ALMIGHTY God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns…
Common Worship
AS THE dark clouds of tragedy loomed over Thomas Hardy’s heroine Bathsheba, she overheard a passing schoolboy repeating over and over the words, “O Lord, O Lord . . . give us, give us . . . give us grace that . . . “. It was not the first 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 provide material for the classroom, it is undeniable that the rhythm and cadences of the Prayer Book once lived in 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, and then as an undergraduate in his college chapel at Cambridge, he would have heard and said the prayers of the Latin rite. They echoed in the memory of an entire generation of 16th-century reformers, and shaped the content and language of Anglican worship.
The collect that Hardy’s schoolboy was struggling to remember — one that is substantially the same as the one that we now use in Common Worship — is a rare example of Cranmer’s skill. Although most of the Sunday collects in the Prayer Book were his translations from the Latin, the one set for Advent Sunday is among the few of his own composition. It is a skilful combination of biblical texts already associated with Advent in the pre-Reformation Sarum rite — in particular, Romans 13.11-14.
The note in Common Worship indicating that this collect may be repeated as the post-communion at every eucharist during Advent recalls the Prayer Book rubric enjoining its daily repetition with the other collects until Christmas Eve. This came about at 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 of 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 in the last day”. It holds before our eyes the two dazzling icons of our salvation: Christ’s first coming, in Bethlehem, when he “came to us in great humility”, and his second coming “when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead”.
The twin panels linking Christ’s first coming with his second at the end 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 particular day (though we do not know which) and at an address in Judaea. But the story of Bethlehem — so often enacted by our schoolchildren — is only one side of the paradox; without the other, it remains a heart-warming and lovely story, but one that misses the point.
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 more than ours of this aspect of our faith, which required the congregation not to flinch from the prospect of the last trump, and gave the preacher an opportunity to remind them, not without a certain frisson, of their doom.
THERE is an ambiguity about Advent. We approach God, who is our Redeemer, but also our Judge. We come in the knowledge of our sinfulness, but also in the belief that he “has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son”. The equivocal nature of this season is expressed in the rich treasury of Advent texts, both ancient and modern, and now accessible in the supplements to Common Worship. One of these includes a modern version of a hymn compiled from medieval liturgy and known as the Advent Prose. It is made up of messianic passages taken from the prophecy of Isaiah, of which the following are some of the verses:
Turn your fierce anger from us, O Lord,
and remember not our sins for ever.
Your holy cities have become a desert,
Zion a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you.
Pour down, O heavens, from above,
and let the skies rain down righteousness.
We have sinned and become like one who is unclean;
we have all withered like a leaf,
and our iniquities 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 have swept your offences away like a cloud;
fear not, for I will save you.
I am 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 recent publication is After the Order of Melchizedek: Memoirs of an Anglican priest (Book Guild, 2022).