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The story in the Advent psalms and readings, Year B

The Advent readings

woman with finger over mouth — No singing in church

Some of us can hear our readings and our psalms live at Mass, but even if we can only have broadcast services or reading the text for ourselves, studying them is an encouraging thing to be doing, particularly during this strange no-music Advent which seems to be what most of us are condemned to. So I thought I’d go through them and see what’s particularly interesting about this year’s readings, now that we have started Year B, which is the year when we read our way through Mark’s Gospel.

[Or for 2021 read about Advent of Year C : joy just round the corner ]

First Reading in Advent is always one of the prophets

Luckily the texts are rich in encouragement and beautiful images even without any musical help. Each year of the Lectionary, A, B or C, has its own distinct set of readings. Year A (which we just finished at the feast of Christ the King) starts with the early part of Isaiah, his vision of everyone streaming towards the lifted-up Temple with joy and excitement. Year B (which began with the First Sunday of Advent) starts with a reading nearly at the end of the book of Isaiah, the longest prophetical book of the Bible, and indeed the longest book of all, sixteen chapters more even than Genesis. Year C, when we reach it next Advent, goes through some of the minor prophets instead of Isaiah.

Isaiah, First Sundays of Advent A and B

The Book of Isaiah starts with an account of God’s anger at the faithlessness of Judah, its downfall along with the whole of Israel, and a call to repentance. Then in the second chapter, the mood swings round completely to an almost breathless call to everyone to ‘come up’, the great call to Jerusalem, which is the Year A reading (and we also have it as a regular reading in the Morning Prayer cycle). The Year B reading in contrast comes from the sixty-third and -fourth chapters, a long way away from the beginning of the book. Modern scholarship reckons that Isaiah is written by at least three writers, possibly by even more, but I don’t need to discuss that now, so for convenience, I’m just calling the author(s) Isaiah tout court. As you might expect, the excitement of the early chapters has dissipated, and the tone is more realistic and regretful : this is all taking much longer than had been hoped in the beginning. Now instead of all of us rushing to the mountain of the Lord, Isaiah calls on God himself to come down. He describes how men have sinned and behaved as though they had forgotten God, but Isaiah knows that God has not forgotten them. He reminds God that he is the Father, the Redeemer, the Lord of this people, and then he moves to a humble and intimate register : we are the clay, you are the potter. It throws us back to the beginning of Genesis, and the version of Creation where God makes Adam out of dust; but the prophet’s object here is not to remind us of our lowly beginnings, but to remind God that he has a responsibility to us because he made us.

Antony Gormley’s little pot people, each made of a handful of clay

First Sunday B : Save me in your love

This is poetry, not prose (Isaiah is written in both), but it’s the tone which is fascinating. It’s descriptive, not penitential. ‘We’ acknowledge our guilt and sins, but we aren’t apologising, but rather calling on God to come and save his people, just because he made us and is responsible for us. It’s almost like a challenge.

Psalm 79/80 : poetic form

Yggdrasil tree — See where your Celtic roots can lead you

The psalm (79/80) picks up this theme. It’s an interesting psalm, one of the ones with a very clear poetic structure even in translation. The first stanza is a call to God to come and help, and then there is a refrain : God of hosts, bring us back;/let your face shine on us and we shall be saved. The next stanza explains how bad the people’s current state is, and repeats the refrain. Then the psalm takes a different course, and recounts the story of a vine, brought out of Egypt and planted by God in another place (the allegory is very clear). It grew and flourished – and then God broke down the wall which kept it safe from all dangers. Now it is in dire straits, and God needs to turn back to his people and make things right again (and, almost as an afterthought, we shall never forsake you again), followed by the refrain one last time.

Psalm 79/80 : turning round, turning back

We don’t have the whole psalm on the First Sunday of Advent B. We have only the first call, then the request for God to turn back again to protect the vine, and then the last stanza about the man who will rescue the vine, interpreted for us as the coming of the Messiah, and the promise that we will never forsake God again, which looks less like an afterthought when the psalm is shortened like this. We keep the Response as it is set in the psalm (more or less, depending on your Lectionary), but all the versions have the idea of movement back towards, and because half the movement is for us to make and half the movement needs to come from God, there is a beautiful idea of both sides turning back to each other.

Second Reading and Gospel : stay awake!

