taste of Simeon’s rapture. To look at a baby and feel our hearts stutter in our chests. To know that we are glimpsing, even for a moment, the embodiment of every promise. To be filled with awe and wonder at the mysterious inner knowing that we stand at the very cusp of the great turning of the tide.
Everything that we’ve waited for, longing for, wept for, prayed for, begins here. Begins with him. Every promise God has made to humanity is bound to this small body. In him we glimpse the birth of the world’s salvation. When evil is buried forever, He is the one who will be standing victorious over its grave. When heaven touches down on earth, He is the one whose hand will be throwing open its gates.
It reminds me a bit of what scientists say about how the universe began. Impossible as it seems to believe, there was a moment—a real, discernable moment in the past—when the entire universe that we know now and everything in it was compressed to a single point, a single atom of infinite density. Then it burst forth. And now, here we are, we and a hundred billion blazing galaxies.
So it is with this small child in Simeon’s arms. All of time, all salvation, all power, all life, all joy, all hope, has been compacted to a single point of infinite density here, in him. And when it bursts forth, the whole universe is reborn. Simeon is set to die of wonder, barely yet knowing the half of it.
Hear the later reflections of Jesus’ friend John, who had the privilege of years to see and touch what Simeon saw and touched for moments:
The Word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
John [the Baptist] testified about him, crying out, “This is the one of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.’
From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace; as the Law was given through Moses, so grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known.”
John 1:14-18
