Nunc Dimittis

The scene occupies a few verses of the Gospel of Luke. Joseph and Mary bring the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem to fulfil the law, and there they meet Simeon, a righteous and devout man to whom the Holy Spirit had revealed that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. Taking the child in his arms, he blesses God in the words the church calls by their Latin opening, Nunc dimittis, now you dismiss your servant in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

The canticle is the third of the songs Luke sets in his infancy narrative, after Mary's Magnificat and Zechariah's Benedictus, and it is the shortest and most personal of the three, an old man's release. Its theology runs deeper than its brevity, salvation seen in a child a few weeks old, and seen for everyone, gentile and Jew in one clause. Simeon then turns to Mary with the darker prophecy that a sword will pierce her own soul, so the gentlest of the canticles stands beside the first shadow of the passion, contentment and cost in the same meeting. Eastern Christian tradition venerates Simeon as Theodochos, the God receiver, and keeps his memory on the day after the feast of the presentation, honouring the arms that held the promise fulfilled.

The church took Simeon's farewell and made it the song of every nightfall. In the Byzantine rite the canticle is sung toward the end of Vespers, and in the West it belongs to Compline, the last office of the day, where its logic is transparent, each night's sleep rehearsing the final dismissal, each singer asking to end the day as Simeon ended his life, in peace, having seen the light.

The Book of Common Prayer carried the custom into English by folding Vespers and Compline into Evensong, pairing the Nunc Dimittis with the Magnificat as the two fixed canticles of the evening office, and the Anglican choral tradition has produced settings of the pair continuously for five centuries, so that Evening Canticles in D or G name a whole musical genre. The canticle keeps two other stations in Christian life.

At Candlemas, the feast of the presentation forty days after Christmas, it is sung during the blessing and procession of candles, the light for revelation to the gentiles carried in wax and flame, and at funerals and deathbeds it is among the most used of all texts, spoken over lives that are being dismissed in peace. Luther's chorale paraphrase and the Latin chant tones alike have carried it, and its first line has become simply the way Christian speech says a good death.