Symeon the God-receiver

The witness of the Gospel

Everything certain of Symeon is contained in a single passage of the Gospel of Luke, and it is enough to have made him one of the most beloved figures of the Church's memory. When, forty days after the Nativity, the Virgin and Joseph brought the Child Jesus up to Jerusalem "to present him to the Lord" and to offer the sacrifice of the poor — "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons" — there was in the city "a man… whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him" (Luke 2:25). Three times in as many verses the Evangelist binds Symeon to the Holy Spirit: the Spirit was upon him; it had been revealed to him by the Spirit that he should not see death before seeing the Lord's Christ; and he came "by the Spirit into the temple" at the very hour the Child was brought in. He is, in the reading of the Fathers, the last of the prophets of the Old Covenant, standing on the threshold of the New — the aged embodiment of a whole people's expectation, at last permitted to hold in his arms the One for whom it had waited.

Taking the Infant up "in his arms," he blessed God and spoke the words the Church has never ceased to repeat:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. (Luke 2:29–32)

It is the Nunc Dimittis, the Song of Symeon, the fourth and last of the canticles of Luke's infancy narrative (after the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the angels' Gloria) and the only one placed in the mouth of one about to die. In it the old man asks his release — "now lettest thou thy servant depart" — as a bondservant asks leave to go, his watch kept and his charge fulfilled; and he names the Child, in the language of the prophet Isaiah, "a light to lighten the Gentiles," the salvation prepared "before the face of all people." The Church took the song into the daily office of Vespers, where it is sung or read as the lamps are lit and the day closes — the whole Church, each evening, asking with Symeon to depart in peace, having seen its Salvation.

The prophecy of the sword

Joseph and the Mother "marvelled at those things which were spoken of him." And Symeon "blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed" (Luke 2:34–35). The blessing is also a prophecy of the Passion: the Child is a stone of division, over whom Israel will stumble or rise; a sign contradicted; and the sword that shall pierce the Mother is read by the Church as her sorrow at the Cross, foretold at the very hour of the Presentation. The Byzantine hymnography dwells on the paradox that the aged Symeon holds the Ancient of Days as an infant, and that the same arms which received the Consolation of Israel foretell to the Consoler's Mother the anguish of Golgotha. From this word Symeon is styled not only Theodochos, God-receiver, but a prophet of the Passion.

The tradition of the Seventy and the promise

Around the bare Gospel notice the tradition of the Church wove a fuller account, which the synaxaria and the hymnography transmit and which gives the elder his particular glory. According to it, Symeon was one of the seventy (or seventy-two) translators commissioned at Alexandria under Ptolemy II Philadelphus to render the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek — the version the Church calls the Septuagint. Assigned the book of the prophet Isaiah, he came to the words "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son" (Isaiah 7:14), and his reason rebelled: a virgin cannot bear. He took up his pen to alter the word parthenos, "virgin," to neanis, "young woman" — when an angel stayed his hand and told him that he should not taste death until he had seen with his own eyes the Christ born of a Virgin. From that day, the tradition holds, Symeon lived on — through generations, some accounts saying two hundred and seventy years, others more — a man kept alive by a promise, until the day the Spirit led him into the Temple and the Virgin's Child was placed in his arms, and he could ask at last to be let depart. The story is a pious tradition, not a datum of Scripture; but it crystallises the meaning the Gospel itself gives him — the man who "should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ" — and it makes of his doubt over Isaiah's word a witness, across the centuries, to the very virginity he had questioned.

Repose and relics

Having received his release, Symeon reposed soon after — the tradition places his death within the same year, an old man full of days who had held his salvation and been let go in peace. His relics were later gathered and honoured. Byzantine sources record their translation to Constantinople, where they were enshrined among the treasures of the imperial city. In the West, the city of Zadar in Dalmatia venerates relics said to be those of the righteous Symeon, kept in the church that bears his name in a celebrated silver reliquary; the Orthodox East keeps his memory above all in the office of the Meeting and its afterfeast, of which — with the prophetess Anna — he is the human protagonist.