The Icon of the Meeting
The Presentation or “Meeting” of our Lord Jesus Christ is better known in the West under the name of Purification of the Holy Virgin. Like the majority of feasts of Palestinian origin, that of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple belongs to Christian antiquity. Aetheria (end of the 4th century) saw it celebrated in Jerusalem with a procession and with great solemnity. This feast was to be introduced in Constantinople in the 6th century under Justinian, and thence passed to Rome in the course of the 7th century. The practice of holding candles during the Feast, introduced in Jerusalem about 450, has been preserved in the West: hence the name of Candlemas….
The iconography of the feast of the Meeting was definitely established in the 9th or 10th century, and remains almost unchanged…. As in the account of St. Luke, the theme of the Purification of the Mother of God is almost forgotten: The central moment of the feast is the “Meeting” of the Messiah: The meeting of the Old and the New Testament.
The scene of the “Meeting” takes place in the Temple, in front of the Altar, which is represented in our icon covered with a canopy. On the Altar is sometimes seen a cross, a book or a scroll…. St. Joseph follows the Mother of God carrying in the fold of his garment the offering of poor parents (Lev. 12:8), two turtle doves of two young pigeons. These birds were to symbolize the Church of Israel and that of the Gentiles, as well as the two Testaments…. The figure of Symeon…is given great importance: His prophetic saying, one of the three “Canticles of the New Testament,” is sung [or read] at Vespers throughout the Liturgical year. Attempts have been made to see in the old saint who received Christ in his arms, a Priest of the Temple. Some authors say that he was one of the Doctors of the Law – son of Hillel and father of Gamaliel, master of St. Paul. Others have supposed Symeon to be a translator of the Bible; of the Seventy, and that God had preserved him in life during 350 years, till the coming of the Messiah….Symeon deserves the title of “He who has seen God,” for to Moses God appeared in darkness, whilst Symeon carried in his arms the Eternal incarnate Word (The Meaning of Icons, pg.168).