Brian Kay:

Luke 2:25–35 (NIV)

²⁵ Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was on him. ²⁶ It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. ²⁷ Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the law required, ²⁸ Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying: ²⁹ “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. ³⁰ For my eyes have seen your salvation, ³¹ which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: ³² a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.” ³³ The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him. ³⁴ Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be spoken against, ³⁵ so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

Well, good morning everyone. My name is Brian Kay. I’m pastor in partnership here. I was actually—I’m not Bart Garrett. I was sitting in Bart’s seat earlier in the service and I turned around and someone said to me, “Bart, you’ve changed.” So I’m a little shorter, a little less eloquent, but I’m here to serve. How weird that the only round of applause I’ve ever received at this church is first a self-deprecating comment that you’re all agreeing with somehow. Please don’t agree with me.

Well, let’s go. Let’s encounter together this great story of Simeon. And so as you know, if you’ve been around at our church for the last several weeks, we’ve been in this series looking at various plot twists that show up in the gospel accounts of the birth and the announcement of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. So this is our last Sunday in the series and plot twist really is the right way to describe the coming of Jesus Christ.

I came across this great quote from Wes Hoff this week who is a very young New Testament scholar. You might have seen him if you’re a TikTok theology person. He’s been doing a lot lately, but here’s what he said—and sorry guys, this is my last. I just found this quote just after our deadline for the slide, so I’m just going to read this.

At the very moment that Augustus is making decrees as the ruler of the known world and Herod is seething in his palace, God enters stage right, not on the clouds, asserting his power and dominance, not with all the strength and might that he rightly has, but in humility, doing so with a profound statement that he is turning all of our preconceived notions completely upside down.

— Wes Hoff

And that is the plot twist of the arrival of Jesus Christ. Now, Simeon in this story is a man who certainly also announces Jesus as a kind of plot twist to so many expectations. But for Simeon personally, you might say it’s not just a plot twist for him, it’s a kind of a plot resolution of his whole life.

So here’s where we’re going in the sermon. We’re going to look at Simeon’s longing, which is quite clear from the beginning of the text, his consolation, how that longing was resolved. And then Simeon’s blessing, kind of a prophetic blessing on Mary and Joseph.

So at the start of our story, if you’re following these birth narratives, Jesus has already been born at this point. He and Mary and Joseph have had him circumcised, and they have taken him now to the temple in Jerusalem, and they’ve offered two doves as the appropriate sacrifice for a young boy. And while they’re there at the temple, they are approached by this man, Simeon.

So who exactly is Simeon? If you’re like me and you’ve read the Bible a few times, you read the Simeon story and you have this pang of like, “Boy, I feel like I should know more about this person,” because you’ve heard the name before. There are four Simeons in Scripture. Rembrandt has a—it’s a little bit dark, but a great painting of just this one moment with this particular Simeon. So there are four Simeons, but this is the only account we have of this particular Simeon. So you’re off the hook on wondering if you should know where he shows up elsewhere. This is all we get about this Simeon. It’s a brief and potent little portrait of this one man’s life and this one man’s encounter with the newborn Jesus.

So let’s go into his longing, which we really enter with. What did Simeon long for? Quite simply, verse 25 says he was longing for the consolation, the consolation of Israel. God had promised that Simeon wouldn’t die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah, we’re told. And this all implies at least that Simeon was distraught in some way about the way that the nation of Israel, the people of Israel, his friends and neighbors and loved ones were unconsoled. There was something off, something that was pained or disordered about the people of Israel. And this bothered Simeon. It got under his skin. He was longing for a kind of tranquility and consolation in the face of that.

The text tells us in verse 25 that Simeon was righteous and devout. So we can intuit from that that Simeon would have been certainly a man of prayer. He was very likely a regular worshiper at the temple there in Jerusalem. It also is very clear that he knew the Scriptures well because as we see what he ends up saying to Mary and Joseph, and even in his prayer of praise, he’s quoting or at least alluding to the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. Three different chapters, three different verses. So he was a person who was scripture soaked.

