The Church’s Year

One of my favorite collects (Trinity 4) makes this petition: “that [God] being our ruler and guide, may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal”. It’s a prayer for the right use of time, a prayer that our passage through time might not end in darkness, but in life with God. In the cycles of the sun and moon, the rotation of the earth, nature provides markers for the passage of time, in days, seasons, and years. But in Scripture there is an organization of time which is not determined by the natural cycle, and that is the weekly memorial of creation, culminating in the seventh day’s observance as the Sabbath (Genesis 1:1-2:3). The Scriptures of the Old Testament also appoint specific holy days for the people of God to give thanks for redemption or in repentance for sin, such as Passover, and the Day of Atonement.

In the freedom of the gospel, however, the church is not bound by the ritual observances of the Old Testament law, which belong to the time of preparation for Christ, not its fulfilment in his coming. The fact of Christ’s resurrection on the first day of the week established it as “the Lord’s Day” in distinction from the Sabbath. Likewise, the fulfilment of the Passover hope in his resurrection establishes the Christian Passover (Easter), on a date that by intention never coincides with the Jewish Passover. Thus the structure of the Old Testament year is remade to reflect the newness of Christ. In its inception, though centered on his resurrection, Easter was a unitary celebration of the entirety of Christ’s redemptive work – from his first coming to his second. By a natural process, its constituent aspects were gradually “spun off” into observances of their own, so that the principal moments of his redemptive action each have their proper commemoration, accompanied by times of preparation and fulfilment – his birth and appearing, in Christmas and Epiphany; his passion, in Holy Week; his triumph, in Ascension and Pentecost.

The development of the Church year was completed in the 6th century with the season of Advent, beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas. Advent, which means “coming” or “arrival”, is a season that looks two ways at once, in a perspective that is both “now” and “not yet”– back to Christ’s first coming, in all humility, to accomplish our redemption; and forward, to his second coming, to the fulfilment in us of the redemption he accomplished. Advent means that we begin our journey through time to eternity, with the recognition that our going to God begins – and can only begin – with his coming to us. There is no attainment to the infinite if we begin from the finite. Only if we begin from God can we attain to God. And so our prayer in Advent is taught by Psalm 80:

Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel,
thou that leadest Joseph like a flock;
show thyself also,
thou that sittest upon the Cherubim.
Before Ephraim, Benjamin,
and Manasseh,
stir up thy strength,
and come and help us.

“Hear.. show thyself … stir up thy strength…come!” The purpose of Advent is to teach us to look for and long for his coming in the power of his Spirit, in saving grace and judgment, so as to receive him when he comes.

The Christian year does not exist in abstraction, but in its outward expression – in ceremony and song, in ornament and vestment, but primarily in the reading of the Scriptures at the Lord’s Supper, in a pattern of lessons (or lectionary) that took final form in late antiquity, and is retained in the historic Prayer books, up to and including that of 1928, which we use at St. John’s. (One of the sad mistakes of the Episcopal Church in the current Prayer Book, of 1979 was to abandon that ancient eucharistic lectionary). They are short passages, which we may quickly read, but if we slow down, linger over them, meditate on them, become intimately familiar with them, both in word and in meaning, they nourish our minds and exercise our wills for our pilgrimage to God in the way of Christ.