Formed into a 'We'

Last week, we began our Advent journey with a new song, reflecting on the introit or entrance antiphon for the first Sunday of the liturgical year.  We opened ourselves to Gregorian chant as a form of lectio divina, which invites us into deeper levels of meaning.  This Sunday’s introit is quite different from last Sunday’s personal cry to God.  Today we have a trumpetlike oracle of the Lord through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, directed to God’s people as a whole.



O people of Sion,
behold the Lord will come
to save the nations.
And the Lord will make
the glory of his voice heard,
in the joy of your hearts.




The first thing to notice is that the people are being told that the Lord comes to save, not just them, his own people, but the nations, the gentiles, all people.  The two verses are based on Isaiah 30:19, 30, but if you take the trouble to look them up, you will see that they are not complete quotations from the prophetic text.  In fact, you might be quite bewildered to find yourself in the midst of a chapter on condemnation and punishment of the nations.  The first verse of Isaiah (“People of Zion … the Lord will give grace to you”), is coupled with the second verse a little further on (“the Lord will make his majestic voice heard and will show how his arm strikes with burning anger”) within a context of divine ‘vendetta’ against Assyria, for the salvation of Israel.  Precisely this text that promises the annihilation of an enemy people is used and radically modified to become, in the first phrase of the introit, a proclamation of universal salvation: “the Lord will come to save all peoples.”  So, is this a gross example of quoting out of context, using a text in direct opposition to its original meaning?

What we are looking at is an example of a phenomenon called centonization, which literally means ‘patchwork’.  Centonization is the free combination, change, removal, or addition of phrases, whether musical or textual.  It makes the chant a liturgical response to the scriptural text, rather than simply a quotation.  Now this might sound a bit obscure, but I think we are quite familiar with it.  We do it all the time, when we make free associations between meaningful texts, sometimes conflating one with another, even forgetting whether we are in the Old Testament or the New.  Our liturgy is a prime example of the artful patchwork of scriptural themes pertaining to a given day or feast.  The purpose of the patchwork is to bring out the fuller meaning of the word of God.  What is this fuller meaning?

As Catholics, we believe that God chooses to reveal himself through the Scriptures and in creation.  He speaks to us.  He makes his voice heard.  The Scriptures are the Word of God, inspired texts which speak truth about God and the origin, meaning and destiny of creation.  But we are not fundamentalists, that is, we do not believe that the words of Scripture are in every case literally or historically true, or that they are equally important.  To be understood, the Scriptures must be interpreted according to the different literary genres of the texts, as a chronicle of human beings’ evolving understanding of God and his purposes in creation.  The basic principle of interpretation of the Scriptures is the person of Jesus Christ, the definitive self-revelation of God, as recorded in the New Testament, and as passed on in the tradition of the Church.  Jesus reveals the meaning of all that went before him.  And so, we can read the Old Testament texts with him in mind, recognizing that it contains the revelation of God’s truth, but a gradual revelation, at one point more primitive and incomplete, at another point more developed and closer to the fulness of revelation in Christ.

The book of Isaiah, from which today’s chant is drawn, is a case in point.  As with each of the writing prophets, Isaiah contains material condemning the nations which threatened Israel and promising salvation through destruction of these nations.  This emphasizes the separateness, the difference and even the antagonism of God’s chosen people in respect to all those who surrounded them, which was a feature of the people’s historical experience.  And yet, in a later portion of the book, Isaiah speaks of the vocation of Israel to be the gathering point where all peoples come to worship the one God.  This brings us very close to the Christian realization that God the Father of Jesus Christ is Father of Jew and gentile alike, as St Paul says, “he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh” (Eph 2:4).

The text we sing in today’s chant edits Isaiah to reflect the fuller understanding of salvation present in the New Testament, also suggested by later parts of Isaiah.  What we are being offered here is a way of reading the Scriptures, and by extension, a way of reading the book of life, of experience.  We take what is good, leave out or modify what is incomplete, and add deeper meanings learned later. The proclamation is that the Lord works not through the annihilation of other peoples, but through their salvation.  

This is a call to look beyond the people to the nations, from ‘us’ to ‘them’, or better, to a more inclusive ‘we’.  This applies historically to Israel and the gentiles.  But we gentiles who have been welcomed into God’s people can still point behind us to ‘them’, to the ones who do not belong to ‘us’.  Pope Francis has emphasized that the Church is by nature missionary, that is, moving toward those outside its borders to welcome them in.  Christians are called to regard all as brothers and sisters.  It is all too easy in the cultural atmosphere of our times to huddle in camps of those who share my point of view, and to exclude or avoid those who disagree with me.  The world becomes divided into people like me and people not like me.  Us and them.  But the whole thrust of today’s chant, as well as the readings, is toward breaking down dividing walls and reconciling enemies.  Isaiah sings of the reconciliation in justice of wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, calf and young lion, cow and bear, child and serpent.  John the Baptist cries out to the complacent among the people: “God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones” (Mt 3:9) – even from those outside the people of God!  It is Paul who makes this appeal most directly, calling on the community of Roman Christians to live up to their vocation:
“May the God of endurance and encouragement
grant you to think in harmony with one another,
in keeping with Christ Jesus,
that with one accord you may with one voice
glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you,
for the glory of God.” (Rom 15:5-7)

Welcome one another.  In his recent book, Entering the Twofold Mystery, Bishop Erik Varden makes the trenchant remark that the primary asceticism in the Rule is not physical mortification, which is barely mentioned, but relational asceticism.  Relational asceticism is living with people who are not like me, people who may disagree with me, people who may rub me up the wrong way, and learning to welcome them as brothers or sisters.  I think St Benedict had this in mind when he wrote of the voice of the Lord calling out to the multitude and saying: “if you desire true life…let peace be your quest and aim” (Ps 33, RB Prol 17).  He closes his Rule by setting the highest standard.  The brothers are to “vie in paying obedience one to another -- no one following what he considers useful for himself, but rather what benefits another” (RB 72.6-7).  I like to picture mutual obedience in community in the same way Fr Dominic did in our recent class, when speaking of obedience to God.  He said it is not so much a matter of two opposed wills – God’s and mine – but of two rivers flowing together, my own will finding itself joyfully in God’s.  When the Lord makes his glorious voice heard in the needs and wants and points of view of others, it is a question of finding our hearts flowing together into the joy of a common will.  Or if we can’t quite manage that, at least loving our enemy-of-the-moment for the sake of Christ, foreseeing the salvation of both of us, and saying with Christian de Cherge: “May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.”

If we listen to today’s trumpeted oracle of the Lord, we learn that life in community, in the Church, in the world, requires planning for the long haul – our enemies will not be destroyed but saved.  This may well necessitate a conversion for both of us. Therefore, to hear the glorious voice of the Lord in the joy of our hearts means allowing our dividing walls to be broken down so as to be formed into a ‘we’ by Christ.

Source: Commentary by Fulvio Rampi