Who wrote ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’?
Iwas wondering where Thomas Cranmer got the line: “To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.” It seems very poetic to me. This reference to the Child Jesus as the revelation for all people comes in the Nunc Dimittis in Evensong in the Church of England.
Thus it is that, day by day, the Presentation in the Temple is commemorated, in which the Virgin Mary and Joseph take the firstborn, to Jerusalem to be given, as it were, to God, and bought back with a ritual sacrifice. A pair of doves or pigeons are mentioned in the Gospel.
The incident is marked each year on Feb 2, the day called Candlemas, on which the candles lit imitate the light that is Christ, just as the Easter candle does. In thinking about it, I’ve also wondered whether I count as one of the Gentiles or one of the people of Israel.
In the scene, an old man,
Simeon (to whom it had been revealed
“by the Holy
Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the
Lord’s Christ”) takes the
Child into his arms and says:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
The Latin title Nunc Dimittis is used in the Prayer Book of 1662 ( just as it had been in 1549) for this prayer or canticle delivered by Simeon (called “the Just” in the title sometimes given to the canticle in 1549).
In Evening Prayer in the Prayer Book, the canticle is paired with the Magnificat, the song of the Virgin Mary. But you won’t hear it in the Vespers of Monteverdi, for example, because Cranmer took the Nunc Dimittis from the service of Compline.
Of course, when Cranmer was making his English translation, the 1611 version of the Bible was decades in the future. Tyndale had made his own translation in the 1520s and he too renders the verse from St Luke’s Gospel: “A light to lighten the gentyls and the glory of thy people Israel.” But back in the late 14th century one of the Wycliffite translations made it: “Light to the schewing of hethene, and glorie of thi peple of Israel.”
Showing is the word used by Julian of Norwich, an orthodox contemporary of Wycliffe, to refer to her own “revelations particular”, of which she wrote a devotional account. By “particular” revelations she meant things revealed to her alone, not revelation for everyone, like that in the Bible.
Between Tyndale’s unauthorised translation and that of 1611, the official Bishops’ Bible of 1568 uses “a light to be revealed”, which is what it says in the original Greek and the Latin Vulgate. So it is interesting that the Bible of 1611 reverts to “light to lighten”, bringing its text back to near conformity with the wording of the Book of Common Prayer. I don’t think it is a fuss about nothing to ponder this wording, for it celebrates something remarkable.
Mary had come for a ceremony of purification, even though she, as a sinless virgin, required neither spiritual nor ritual purification. Her Son is presented to God, whose own Son he is already. He is notionally bought back or redeemed with a sacrifice to God, even though it is he that is the redeemer, whose sacrifice of himself is the only effective atonement or reconciliation of God and mankind. That is the work of the Christ whom Simeon has been expecting.
If Simeon is just, it is by faith in the coming of the Just One. And in his arms he beholds with his own eyes the light of revelation with which the people of Israel shine in glory. It is from this that the Gentiles, “ethnics” or heathen like me benefit.