And yet for all that, for all of his deep encounter with God in prayer and in worship in the Bible, he was a person that was longing. He was a person who was at pain in some degrees and in some ways. And before we race on to what happens with the consolation and the coming of Jesus in his life, it’s just worth noting that this longing is a regular part of the Christian life. If you’re like Simeon and you’re devout, there’s even—you can almost graph this, I suppose in some loose graph—that your level of adherence and faith in God will be represented by an also growing level of distraughtness about certain things in the world.

Another way to put this is that the more you know God’s nature, God’s will, God’s Word in Scripture, the more you’ll be troubled by certain things in the world. Now I know the reverse is also true. If you’re thinking this is a downer point, that the more you know God, the more you’ll be delighted by certain things in the world, the more you’ll be off the hook and you’ll find certain things will be more pleasant to you in life. I kind of trend that way myself. So I’m grounding myself though, in this particular scripture on this particular day, which is talking about longing. So just so you know, I do believe that Christians can be happy and should be happy people in deep, deep forms of happiness. But we’re here to talk about longing first, because that’s where Simeon was, at least at the beginning of this text.

Simeon teaches us another way to put this is that there is a kind of holy discontent that is the norm of even the Christian life. What makes discontent holy, though, is that we’re praying about it. There is a kind of—I don’t know what you call this—spiritual grumpiness or kind of a Christianly curmudgeonliness that seems to be cool these days, where you’re sort of upset and cranky about everything and you send kind of, yeah, crank-oriented texts and social media posts and stuff like that. We’re not talking about being a crank. Holy discontent is a kind of quiet botheredness by the distance between God’s kingdom values and the world around us, or even our own hearts as they are when we look within, far from the ways and the things of God. What else makes it holy is that we’re also, as I said, praying about it. Simeon would have been a person of prayer. That’s implied in the devoutness. He took that discontent to God in prayer. He prayed it. Who knows how many psalms Simeon was used to praying. There are many psalms that give words to our discontent. But don’t skip right to the Christmas joy before you really let sink in that holiness. Devoutness is coterminous in some ways with discontentedness.

Well, Simeon was someone who is—I think the words righteous and devout can put some of us off as if he was some kind of a super follower of God. I just want to also mention that he is at the same time just—he’s like a run-of-the-mill follower of God, just like you and me. And the reason I want to camp out on that for just a second too is that this closeness to the Holy Spirit seems to be another feature of Simeon’s life. There’s three times in this text that it mentions his interaction with the Spirit, his being led by the Spirit, the Spirit’s revealing something to him. That is not some kind of merely super spiritual posture that only the prophets of God attain to, or something. There is a—I hesitate to call it run-of-the-mill, but I will, I guess—there’s a run-of-the-mill spirituality that is just simply described later in Galatians chapter 5 as just keeping in step with the Spirit. You and I can be Simeon-like in this way, if we’re just simply laying our lives before God on a regular basis, encountering God through His word, seeking to let the fruit of God’s Spirit ripen our lives—this fruit of joy and peace and kindness. Simeon, don’t put him on too high a pedestal. He’s also—I mean, he was chosen by God in a very specific way, but he’s a run-of-the-mill believer that you and I can be like too, keeping close to the Spirit. And as we do that, we will also experience both the discontentedness and the consolation that he’s about to receive.

Well, what else? Two more words about what he was troubled by. And this is stealing from the second part of the text here, but when Simeon eventually sees Jesus, there’s kind of a bursting forth of praise. And he says, in verses 30 through 32, “My eyes have seen your salvation, Lord, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel.” Simeon was yearning for the Messiah to be revealed, for God to break into history with a particular person who would somehow take away the pain of this distraughtness of Israel, the distance that people felt, and he even felt with God. It was going to be in the person of this Messiah.

But it’s interesting, I think, to see the type of resolution that he’s looking for. Sometimes it’s easy to look at the yearning for the Messiah, the longing for the Messiah in the Old Testament, and notice how often it’s tied to, like, the political unrest and the distraughtness of Israel. As I said, Simeon quotes Isaiah three times. And if you go back to the Isaiah text, Isaiah is yearning for resolution from the fact that Babylon had just pounced on Jerusalem. Isaiah is also yearning for resolution that all the northern tribes have been wiped out by Assyria. There’s this, like, political burden, which is definitely part of what he’s yearning for. But he’s also yearning for this spiritual dawning that would not only throw off the physical enemies of Israel, but would also bring resolution to the heart of everyone. So he says in that verse I just read to you, when the Messiah comes, who’s going to be the winners? All nations are going to be the winners. Even the Gentiles are going to get light. He’s not praying for the destruction of the bad guys. He’s not trying to own, as we say, own his political opponents or Babylon or Rome at this time. He’s looking for the conversion of his enemies.