Then we have Paul, thanking God for the strength of the Spirit among the Corinthians. The Gospel is Jesus encouraging everyone to stay awake because we do not know God’s timetable. Year B is Mark’s Gospel, but this is not the beginning of it, because that is the Gospel for the second week. This piece is just a few verses where Jesus encourages everyone to wait actively for what God is planning. It is to set the mood for the whole of Advent. Mark’s Gospel is probably the earliest, and certainly the most immediate and direct, where Jesus speaks very clearly and forcibly, repeating points to reinforce them. So we get ‘stay awake’ four times in only four verses of Gospel, it’s like a bell clanging. And because we can’t have music in church, here’s a link to the stunning Bach Chorale Wachet auf, the essential music for this season.

Second Sunday of Advent B : comfort now

The Second Sunday of Advent B is again Isaiah, but we have gone backwards, as this is from the middle section of the book, actually Chapter 40, where the tone changes to one of comfort. This is where Handel’s Messiah begins, and for anyone that has ever sung it, it’s impossible not to hear the music when you read the words. This is immediate comfort, not just hints of possible future solace : ‘Tell Jerusalem that her time of service is ended’….’shout without fear : here is your God’. So the coming is not just to be expected, it is actually here. The Lord is coming, mighty and victorious, but he is coming like a shepherd, cuddling a lamb, and we don’t need to be afraid any longer. How does the psalm respond to this?

Psalm 84/85, a psalm of two halves

It is Psalm 84/85, which is a psalm of two halves, though we are going to use only the second half. The first half remembers God’s mercy and forgiveness in bygone days, and appeals for them again. It ends with the couplet which gives us our Response : ‘Let us see, O Lord, your mercy /and give us your saving help’, but because it comes after cries for help and fear of God’s anger, it feels almost desperate.

Justice and peace have – already – embraced

The second half, the part actually prescribed for us to use, has a totally different atmosphere; the psalm in its entirety is like a before-and-after picture. It starts with confidence and serenity, describing God speaking of peace in the present, not even the future, tense. ‘Mercy and faithfulness have met’ even before God starts to speak. Everything is all right now. This is a beautiful psalm, with a picture of life almost like heaven or Paradise garden. We use this psalm for Australia Day because it is so idyllic.

Justice and Peace will embrace when the music stops

Second reading : St Peter : How long is a ‘day’?

The second reading is from St Peter, clarifying the difference between God’s time and our time. The Lord is not slow, but he is patient, and he is giving us all time to reform before his return. This must have been so difficult for the first Christians, and Peter’s words are impressive in their simplicity and honesty. The apostles thought for a very long time that Jesus was going to come back in their lifetimes, and each of them had to work out how to handle the fact that he didn’t. Particularly during Advent, Peter’s explanation and encouragement to patience are worth reading and rereading.

John the Baptist bursts onto the stage : Gospel

Then the Gospel cuts to the chase : this time the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel, quoting precisely the bit of Isaiah that we have just heard, setting the scene, and describing the arrival of John the Baptist. Mark doesn’t give us the (highly exciting) birth narrative, which is in the Gospel of Luke. He simply reminds us of the prophecy and then says …’and so it was that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness..’ and we are on the way, because Mark has no birth narrative for Jesus either. He wants to tell us just about Jesus’ life as an adult, what he did, who he met, what he said, and what happened, which is why it can feel almost breathless (and count the number of times something happens ‘immediately’).

Third Sunday of Advent : Rejoice

We start the Readings for Gaudete (Pink) Sunday by going back to nearly the end of Isaiah again, this time celebrating a joyful prophecy of turning everything upside-down, with a hymn of exultation. The Psalm is actually a Canticle at this point, because it’s the Magnificat, from Luke chapter 1 instead of the book of Psalms, and not even all of that. We can’t sing it, so here’s another Bach link to the wonderful Netherlands Bach Society, singing the whole thing (if I can find good links, I’m going to put them in, because we’re all running short of music at the moment). However, it picks up the exultation of the First Reading in what is probably an exact quote in the Hebrew, if only I could read it (My soul rejoices in my God/ My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour), and continues the topsyturvey motif, feeding the starving and sending the rich empty away. Our Response is precisely the line which occurs in both texts. It’s good to see the Magnificat here, because so far Mary has not figured at all in these Year B Advent readings, and indeed, if you didn’t know it was the Magnificat, there is nothing to tell you, as the Gospel for Third Sunday of Advent B is the beginning of John’s Gospel, just after the Logos passage, where he describes the arrival of John the Baptist (similar to Mark’s account last week, but fleshing it out a bit), and his account of himself to the Pharisees who challenge him and ask if he is the Messiah.

