Advent Reflections on the Office Canticles (Part 1)
In Advent, we are invited again to see that our life as Christians is one in which our sense of the present moment, at any point, is the overlapping of a past and a future made present. This is the only thing that can happen, after all, to people who have been made to be what we are. Because the Father has regenerated us in the life of Jesus Christ, and because our life is mediated by the Holy Spirit of God who leads us into the fullness of truth, we cannot help but experience life with and in and for God who is everywhere present and present to all times.
The shape of our time is also the shape of our life: Jesus Christ. We are living in the life He made possible by His first coming, the life He continues to renew and uphold in His coming to us now, and the life that He will consummate in His second coming. These are not objects across otherwise neutral history, they are not portraits hanging in a long gallery hall to which we should direct our particular attention. The life of Christ is not episodic to the history of the world. The life of Jesus Christ is the substance of history and the gallery itself.
Because of these facts, we are able to glorify God with integrity when we declare in the Spirit “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” This would be a presumptuous guess unless we were granted the knowledge of eternity beyond our time.
Whenever we utter these words to glorify God, we are relying upon the fact that He through whom the whole universe was made is also He toward whom the whole universe is purposed. Jesus is Alpha and Omega, true beginning and true end.
As we walk through time though, the present often commands our attention. But we fail to apprehend the meaning of any present moment unless we see it through the lens of the true beginning and the true end. We are people who can understand the times and perceive prophetically into our current time because we are a people who have been given those two key ways of seeing: remembrance and anticipation. These are essential ways of seeing the fullness of life and of knowing how to live as a Christian. If we lack either or both, we begin to see wrongly. If we have only remembrance then our sense of things becomes stodgy and fossilized. If we have only anticipation, our sense becomes ethereal. If we have only the present, our sense becomes compulsive, driven by the loudest and most obvious thing near us.
This is why Advent is so significant as a season; we are annually rescued from the morass of the flattened present and are given the gift of a renewed sense of time to carry into the rest of the year. The grace of Advent attends us beyond the four weeks of the Calendar. We observe it every day in the three canticles drawn from St. Luke’s Gospel that are enshrined in our daily prayer: the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis. From before the time of the earliest Anglican Prayer Books, the songs of Zechariah, of Mary, and of Simeon have been pillars of the Church’s life of prayer. Each Advent season, they are revealed again in their significance, in the way that they teach us to remember and to anticipate–to recognize the coming of Christ in His Incarnation, His Coming in the Sacrament, and His Coming as King and Judge. Because of this, they continue to have a significant and formative impact on us as we pray them everyday in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. They lead us on a journey each day, directing us to sing with them as we welcome Christ into our lives as He comes to meet us and to dwell within our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit. The three songs prepare us in unique ways, as well, to bear witness to the nearness of Christ who is coming again with glory. In this way, they reveal the shape and substance of the Christian life until our Lord’s return.
Benedictus
As St. Luke tells us, Zechariah was of the House of Levi and of the order of Abijah. From 2 Chronicles, we understand this as indicating his descent from Levi through Aaron through his third-born son Eleazar. As recorded in chapter twenty-three, we know that the sons of Eleazar were appointed among the Levites to have special stewardship over the sanctuary of the Tabernacle and then Temple. Within this space, there was a special altar in the Holy Place before the entrance to the Holiest Place. It was as close as you could get to the holiest place of the Temple without being the High Priest, who himself was only allowed to enter once a year. To offer incense at this altar was, among the priestly sons of Aaron, a once-in-a-lifetime privilege.
The Temple space, like the Tabernacle before it, was designed to be a mirror of heaven on earth. It was understood to be the high place of Israel, set up on a hill to reflect that it was the place where heaven and earth overlapped.This ultimately referred back to the Garden of Eden, which was set on a high place and was a Temple in the Creation where God walked with Man. By the time of Zechariah, however, the Temple was a source of controversy. Solomon’s Temple had been destroyed centuries earlier. Those who had returned from Captivity rebuilt a less glorious version. Then matters grew more complicated when Herod the Great embellished the Temple as a part of his architectural schemes to secure his position as the Roman-appointed King of Judea. The Temple was a complicated place–it was grand in every way that the eye could detect, but the glory of the Lord had not returned to it as in the days of Solomon. There was plenty of room, but it was missing that presence, that life within.
This was not unlike Zechariah’s own home. He and Elizabeth, despite being upright and righteous, had not been given children. In the eyes of their community, this would have been seen as a sign that God was secretly displeased with them–their situation never would have been completely devoid of scandal or whispers. There they were, a priestly family from a noble bloodline stretching back to Aaron himself, true children of Abraham and Sarah who were in much the same predicament as Abraham and Sarah had been. But like the Temple, like the sense of their people’s identity after long years of Captivity, occupations, and silence, the old ways just couldn’t be assumed to apply anymore, right? Surely the grace extended to Abraham had ended along with God’s apparent care for His people after enduring so much, yes? And that is why, perhaps, Zechariah did not believe the word of the angel in the holy place: how could these things be, after all?
The Song of Zechariah emerges from a meditation on the question: “what is still possible for me, for us, and for all of us?” In the silence he was made to endure, something changed in him. He had heard the report of Elizabeth after her visit with Mary, and had seen his wife change over the months that his son grew within her. He had time in that silence to meditate on what the arrival of his son and that Lord he would serve would mean. On his son’s name-day, Zechariah opened his mouth and sang a song of redemption. Zechariah’s song is one of remembrance, it is a song that gathers together the time of the patriarchs and the promises God made to them. It is a song that gathers the time of the Exodus and wanderings, that draws close the promise God made to David of a king who would come. Zechariah is finally able to allow the past to inhabit the present again. All of those promises had come to pass. And now, it was time for another to be fulfilled in their own time.
Our contending with the past and accepting it frees us in the present to entrust God with the future. In remembering, Zechariah is able to then anticipate. “Thou child shall be the prophet of the highest…of the dayspring from on high who will give light to them in sit in darkness and the shadow of death and guide our feet into the way of peace.” The future is allowed to inhabit the present again as well. Zechariah’s song is the healing of his disbelief, of his sense of exile from his people’s history and from the God He thought was far away from him and his wife.
When we sing the Song of Zechariah in the morning, we allow the past to be present with us in a new day–we resist the urge to cut off from it or exile it. Instead, we welcome it as the pretext for our expectation of what the Lord will now do with this new day that is just beginning. In this way, we daily participate in the Lord’s healing of memory and are reoriented as people who can attend to our part in the Kingdom because we slowly cease to be wounded by the shame of failure and perplexity. As Zechariah proclaims: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He has visited and redeemed his people.”