So at our moment of cultural warring that we’re experiencing these last few years in so many ways, remember that Simeon didn’t long for the Messiah to destroy his enemies. He longed for the Messiah to bring light, to bring salvation, verse 30, and to bring revelation to their enemies so that they can encounter Yahweh too, to be consoled, to be blessed. It was a big vision.

What about Simeon’s consolation? That’s our second part in this story. We see God following through on this long promise. Who knows how many years Simeon had been holding on to this hope of seeing the Lord’s Messiah before he died. We don’t quite know how old he was, but we assume he may have been an old man. And so he finally now sees in the temple. The Spirit somehow leads him to encounter Mary and Joseph in the temple courts. And in verse 28, Simeon takes Jesus in his arms and praises God. It says, can you imagine the privilege of that, of yearning for some kind of consolation? But moments later, you are now, after many years of waiting, holding in your arms the baby Jesus who you have been told by the Spirit will be the consolation of Israel, the Messiah who will bring about so much good.

I think a lot of us can relate to the joy of picking up a baby. It’s just kind of a universal happy thing to have this, cradling a child in your arms. And even then we don’t know anything about that child’s future. But what if you did know the future of that child? If the one that you’re cradling you knew was not just a baby, but was the Lord’s Messiah? If you knew that that was not just any old baby, but somehow the Creator, along with the Father and the Spirit of the entire universe. Like, it’s really hard to wrap our head around this, but I do want to linger on this. You’re holding this child and you know somehow that this is the child that created DNA. I was trying to think of, like, what would be the wildest things you could imagine holding a child, knowing that it’s God in the flesh, as we presume was at least dimly something Simeon was aware of. The child was the one who organized the constellations before the creation of the world. But more potently, that this child would be the one that would take away not just your sin, but the sin of anyone who trusts in him.

There’s a lot of ways you could explain biblical consolation, Christian consolation, Jesus-oriented consolation. But I think we have to say that definitely these birth narratives especially feature the consolation of knowing that the coming of this child will remove the problem of sin and the distance from God that our sin creates. If you remember that Matthew 1 text, when the angel says to Joseph, “I want you to give the baby the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” So Simeon is cradling this child. Somehow he knows that this is the child that will take away the consequence of his worst choices, the worst choices of anyone who then trusts in this child. This is a child who will become living water to spiritually thirsty people. This is a child who will be the bread of life to spiritually hungry people. A child who will, at the end of time, return to defeat our greatest enemy, which is death itself, and to somehow restore the world into a kind of global Eden. That’s the picture that Revelation gives us.

I don’t know how much of these thoughts were floating around in Simeon’s mind when he looked down at that baby. We don’t quite know how much revelation God gave to him, but we know you might think that, “Oh, wouldn’t it be so great to be able to hold Jesus? Then I’d really know that I’d really feel I could sink my heart into the truth of Christ.” But remember, you’ve got an advantage that Simeon didn’t have. You know much more about what this baby would go on to do. You know all that stuff that all those other texts I was just quoting to you are after Simeon. Simeon probably didn’t know that Jesus is the bread of life, but we know. Simeon probably didn’t know exactly that Jesus would come and bring a resolution to all world history when he makes a global Eden. But you and I know this is the stuff of deep, deep, deep consolation.

And maybe a way to close this point would be just to say that if you think that Christianity is some kind of a mild system of just vague self-soothing—and I think some of us do think that—we live our lives, we work hard, we have family, we go through tragedies, we go through high points, and we add a little Christianity on the side, or we sprinkle a little Christianity on top to just bring a little soothing to life. It’s a little mythology, maybe just to kind of create a narrative to get us through. I don’t know what particular phrases you’ve wrestled with that diminishes the glory of Jesus Christ, but those are some of the candidates. The kind of offer that Jesus Christ gives to everyone is a fantastically deep consolation for the greatest troubles, yearnings, and incompleteness we feel. There is really not a single form of human distraughtness that isn’t answered by Jesus Christ either now or into the future. So I guess I’d have you consider that if there’s all kinds of ways that we limit Christ in our minds, consider that he is the consolation for every human yearning.