Fourth Sunday of Advent B : somewhere special for God to be

So after three Advent Sundays, we are still poised waiting for something more than misty prophecies and gnomic denials. But the Fourth Sunday is coming. The first reading for the Fourth Sunday is from the book of Samuel, and is a little baffling to begin with. We are back in the time of David. He has just settled into his house, his enemies have all been dealt with by God, and David feels bad because the Ark of the Covenant is in a tent. He asks Nathan the prophet whether he should not make better arrangements, and at first Nathan says yes.

Beautiful tents — some tents are spectacular, however

God’s promise to David

But God speaks to Nathan when he is asleep that night, to send a message to David. God does not need David to build him a house. He himself took David away from the sheep he lived among and has given him everything, from that day on. The unspoken subtext is that if God wants a better house than David’s, he could create it in no time at all. And then God makes astounding promises to David, about how he will plant the people of Israel in a place that God himself will choose and they will thrive; but as for David, he will give him ‘fame as great as the fame of the greatest on earth’, and when he dies, God undertakes to look after his children for ever. It almost sounds like the promises in fairy stories until you realise that it’s the other way round and the fairy stories are in fact a pale imitation of what God is promising here. David will have a House, like a Scottish clan or a European royal house, and God will always be in loco parentis to David’s descendants.

Psalm 88/89 : God’s promises will be fulfilled

This is followed by Ps 88/89 (all the Advent B psalms are fairly close together), which is a celebration of God’s love and truth. The second and third stanzas are part of God’s promise from the first reading set to music, so that the prophecy is repeated, and the words of the Response express total confidence that God will keep his word. The second reading is St Paul to the Romans, explaining that Jesus is the solution and revelation of the mystery and everything has happened according to God’s plan. And finally we have the Gospel, taken from Luke (because Mark and John don’t do the birth narrative), and describing the Annunciation, explaining how Jesus is the fulfilment of precisely the prophecy we have had in the other readings, and tying everything together. Mary gives her consent; the angel leaves her. God has arranged the very special place for him to dwell in. Mary is far more than just a container, but that was one of the ways in which her role was interpreted in the early days of the Church. Her titles in the Litanies include ‘Spiritual vessel’, ‘Vessel of honour’, ‘Tower of David’, ‘Ark of the Covenant’, and so on.

Annunciation — note the relative positions : the angel is asking, not telling

‘A’ virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph

I feel it’s almost a shame that we have to wait for the Fourth Sunday to get to this point, because the next thing that happens (liturgically) is the Christmas Masses (Vigil, Midnight, Dawn, Day), but I would like to have a chance to spend more time thinking about Mary at this stage. What must it have been like for her? We don’t hear anything about her mother in the narrative, only about Elizabeth; was she the only person in whom Mary could confide? Mary must have been living with someone, even if her mother or father were dead, because she is so young, but we hear nothing about anyone else on Mary’s side of the family. We hear (in Matthew’s Gospel, interestingly, not in Luke, where Mary is traditionally supposed to have had some input) about Joseph’s disquiet, and generous decision to ‘put [Mary] away quietly’, after discovering that she is pregnant, but we are told nothing at all about Mary’s feelings. All we have is her two sentences to the angel, and the Magnificat, that chant of joy and confidence, subversive and yet so orthodox (see how it mirrors the prophecy in Isaiah, and also the prayer of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2). But I think back to being pregnant, the joy, the wonder, the trepidation, the excitement, the longing, and my heart goes out to that unexpected and unexpecting central character of the whole narrative of Advent. Christmas is about Jesus; but Advent is surely about Mary. We wait with her.

© Kate Keefe and Music for Mass 2020 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kate Keefe and Music for Mass with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Celebrating the Annunciation

A moveable feast

The feast of the Annunciation is in a difficult position in the calendar. It has to fall exactly nine months before Christmas Day, because Our Lady, being the perfect woman, had a perfect pregnancy and Christ spent exactly nine months in the womb, so it’s March 25th. But Easter is not a fixed date like Christmas (more on that later), so every now and again, the Annunciation falls in Holy Week, when we are all concentrating on the end of the Lord’s human life rather than the beginning of it. When this happens, the Annunciation is moved to the week after Easter. In practice, this is a bit like having your birthday on or the day before or after Christmas, and any child will tell you that this is not ideal, as the bigger feast tends to swallow up the lesser. Easter is, of course, the biggest feast in the Church’s year; but you couldn’t have Easter without the Annunciation happening first.

