Eagerly Waiting

Did you notice this from this past Sunday’s closing hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory”?

Saints before the altar bending,

Watching long in hope and fear,

Suddenly the Lord, descending

In His temple shall appear:

Come and worship, Come and worship;

Worship Christ, the newborn King.

I asked Lance to sing this because it’s the only carol I know that references Simeon and Anna directly (though “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus” which I quoted at the end, is also deeply connected to their stories/words). But stop and think of what’s going on here. We hear lines 1 and 2 and can be comfortably located entirely within Luke 2, but though lines 3 and 4 speaks of his appearance in the temple, it uses words (“suddenly” and “descending”) that yank us out of Luke 2 and into Jesus’ second coming. Furthermore, it would not be incorrect to say that Jesus “appeared” to Simeon and Anna (remember the emphasis on seeing in 2:26, 30), but “appear” has so much greater eschatological resonance. For example:

Titus 2:13
waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,

2 Timothy 4:8
Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.

Hebrews 9:28
so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Were not Simeon and Anna and their “tribe”(“she began… to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem”) showing us what eagerly waiting for his appearing looks like? This song compels us to place ourselves in lines 1 and 2 of this carol’s verse, because we are to be like Simeon and Anna in this respect. Does the Bible ever tell us explicitly to emulate Simeon and Anna? Some would say no. We would say yes: not only because Luke and the Holy Spirit meant the narrative to be taken that way, but that this is corroborated by the fact that the rest of the NT tells us to be eager, faithful waiters, the kind of people who could sing/pray “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”

We are more familiar with connections to the second coming being made with another “first arrival” to the temple—Jesus’ triumphal entry—but this carol brilliantly bookends his very first arrival in the temple with his last.