Septuagesima: February 2009 Archives

In the traditional liturgy today is Septuagesima Sunday; the Office focuses on the first chapters of Genesis, and Mass on the passing of time from "the morning of the world" to the eleventh hour when the last labourers are hired. The reformed liturgy continues the lectio continua of Saint Mark's Gospel and relates today's passage to the sufferings of the prophet Job.

Even in the reformed liturgy one can and should allude to the traditional observance of Septuagesima. Without this pre-Lenten season, one arrives at Ash Wednesday unprepared; the transition into the Great Fast requires, even from the purely psychological point of view, a time of transition. There is enormous wisdom in the traditional practice of the Church.

Fifth Sunday of the Year B

Job 7:1-4, 6-7
Psalm 146: 12, 3-4, 5-6
1 Corinthians 9: 16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

The Woes of Job

"I am allotted months of emptiness and nights of misery are apportioned to me" (Jb 7:3), says Job: the utterance of a man for whom life has lost all meaning. Job was a prosperous citizen, a man content with himself: comfortable in his religion, secure in his possessions, happy with his family. In a single day, he lost everything (Jb 1:14-16). A tornado struck the house where all his children were gathered for a dinner party, and all perished (Jb 1:18-19). Later he was stricken with a terrible illness; he was covered with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head" (Jb 2:7). His wife (hardly sympathetic and encouraging) tells him to curse God, and die (Jb 2:9). His friends come for visits, but their conversation brings no comfort and their company no solace.

My eye will never again see good

In only six verses, the First Reading reveals the bleakness and intensity of Job's suffering. His torment is more interior than exterior: restlessness, sleepless nights, and the total eclipse of hope. God is conspicuously absent from the text. God is not even mentioned. Listening to the reading, I was moved by the images of despondency that, one after the other, bare for us the depths of Job's pain. "Months of emptiness and nights of misery" (Jb 7:3). "The night is long, and I am full of tossing till the dawn" (Jb 7:4). Job has the fearful experience of seeing his life rush past him into an impenetrable obscurity. "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and come to their end without hope" (Jb 7:6). The last line of the reading leaves one with the impression of an indefinable and tragic emptiness. "My eye will never again see good" (Jb 7:7) or, in the lectionary translation, "I shall not see happiness again."

Job finds an extraordinarily poignant echo in a poem by W. H. Auden.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Respect for Suffering

"For nothing now can ever come to any good." Auden is quoting Job. How do we leap from this into the Responsorial Psalm, "Praise the Lord, who heals the broken-hearted" (Ps 147:3). I'm not even sure that a leap is appropriate. The reality of human suffering, of the gnawing sense of hopelessness cannot, and should not, be treated dismissively. The pain of the human heart deserves the respect that only a speechless and attentive presence can offer. In any case, the leap into the Responsorial Psalm, however long it is respectfully delayed, cannot be attempted alone. We respond together to the glimmers of light that it holds out. God, conspicuously absent from the text of Job, comes out of hiding in the psalm to "gather the outcasts of Israel, to heal the brokenhearted, and bind up their wounds, to lift up the downtrodden" (Ps 147:2-3, 6).

Weakness

As a rule, the Second Reading is not related to the other texts of the Sunday liturgy. Today, however, Saint Paul says something that brings him close to Job, and to us. "To the weak, I became weak, that I might win the weak" (1 Cor 9:22). Here, the Apostle reflects his Lord and Master, the Suffering Servant. Before Paul, Christ Himself, "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" (Is 53:3), became as weak to the weak, that He might win the weak. The weak Christ -- like the weak Job, and the weak Paul -- speaks, I think, to the weakness in all of us, drawing us to Himself humbly and gently. Virtue that causes the righteous to seem distant, and holiness unattainable, is no virtue at all.

Christ Stretches Forth His Hand

Job and Paul, in their weakness, conduct us to the Gospel of the compassionate Christ. In the Gospel, the God of the Responsorial Psalm has a human face, human hands, a human heart, and a healing, human touch. Look at our Divine Lord in the Gospel. What do we see Him doing? He stretches forth His hand (Mk 1:31) to raise up, to set free, to heal. What Our Lord does in the Gospel for the mother-in-law of Peter (Mk 1:30), and for the whole city gathered together about the door (Mk 1:33), He wants to do for us.

Come to Him

Come to Him, present in the adorable Mystery of the Altar. He will take you by the hand and lift you up (Mk 1:31). If, scorched by the heat of the day, you long for the shadow (Jb 7:2), He will "hide you in the shelter of his wings" (Ps 17:8). If months of emptiness have been your lot (Jb 7:3), He comes to "crown the year with bounty" (Ps 65:11). If nights of misery have been your portion (Jb 7:3), He rises before you as the dawn of mercy (cf. Lk 1:78-79).