Autres temps, autres moeurs, and autres temps as well

Interestingly, the Eastern Churches handle this differently, and they celebrate the Annunciation on its day even when it falls in Holy Week, even when it falls on Good Friday (and they have special liturgies for this). The date of Christmas itself was fixed only some time after the fourth century, and of course there are lots of other considerations (symbolism, absorbing older feasts, typology) which come into play. The Annunciation was a Wednesday in Advent and Christmas was celebrated at Epiphany for a while, the thinking being that the revelation to the Gentiles was the important event. Easter, or indeed the Annunciation, was once regarded as the beginning of the New Year in many countries, and the Annunciation was such a beloved feast that it has its own pet name, ‘Lady Day’, which outlasted even the Protestants and the Puritans. So for many years Lady Day counted as New Year’s Day, which is really getting confusing.

The importance of the Annunciation

Last year, the Annunciation had to be transferred, but this year it is back in March where it belongs, so it’s easier for me to write about it. It celebrates the occasion when God sends an angel to Mary to ask whether she will have his baby, and she says yes. She has very little idea what the angel is talking about, but her disposition is to trust God and to carry out what he asks. It’s breathtaking and terrifying, when you think about it. Any Jewish female would have known that she might be a potential mother of the Messiah, but I imagine it would be well to the back of your mind, like an American mother wondering whether her child might grow up to be President, and Mary is not even Joseph’s wife yet. She is a young girl, doing normal things, when suddenly the divine irrupts into her life, and it is never the same again.

Images of the Annunciation

There are an enormous number of pictures of the Annunciation. I don’t know how on earth you could count scientifically, but I imagine that that the pictures of the Annunciation and the Virgin and Child greatly outnumber all other pictures from Mary’s life. I would not dare to hazard a guess whether there are more Annunciations than Virgin-and-Childs. But the Annunciation ones are particularly interesting because they show a setting before the angel arrives, with some evidence of what Mary was doing. There are Annunciations with her in a kitchen, in a garden (full of flowers laden with symbolism), under a tree, praying, spinning, or (my favourite) reading. I like the ones with Mary reading, just as I like the pictures of St Anne teaching her to read (in the Chora museum in Istanbul, among other places), because I think we tend to underestimate Mary. I have listened to sermons where she is presented as simply an illiterate peasant, this being fine because the power of the Holy Spirit makes her so holy that we don’t need to give her any human credit. I don’t agree with this version. After all, God had the whole of Creation to choose from, and he chose her.

I read a fascinating article interpreting the Annunciation as Mary’s #MeToo moment, but in the end I disagreed with the conclusion. It’s striking how totally different the Annunciation is from the scenes of Jupiter arriving to ravish beautiful young women (as Juno asks, in a beloved ffolkes cartoon, ‘Have you seen my husband? He’ll be a bull, a swan […]or a shower of gold’, which I can’t find on line, but I know exactly where the book is if I were at home…). The earlier portrayals of the Annunciation (say, pre-Baroque) have no sense of rush, intimidation or overwhelming power. The angel is shown on the same scale as Mary, and in a lower position.

Usually, in these earlier Annunciations, the angel is kneeling at Mary’s feet. God has sent his representative as a humble supplicant. Mary is not shown as frightened or shocked. There is no assault here. As the mediaeval English poem puts it: He came al so stille/where his mother was/ as dew in April/ that falleth on the grass/….he came al so stille/ to his mother’s bower/ as dew in April/that falleth on the flower.

Another poem, maybe half a century older, the Ave maris Stella, makes it clear that the lady has agency. The whole poem is a request for her to do things which will help us. She is not a passive victim.

The gentleness of God

This is theologically correct, and also in keeping with the way God behaves in the Bible, and especially with women, unlike most of the other characters (Hagar and Sarah in Genesis, for example). He woos but he does not force. He smites enemies, but he does not bully his friends. Forced consent is no consent, so God avoids approaching people directly (so we have the burning bush, the pillar of cloud, the angel messengers and so on). And he waits for Mary’s answer. Nothing can happen until she speaks. Once she says yes, then ‘the power of the Most High will overshadow’ her, and she will start a journey which ends with her as Queen of Heaven and Mother of God. For now, God is waiting anxiously, like the slaves and the servants in Psalm 122/123 : ‘Like the eyes of a servant on the hand of her mistress, so our eyes are on the Lord our God till he show us his mercy’, but, in a thrilling inversion, it is God who is waiting for Mary to agree. The Creator waits for the permission of one of his creatures.

Later portrayals (from the Baroque onwards) of the Annunciation emphasize the power and might of the angel, the beauty of his wing, the breadth of his wing span, how tall he is, and the imbalance of forces gets worse as we move towards the present day. To compare with the two earlier poems, here are two more modern. W.B. Yeats in The Mother of God describes a Mary who is terrified and daunted, who has been overwhelmed, much more similar to one of Jupiter’s victims, and Rupert Brooke’s Mary and Gabriel shows her being bullied into submission by ‘a will too strong for her/That held and filled and mastered all’, and she gives consent only because she is too tired to go on resisting.