Well, Simeon’s blessing is the last point. This passage is almost embarrassingly rich—almost every phrase. I just—I mostly am disappointed with the sermon because I could have gone a thousand times longer than such a short text. So, but let’s just close with this blessing, this rather wild, multifaceted blessing that he gives Mary and Joseph. He says to Mary and Joseph that this child of yours will cause the falling and the rising of many in Israel, that he will be a sign that is spoken against. And then he gives something, a very almost chilling warning to Mary. But the falling and rising of many—what does this mean? Who falls? Who rises?

It’s not just consolation. Somebody gets unconsoled by Jesus. Simeon is saying, basically, I’ll tell you who falls. The proud. This is a theme throughout the Gospels. The people that stand to lose the most at the arrival of Jesus Christ in the world are those who are self-sufficient, who are proud, who are kind of full of themselves. When the arrival of the true king comes, the pretender kings are going to be in trouble. All of us deal with the pretender king syndrome, even in our own lives.

I think of Lord of the Rings, where, if you know the story, when the true king of Gondor returns, Aragorn, who stands the most to lose? It’s Denethor, the one who is kind of pretending to be a king in 2025. So about a year ago, Emily—like, next week, she and I decided that we were going to read a book together all of 2025. And because we are sort of masochistic overachievers, we picked a breezy little novel called War and Peace to try to read this year together by that lightweight Leo Tolstoy, you’ve probably heard of him. So that book, among a thousand other themes, it does deal with Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to take over Russia and really to take over the whole world. Why did he want to take over Russia and the whole world? No real reason. Just because he could do it. That’s kind of one of the themes of the book.

Now, not to spoil the ending, but he does not succeed in taking over the world. But in real history, he went from failing at Waterloo to being entirely stripped of all of his titles, all of his wealth, all of his respect. He was exiled onto a little volcanic rock of an island west in the Atlantic, west of Africa, where he lived out the final six years of his life and during that time began to muse and write a lot and reflect on his life. And here’s a quote that he wrote at some point during those last six years of his life in utter exile and loss.

I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love. And at this hour millions of men would die for him.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte, realizing that in his own pride, trying to build an empire on force, he fell. He lost his greatness. Jesus Christ, who built an empire on love, is raised up. The promise of the Christian Gospel is that no matter how lowly you are in life, and ideally, through humility, we’re all lowly, we will be raised up by this Christ. That was the prophecy of Simeon. Some will fall, some will be raised up. The promise of the Christian Gospel is that those who approach this Jesus Christ in humility and say, “My empire, such as it is, is built on sand, my pretensions of greatness are ridiculous. In your sight I surrender myself, yield myself, give my sword, as it were, to you.” Those are the people that Jesus Christ will lift up, will cancel their sins, will unite them to his Father, and will bring them into a completed kingdom with him one day. That, friends, is consolation with a capital C.

Last, last, lastly, Simeon does say hauntingly to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” This passage, almost bizarrely, begins in suffering, ends in suffering, begins in Simeon’s longing, ends in the promise that Mary too will suffer. She will suffer, seeing what it costs her son Jesus, to accomplish all of this, the pain of his death on the cross. But remember that Mary was also consoled one day. She, as a believer in her son, received a consolation that more than made up for her loss and for that piercing. And so will you, and so will I. When we trust in this Jesus, why don’t we pray?

Heavenly Father, if we are honest, if we’re paying attention to the movings of our heart, we realize that we are, by degrees, unconsoled people, because we live in a fallen world and have fallenness in our own hearts. And yet, would you allow us, by your Holy Spirit, to cleave to Jesus Christ and to experience even now, the beginnings of the consolation, knowing that we are reconciled to you through the sacrifice of Jesus and will one day participate with you and with him in a new world. In Christ’s name, Amen.