He Comes

If you say, "When shall I arise" (Jb 7:4), He stretches forth His hand to raise you up (cf. Mk 1:31). If you say, "the night is long" (Jb 7:4), He says, "You will not fear the terror of the night" (Ps 91:5). If the night is "full of tossing till the dawn" (Jb 7:4), He says, "Come to me . . . And you will find rest for your souls" (Mt 11:28 29). If the days of your life are rushing past, "swifter than a weaver's shuttle" (Jb 7:6), leaving things unresolved, questions unanswered, and your heart without hope, He comes to calm and quiet your soul, "like a child quieted at its mother's breast" (Ps 131:2).

My Hope Laid Up in My Heart

If you fear that never again your eye will see good (Jb 7:7), draw near today to the Holy Table saying with Job, "I know that my Redeemer liveth . . . and in my flesh I shall see my God . . . . This, my hope, is laid up in my heart" (Jb 19:25-27, Vulg).

The image -- it is by Michelangelo and is found in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican -- depicts that most sorrowful mystery of Septuagesima Sunday: our first parents cast out of paradise. It is the visual complement to this evening's sobering Magnificat Antiphon: "The Lord said unto Adam, Of the tree which is in the midst of paradise thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die of death."

Chased out of paradise by the angel wielding a flaming sword, a naked Adam and Eve make their way toward death, toward the very death that the New Adam, naked upon the tree of the Cross will undo. There, the Cherub's flaming sword will be replaced by the soldier's lance, and the gate of paradise will be opened in the Saviour's side.

The Pre-Lenten Season of the Church

Influenced, no doubt, by the practice of Greek Christians living in Rome and observing the Eastern preparation for Great Lent, Pope Saint Gregory the Great instituted the season of Septuagesima: three weeks of preparation for the Great Fast marked by solemn stations at the patriarchal basilicas of Saint Lawrence, Saint Paul, and Saint Peter. In this way the Roman Church prepared her Lenten observance under the auspices of the Eternal City's glorious patrons. Dame Aemiliana Löhr reflects on Septuagesima as the beginning of our passage through death into life:

A Beginning

More clearly than the First Sunday of Advent, Septuagesima forms a point of division. Not unreasonably, it has been questioned from time to time whether one ought to look here for the real beginning of the liturgical year. Today's liturgy differs sharply from the Sundays just past. Contrasted with the joyous liturgy of Epiphany with its shining glance towards the fulfilment of Easter, Septuagesima seems almost gloomy. In every respect it carries the mark of a beginning, and that in the sense of of a laborious, sorrowful one, the character of every earthly as opposed to divine beginning. It is as if the Church had suddenly dropped down from the bright and festive upper storey of her house into the darkness of a low, vaulted crypt, into the earth's womb, the tombs; prepared, now that she has celebrated the glorious feast of life at Epiphany, to seek out the dark and difficult beginnings of that life.

Farewell to the Alleluia

With a last cry of joy, which both gives a final occasion for the glory of Epiphany to shine amd anticipates the joy of Easter, the Church leaves behind her at the First Vespers of Sunday that song of heavenly joy, the alleluia.

Between Epiphany and Pascha

The Christmas and Epiphany season taught us again and again that it is not only God's appearance in this world, but also, and most important, his saving work in and upon it which the Church wills to see present in her ritual; only in prospect of Easter does the feast of the Epiphany become for her fully a mystery. Her whole liturgy, as we shall soon see, turns about Easter, and the feast of Epiphany is only a prelude, or one might have it, a short play . . . which takes its meaning from the vision of salvation and glory completed. It does not exclude the way to salvation, but, so to speak, reduces it to a single point.

Pascha and Transitus

Easter contains both aspects: in an extended prelude it follows the whole way, and in the equally rich solemnity of a single night it rejoices in the glory it has won. The decisive point lies between the two: neither preparation nor celebration, but passage, pascha, in the sense of the typical pascha of the Old Testament which the Fathers translate with the word transitus: the passage out of the land of slavery to sin and living death, into God's Canaan, the promised land of freedom in grace and of life for God's children.

A True Beginning of Salvation

The annual return of Septuagesima Sunday is not merely an occasion for worship -- and this is true of the whole liturgy -- but a true beginning of salvation, which can only be brought to its completion by the common act of God and man; it is a moment as serious as ever can arise for man's moral consciousness: decision for the Pasch of Christ, for the mystical death with Him in liturgy, which can only be carried out through the daily and hourly death of man, through turning away from sin and passing up to God. Today is the beginning of salvation, and the decision to seek salvation.

A Serious Joy

We have nothing to fear: the serious of this road [to salvation] is joined to a high joy, and to the certainty that death's course ends in life. This joy, as well, is woven into the liturgy of the weeks to come, and it us under this double motif of seriousness and joy that the Church leads us through the gate of Septuagesima on to Christ's road of death.

(Dame Aemiliana Löhr, O.S.B., The Mass Through the Year)