Do what I say or I’ll jump on you from a great height (Austrian, 18th-cent.)

We are back in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, not in the Gospels. I think we can blame the Counter-Reformation (again) for some of this, with its emphasis on power and might rather than the love of God, and I think this leads to people seeing the Mary of the Annunciation as a passive victim, but this is not part of the Gospel narrative.

Back to the source

Luke gives the longer account, which he must have got from Mary herself, as no-one else is present besides the angel. (The story is also told in Matthew’s Gospel, from Joseph’s perspective.) God sends an angel to Mary, he comes to her (already slightly surprising, as she is alone) and greets her respectfully. ‘But she was greatly troubled at the saying and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be’. There is no panic, but she is aware that something strange is happening. She is brave, and no fool. This action is typical of Mary; she is someone who listens, observes, and then thinks about the significance of what is happening. She ‘ponders all these things in her heart’, as it says later.

The angel tells her not to be afraid. This is a very human touch in this scene where the divine is breaking in upon the human. Maybe Mary had to sit down. Angels seem to start by telling people not to be afraid quite often (e.g. the shepherds at Bethlehem), but of course we don’t know what they looked like, and traditionally Mary’s angel is one of the archangels, so presumably impressive, even in a kneeling position. Gabriel tells her that she has found favour with God and she will bear a son who will be called the Son of the Most High and fulfil all the prophecies about the Messiah, which of course Mary recognises. She knows the context; she knows what this means. Her response is a question about the practicalities : ‘How can this be, since I have no husband?’ and Gabriel answers that God will see to all that, nothing is impossible for him and tells her about her older, barren cousin’s pregnancy to illustrate the point. And then the crucial moment : ‘And Mary said,’ Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’ And the angel left her.’

What we don’t know, of course, is whether there was any other conversation or discussion, but I think probably not, because what would you say? The angel tells Mary what the plan is, and she only has to say yes or no. The most important things we say tend to be the simplest: I love you, will you marry me, goodbye, please take care; and yes or no. And she’s not just a vessel (whatever the early Church Fathers say about this, with their strange physiological ideas), or a passive victim in any way; it is hard to think of anything more active and engaged than having a child and looking after it yourself.

Just hold the baby, while I down a devil : Mary in a more active role

The psalm for the Annunciation

The psalm we sing at the Feast of the Annunciation is not the Magnificat, Mary’s great song of praise (see an earlier blog) when she visits Elizabeth, but the simpler and lower-key Psalm 39/40. I think of this as the Samuel psalm, because it reminds me of the little boy Samuel being repeatedly woken in the night by God’s voice calling him, and he doesn’t know what to do, until Eli tells him to answer, in the same words that we use as the Response. ‘Here I am, Lord’, and that’s too short for a workable psalm response, so it goes on,’I come to do your will’. Repeatedly in salvation history, God calls a person for a special job (Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Jacob…..Peter, James and John, and so on); and the best answer is just,’Here I am’.

I like the line where it says ‘You do not ask for sacrifice[..]but an open ear’, because there was a charming if peculiar early idea that Mary conceived Jesus through the ear (the Word of God going in through the ear and bearing fruit in the womb). This is like Rabelais’ frozen words whizzing through the sky across the sea and being audible only when they melt, the Word made flesh indeed. I also like the line where the psalmist sings of treasuring God’s word ‘in the depths of my heart’, which feels very appropriate for Our Lady.

I’ve set it as simply as possible. Everyone has the same version except the US, where the words are more convoluted, but at least the Response, like Mary’s, stays short and simple. And it doesn’t come back to the tonic at the end (unusually), because the point is that this is the start of something, not its conclusion. Mary doesn’t know where she is going, but she has set her foot upon the road.

The Annunciation is not the celebration of the Incarnation

It is important, when we celebrate the Annunciation, that we don’t get sucked into just celebrating the Incarnation. In one sense they are the same event, but the emphasis is different. We celebrate the Word made flesh above all at Christmas, his birth-day, when he appears as a separate individual, but at the Annunciation, what we are celebrating is Mary’s agreement, her leap of faith, her conception of the Baby who will stay her secret for a while, and belong to her only, for only those nine months, in a very special way. The Annunciation is Mary’s feast. Hail, Queen of heaven.

someone’s holding up the words, she must be joining in the singing

© Kate Keefe and Music for Mass 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kate Keefe and Music for Mass, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.