Simeon (Gospel of Luke)

Based on Wikipedia: Simeon (Gospel of Luke)

The Old Man Who Refused to Die

Imagine being so certain of a promise that you simply refuse to leave this world until you see it fulfilled. Not out of stubbornness, but out of an unshakeable conviction that God keeps His word.

This is the story of Simeon—an elderly man in Jerusalem who had been waiting his entire life for a moment that lasted perhaps thirty seconds. One glimpse of an infant's face. One prayer spoken aloud. And then, finally, permission to rest.

A Chance Encounter That Was Anything But Chance

The scene takes place in the Temple in Jerusalem, forty days after the birth of Jesus. Jewish law required new mothers to undergo a ritual purification ceremony after childbirth. According to the Book of Leviticus, a woman who had given birth to a son was considered ritually unclean for seven days, followed by an additional thirty-three days of purification—forty days total. At the end of this period, she would come to the Temple to complete the ceremony and present her child.

So Mary and Joseph arrived at the Temple, carrying their infant son, doing what thousands of Jewish parents had done before them. They were young, poor (we know this because Luke mentions they offered two turtledoves, the sacrifice permitted for those who couldn't afford a lamb), and probably nervous first-time parents navigating the bureaucracy of religious obligation.

And then an old man appeared.

Who Was Simeon?

The Gospel of Luke describes Simeon with just a handful of words: he was "righteous and devout," and he was "looking for the consolation of Israel." That last phrase is loaded with meaning. The consolation of Israel was a way of referring to the long-awaited Messiah—the anointed one who would deliver the Jewish people from their suffering under Roman occupation and restore their nation to glory.

But here's what made Simeon different from the countless other Jews who shared this hope: he had received a personal promise. The Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen "the Lord's Christ" with his own eyes.

Think about what that means. Every morning Simeon woke up, he knew death couldn't touch him—not yet. Every day that passed without the Messiah's arrival was another day of waiting, but never despairing. The promise was the promise.

How long did he wait? The Bible doesn't say. But Orthodox Christian tradition offers a remarkable claim: Simeon lived to be around 360 years old.

The Legend of the Skeptical Translator

This extraordinary lifespan, according to Orthodox tradition, wasn't arbitrary. It was a consequence of doubt.

The story goes that Simeon was one of the seventy Jewish scholars commissioned to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek—the translation we now call the Septuagint. This translation project, undertaken in the third century before Christ in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most ambitious literary undertakings of the ancient world. It made the Jewish scriptures accessible to the Greek-speaking world and would later become the version of the Old Testament that early Christians used.

When Simeon came to a verse in the Book of Isaiah—chapter 7, verse 14—he encountered a prophecy that troubled him. The Hebrew text said that a young woman would conceive and bear a son. But Simeon, skeptical of anything that might sound too miraculous, translated the word as "young woman" rather than "virgin." A virgin conceiving? That was biologically impossible. Better to use the more mundane term.

At that moment, according to the legend, an angel appeared and told Simeon that because of his unbelief, he would live to see this prophecy fulfilled with his own eyes. He would not die until he had witnessed the virgin's child.

Centuries passed. Empires rose and fell. And Simeon kept waiting.

The Moment of Recognition

On that particular day at the Temple, Simeon felt drawn there by the Spirit. Luke's Gospel describes it simply: "inspired by the Spirit he came into the temple." No voice from heaven, no burning bush—just an inner compulsion that this was the day, this was the time, this was where he needed to be.

When he saw the young couple with their baby, something happened that we cannot fully explain. Simeon knew. This unremarkable infant, born to unremarkable parents who could only afford the cheapest sacrifice, was the one he had been waiting for his entire impossibly long life.

He took the baby in his arms.

And he prayed.

The Song of Simeon

The prayer Simeon spoke has been recited billions of times over the past two thousand years. In the Western church, it's known by its Latin opening words: Nunc dimittis—"Now you dismiss." In English, it goes like this:

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

There's something almost unbearably poignant about these words. After waiting so long—whether decades or centuries—Simeon's first response upon seeing the Messiah isn't to celebrate or to ask for anything more. It's simply to say: I can go now. The waiting is over. I have seen what I was promised, and I am ready to rest.

The prayer also contains a theological bombshell that's easy to miss. Simeon says this child will be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles." The Gentiles—non-Jews—were generally understood to be outside God's special covenant with Israel. But Simeon's prophecy suggests something revolutionary: this salvation isn't just for the Jewish people. It's for everyone.

The Darker Prophecy

But Simeon wasn't finished. After blessing the astonished parents, he turned to Mary and delivered a second prophecy—one much darker than the first.

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

The image of a sword piercing Mary's soul has haunted Christian devotion ever since. It's understood as a prophecy of the suffering Mary would endure watching her son be rejected, tortured, and executed. This prophecy is central to the Catholic devotion to Mary as "Our Lady of Sorrows," which meditates on seven particular sorrows she experienced throughout her life.

What's striking is that Simeon delivered this heartbreaking prophecy to a young mother holding her newborn son. Forty days old, and already the shadow of the cross was falling across the child.

After Simeon: A Trail of Relics Across the Mediterranean

The Gospel of Luke tells us nothing more about Simeon. We don't know if he died that very day or lived a bit longer. We don't know where he was buried or how he spent his final hours. The Bible simply moves on to other events.

But the story of Simeon's physical remains takes some unexpected turns.

