Instruction for the Day of the Meeting of the Lord

Now Lord, You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word (Lk 2:29).

The present feast of the Meeting of the Lord is so called because the righteous elder Simeon, who lived in Jerusalem, met, in the Jerusalem temple, the forty-day-old Infant, the Lord Jesus Christ, together with His most pure Mother, took Him into his arms, and said: now Lord, You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word: for my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all peoples: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel (Lk 2:29-32). This elder was wondrous both in his holiness, for the Holy Spirit ever dwelt in him, and in his enlightenment, and in his great age—he was three hundred and sixty years old. One might say that the grace of God, beyond the ordinary law of nature, wondrously preserved him so long.

Here is what Church history tells us of this holy elder. When Ptolemy, king of Egypt, who lived almost three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the founder of the famous library of Alexandria, wished to translate the Bible from Hebrew into Greek, he sent a request for this to the Jewish high priest. The high priest chose from among the Israelites seventy men, wise and skilled in both languages. Among them we find the righteous Simeon. While working on the translation of the book of the prophet Isaiah, when Simeon came to the prophecy: behold, a virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son (Is 7:14), he doubted, and, pausing, reasoned within himself—how can a virgin bear a child? Then he took up his knife and wished to erase the prophecy from his manuscript. Suddenly an Angel of the Lord appeared to him and, restraining his hand, told him: believe what is written. You yourself will see the fulfillment of this greatest mystery, for you will not see death until you have seen the Christ of the Lord, who is to be born of the most pure Virgin. Confirmed by the words of the Angel and of the prophet, from that time Simeon awaited the coming of Christ with burning desire, lived righteously and blamelessly, and prayed constantly to God. When the newborn Savior, after forty days, was brought into the temple by His God-graced Mother, then Simeon, knowing from above that this Infant was the promised Savior and that His Mother was the Holy Virgin on whom Isaiah’s prophecy had been fulfilled, received the Lord into his arms with reverence and joy and uttered the words already given. Then, having given thanks to God, who had given comfort to Israel, he gave up his spirit. This is why the Lord so remarkably prolonged his days—that he might live to see that year in which the timeless, beginningless God was born in the flesh. We have a happiness and blessedness no less than Simeon’s, indeed even greater; for with our lips and our hearts we receive the Lord Jesus Christ, when we partake of His Mysteries.

On what occasion was the feast of the Meeting of the Lord established? For it was not established soon after the Lord’s ascension into heaven and the descent of the Holy Spirit, as some other feasts were—Pascha, Nativity, Baptism, Ascension, and Pentecost—but almost five hundred years after the Nativity of Christ. It was on this occasion: in the ill-fated year of the reign of Justinian, in the last days of October, in Constantinople and the surrounding regions, a plague broke out and raged so fiercely that in the end some ten thousand people were dying every day, and in some places such desolation resulted that there was no one left to bury the dead. And in Antioch, in addition to this scourge, terrible earthquakes continued, recurring several times, destroying houses and churches, and a multitude of people perished beneath their ruins. Among other things, the building of the church collapsed while Euphrasius, bishop of Antioch, was offering the bloodless sacrifice within it. The city of Pompeiopolis was destroyed by half, and its other half was swallowed by the earth together with thousands of its inhabitants. To turn away this wrath of the Lord, by a special revelation to a certain holy man, a solemn festival of the Meeting of the Lord was established. And as soon as, on the second day of February, they began the all-night vigil with the procession of the cross, the plague ceased that very hour, the pestilence stopped, the earthquake grew still. Such is the wrath of God that our lawlessness, our unbelief, our carelessness about salvation, our ingratitude, our ill nature and hard-heartedness bring down upon us and upon the earth itself.

O fearsome monster—sin! O all-destroying monster—sin! Let us flee with all our strength from this hundred-headed hydra, this serpent. Let us put sins to death within ourselves! Let us repent unceasingly. Beloved, without fasting, repentance, and prayer, a Christian cannot, any more than a soldier without weapons, conquer the sin living within him. Amen.