"Prepared in the Sight of all Nations"

I got to spend Easter Sunday last weekend in Stockholm with my parents. I'd looked online for an international church to attend there (this is perhaps my favorite thing about traveling right now - going to English-speaking church!). Thus, we celebrated the resurrection of the Dead and the defeat of darkness with the singing of an African, Asian and European-voiced choir, a church full of visiting tourists, European government and NGO workers, North American pastors and musicians, Swedish pianists, and British scripture-readers. I love these churches (Immanuelskyrkan in Stockholm felt like the close kin of Union Church in Istanbul) - the powerful sense that these are my people, my family, my home, overpowers me completely when I'm traveling and displaced. I cannot imagine a better tangible reminder that we are all of us aliens and strangers on the earth than to worship in communities made up of expats and immigrants.

After church, I drug (accompanied? persuaded?) my parents to the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm's modest but impressive fine art gallery. It was a bit odd to leave church and go look at art, but it also reminded me keenly of what I like most about art museums. They're some of the only places left in the world where secular people realize they should be reverent, in which they recognize that they don't fully understand what they're seeing, in which we know we are standing in the presence of works and of persons who are larger than us and will outlast us. They're what churches and cathedrals used to be.

Coming around the corner of the second floor gallery, I saw brush strokes I thought I recognized. I bent my head closer to look at the plaque beneath the frame. Yup. Here was an entire wall of Rembrandts.

In the era of digital reproduction, in which we get most of our visual information through glowing pixels, I'm not sure I can convey the mucky tangibility of that paint on canvas. Rembrandt's brush strokes make me think of Jesus's miracle in John 9. Jesus has just told the crowd, "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Then he spits on the ground, makes mud from the dusty ground and smears it on the blind man's eyes. The man washes off his eyes and "came home seeing." First mud, then sight.

Working my way slowly down the row of paintings ("The Apostle Peter," "The Kitchen Maid"), I looked deeply into the eyes of these characters and thought about the familiar story they all played a part in. Then I came to another painting and I stared at it hard, felt my insides clutch and my breath stop. Eyes soften and well up. How can I describe the feeling of being pulled in, of scales falling off the eyes, of being witness to real point in time? Easter morning, sun bright outside over the bays and islands of a beautiful, magical city... but inside, I was suddenly far, far away. Deep in the past.

This is Rembrandt's last painting, Saint Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child. It is listed as unfinished, though I can't see how. As I stared at it, all the words from the advent Bible study I'd been doing with some girls back in December came to mind: "My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel." (Luke 2:25-32)

Simeon's eyes in the painting are not looking at the child, but somewhere far away and interior. Rembrandt captures the wrinkled squinting of an old man whose eyes have been worn by years of looking for, and not yet witnessing, the promised light of God. Here, this moment is Simeon's completion. My eyes have seen your salvation.

I think about him as one of the remnant of Israel, among whom are Zachariah, Elizabeth, Joseph of Arimathea, all those who God kept through the years "waiting for the consolation of Israel." Through darkness and waiting and destruction of the temple and the scattering of the Jews. But on this canvas, Simeon's form emerges from the darkness of the paint, the darkness of the Old Testament and its as-yet-unfulfilled promises, into this fragile ray of golden light, the salvation embodied by the child bundled in his arms.

I know that Easter messages usually center on the cross and the characters present in Jesus's last days. I couldn't help but feel, though, as I looked at Simeon and the light falling across his face in Rembrandt's final painting, that this moment is also Easter. As a whole story, the gospel narrative is not divisible into thematic units. Christmas is Easter is Pentecost. Light coming into the world; light defeating darkness. The whole story contains every moment of the story simultaneously. The dark mud that Simeon emerges from is the dark earth that Christ rises out of; the darkness of the past without revelation gives way to the present in which we can walk by the light of the Spirit.

Happy Easter friends. Walk in that light.