Sometime between 565 and 578 AD—more than five centuries after his death—a body believed to be Simeon's was transported from either Syria or Jerusalem to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Relics of saints were prized possessions in the medieval world, and major cities competed to acquire the most prestigious ones.

Constantinople held these relics for more than six hundred years. Then came the Fourth Crusade.

In 1203, Crusaders—who were supposed to be fighting to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control—instead turned on their fellow Christians and besieged Constantinople. During the chaos, Simeon's relics were seized and loaded onto a ship bound for Venice. But a storm forced the ship to take shelter in the port of Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia.

And there the relics stayed.

Today, Simeon is one of the four patron saints of Zadar. His feast day is celebrated there on October 8th, and his remains rest in a church that was renamed in his honor: the Sanctuary of Saint Simeon the Godbearer. In 2010, a small portion of these relics was transferred back to Jerusalem—a silver reliquary given by the Archbishop of Zadar to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, completing a journey that had begun over a thousand years before.

A Feast Day by Many Names

The meeting of Simeon and the infant Jesus is commemorated every year on February 2nd, exactly forty days after Christmas. But this single event has accumulated different names across different Christian traditions, each name emphasizing a different aspect of what happened that day.

In the Western church, it's often called Candlemas. The name comes from the practice of blessing all the beeswax candles that will be used in church services throughout the coming year. The connection to Simeon is poetic: he called the child "a light for revelation," so the church celebrates with literal light.

The Roman Catholic Church calls it the Presentation of the Lord, focusing on the moment when Jesus was formally presented in the Temple. Older Catholic calendars called it the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, emphasizing Mary's completion of the ritual purification required by Jewish law.

The Eastern Orthodox Church calls it The Meeting—a beautiful, simple name that captures the essence of the event. God and humanity met that day in the Temple, the eternal becoming visible to mortal eyes.

The Armenian Apostolic Church, which celebrates Christmas on January 6th rather than December 25th, consequently celebrates this feast on February 14th. They call it The Coming of the Son of God into the Temple.

Why the Dates Don't Match

If you've been paying attention to the dates, you might have noticed something confusing. February 2nd is forty days after December 25th. Simple enough. But some Orthodox Christians celebrate Simeon's feast on February 16th. What's going on?

The answer lies in a calendar controversy that has divided Christians for over four hundred years.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Western calendar to correct accumulated errors in the older Julian calendar (named after Julius Caesar, who introduced it in 46 BC). The Julian calendar had assumed the year was exactly 365.25 days long, but the true figure is slightly shorter—about 365.2422 days. Over centuries, this small discrepancy caused the calendar to drift. By the 1500s, the spring equinox was occurring about ten days before the calendar said it should.

Gregory's reform dropped ten days from October 1582 and adjusted the leap year rules to prevent future drift. Most Catholic countries adopted the new Gregorian calendar immediately. But the Eastern Orthodox churches, which had split from Rome in 1054 during the Great Schism, were understandably reluctant to accept a calendar reform imposed by the Pope.

Many Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar for liturgical purposes. Today, the Julian calendar runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar. So when the Julian calendar says February 3rd—the traditional date for commemorating Simeon—the Gregorian calendar reads February 16th.

It's the same day, measured in different ways.

The Song That Never Stopped

Simeon spoke his prayer once, in the Temple in Jerusalem, while holding a baby who would change the world. And then he disappeared from history.

But his words never stopped echoing.

In the Catholic Church, the Nunc dimittis is sung or recited every night at Compline, the final prayer service before sleep. The connection is obvious: just as Simeon asked permission to depart in peace after seeing what he had waited for, Christians ask each night for peaceful rest, having entrusted their day to God.

In the Anglican tradition, the Song of Simeon is sung every evening at Evensong, one of the most beautiful and distinctive Anglican services. The words float through candlelit cathedrals in English churches, just as they float through Orthodox churches in Slavonic and Greek, just as they once floated through the Temple courts in Aramaic.

Composers have been setting the Nunc dimittis to music for centuries. One of the most famous settings appears in Sergei Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, a choral masterpiece written in 1915. The Russian composer took Simeon's ancient words and wrapped them in harmonies of such crystalline beauty that listeners still find themselves moved to tears.

What Simeon Teaches About Waiting

We live in an age of instant gratification. Same-day delivery, streaming video, immediate answers to any question we can type into a search bar. The idea of waiting years—let alone centuries—for anything seems almost incomprehensible.

Simeon waited. Whether it was decades or the legendary 360 years, he waited with a certainty that most of us would find impossible to sustain. He didn't know when the promise would be fulfilled. He didn't know what the Messiah would look like, or how he would recognize him. He only knew that God had promised, and God keeps promises.

And when the moment finally came, it didn't look like anything special. A poor couple. A forty-day-old baby. A routine religious ceremony in a Temple crowded with dozens of other families doing the same thing.

But Simeon saw. He recognized what others missed. And in that recognition, his long vigil ended not with exhaustion or disappointment but with words of peace and gratitude that have outlasted empires.

There's something to be said for people who know how to wait well—who trust the promise even when the evidence seems thin, who remain alert even after years of apparently nothing happening, who are ready to recognize the extraordinary disguised as the ordinary.

Simeon had waited so long that he must have sometimes wondered if he had misunderstood. Maybe the promise wasn't literal. Maybe he would live forever, trapped in a body that refused to release him. Maybe the Messiah would never come.

But he kept going to the Temple. He kept watching. He kept believing.

And one day, a young mother placed her baby in his arms, and everything he had hoped for became real.