ALMIGHTY God, give us grace to forged away the works of darkness and to placed on the armour of sunshine, now within the time of this mortal life, during which your Son Jesus Christ got here to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to guage the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who’s alive and reigns…
Common Worship
AS THE dark clouds of tragedy loomed over Thomas Hardy’s heroine Bathsheba, she overheard a passing schoolboy repeating time and again the words, “O Lord, O Lord . . . give us, give us . . . give us grace that . . . “. It was not the primary time, or the last, that a schoolboy had been set to learn by heart the collect for Advent Sunday. Although it was not the intention of the Church to supply material for the classroom, it’s undeniable that the rhythm and cadences of the Prayer Book once lived within the memories of English schoolchildren.
When Thomas Cranmer compiled the Book of Common Prayer, in 1549, he made extensive use of ancient Latin collects. This was the language of worship which he had known from childhood. At home as a boy, after which as an undergraduate in his college chapel at Cambridge, he would have heard and said the prayers of the Latin rite. They echoed within the memory of a whole generation of Sixteenth-century reformers, and shaped the content and language of Anglican worship.
The collect that Hardy’s schoolboy was struggling to recollect — one which is substantially similar to the one which we now use in Common Worship — is a rare example of Cranmer’s skill. Although many of the Sunday collects within the Prayer Book were his translations from the Latin, the one set for Advent Sunday is among the many few of his own composition. It is a skilful combination of biblical texts already related to Advent within the pre-Reformation Sarum rite — specifically, Romans 13.11-14.
The note in Common Worship indicating that this collect could also be repeated because the post-communion at every eucharist during Advent recalls the Prayer Book rubric enjoining its day by day repetition with the opposite collects until Christmas Eve. This got here about on the suggestion of Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, a member of the committee for the 1662 revision of the Prayer Book.
THIS collect is one among the jewels of the Anglican liturgy. To the reader, to the listener, but, above all, to the worshipper, it opens out like a medieval diptych, its twin panels hinged by the words “that within the last day”. It holds before our eyes the 2 dazzling icons of our salvation: Christ’s first coming, in Bethlehem, when he “got here to us in great humility”, and his second coming “when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to guage the living and the dead”.
The twin panels linking Christ’s first coming along with his second at the tip of time draw attention to the paradox of our redemption: “the scandal of particularity” that the King of all creation was cradled in a manger on a specific day (though we have no idea which) and at an address in Judaea. But the story of Bethlehem — so often enacted by our schoolchildren — is simply one side of the paradox; without the opposite, it stays a heart-warming and beautiful story, but one which misses the purpose.
The phrase “on the last day” reminds us of what our predecessors called the Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. An earlier generation made greater than ours of this aspect of our faith, which required the congregation to not flinch from the prospect of the last trump, and gave the preacher a chance to remind them, not with out a certain frisson, of their doom.
THERE is an ambiguity about Advent. We approach God, who’s our Redeemer, but in addition our Judge. We are available in the knowledge of our sinfulness, but in addition in the idea that he “has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the dominion of his beloved Son”. The equivocal nature of this season is expressed within the wealthy treasury of Advent texts, each ancient and modern, and now accessible within the supplements to Common Worship. One of those includes a contemporary version of a hymn compiled from medieval liturgy and generally known as the Advent Prose. It is made up of messianic passages taken from the prophecy of Isaiah, of which the next are a few of the verses:
Turn your fierce anger from us, O Lord,
and remember not our sins for ever.
Your holy cities have develop into a desert,
Zion a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; our holy and delightful house, where our ancestors praised you.
Pour down, O heavens, from above,
and let the skies rain down righteousness.
We have sinned and develop into like one who’s unclean;
now we have all withered like a leaf,
and our iniquities just like the wind have swept us away.
You have hidden your face from us,
and abandoned us to our iniquities.
Pour down, O heavens, from above,
and let the skies rain down righteousness
Comfort my people, comfort them;
my salvation shall not be delayed.
I actually have swept your offences away like a cloud;
fear not, for I’ll prevent.
I’m the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your redeemer.
Pour down, O heavens, from above,
and let the skies rain down righteousness.
The Revd Adrian Leak is a retired priest. His most up-to-date publication is After the Order of Melchizedek: Memoirs of an Anglican priest (Book Guild, 2022).
