You or may or not have heard of the O Antiphons. For many Catholics, these antiphons form an integral part of Advent spirituality. Even though Advent is a relatively short season when compared to, say, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time, it is a multifaceted season.
On the Third Sunday of Advent, known as Gaudete Sunday, the season takes what can best be described as a turn. Before discussing this turn, it is important to note that the title Gaudete also comes from an antiphon. Each Mass has an Entrance Antiphon, formerly (and still sometimes) called the Introit. For example, the Entrance Antiphon for this Fourth Sunday of Advent is:
Drop down dew from above, you heavensHistorically, the Fourth Sunday of Advent was known as Rorate Caeli, which is the Latin translation of the opening words of today’s Entrance Antiphon (“Drop down dew from above, you heavens”) that comes from Isaiah.
and let the clouds rain down the Just One;
let the earth be opened and bring forth a Savior1
Antiphons are refrains that can be sung or simply said, which they often are. During the Liturgy of the Word, the refrain we sing before and after each verse of the Responsorial Psalm is an antiphon. In the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s official prayer, every Psalm has an accompanying antiphon, as do the Canticles for Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer.
The turn Advent makes on Gaudete Sunday is away from focusing almost exclusively on Christ’s glorious return, when “he will come to judge the living and the dead.”2 It’s not that we stop focusing on that altogether, we simply shift our perspective and look forward by looking back. In a sense, we look back to the future.
During Advent time collapses; the past, present, an future collide. This liturgically rich season urges us to step out of chronological time into God’s time. What this means in terms of our preparation for and celebration of the Incarnation of the Son of God was captured well by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s observation that Christ comes in three ways: his birth in the manger, his glorious return at the end of time, and his continual rebirth in us that makes him really present in his Body, the Church.
Perhaps this year more than most years, in light of the changes necessitated by the pandemic, not all of them bad, most of us are looking hopefully toward the future. If nothing else, many hope for a better, brighter 2021. Hope this year seems more concrete than the end of most years when we anticipate and perhaps even hope for a comfortable continuity.
Our readings today highlight how God accomplishes his purpose of completing creation in very unexpected, not to mention uncomfortable, ways. In our first reading, before promising David that he will make of him and his descendants a royal house over which they will rule forever, he reminds the greatest of all Israel’s kings: “It was I who took you from the pasture, from following the flock, to become ruler over my people Israel.”3 Paul, in our second reading, writes to the Christians in ancient Rome about “the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages” and revealed Christ Jesus.4 It is this secret that the itinerant rabbi set out to reveal to the nations.
Our Gospel today is that portion of Saint Luke’s Infancy Narrative that tells of the Annunciation and our Blessed Mother’s fiat: “May it be done to me according to your word.”5 Because God forces his will on no one, Mary’s fiat precedes her Magnificat.
The Blessed Virgin’s Magnificat is indicative of the turn Advent makes roughly half-way through. Looking at her canticle of praise bids us look even farther back: “he has remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.”6
This song glorifying God also bids us look beyond the present: “he has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit, he has cast down the mighty from their thrones, he has lifted up the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.”7 What she exclaims is God’s reign with which she is wholly on-board.
It was with the Lord’s conception by this lowly girl in backwater Nazareth that the reign of God began inconspicuously. But God’s rule is not yet fully established. It is already but not quite yet. We are reminded, to borrow words from Rev. Carys Walsh:
of the ‘now and the ‘not yet’ of living as Christ’s people on our journey again towards His new life, but also of the greater ‘not yet’ of which are reminded in Advent: the ‘not yet’ of waiting for the whole of creation to be freed and restored, in God's kingdom which is both with us, and just over the horizon8Christians are, indeed, a pilgrim people, a people of the way and on the way.
The O Antiphons, which are recited as the antiphon for the Magnificat during Evening Prayer from 17-23 December, the last week of Advent, look back from the present with an eye toward the glorious future God has in store for us.
O Wisdom, O holy Word of God, you govern all creation with your strong yet tender care. Come and show your people the way to salvationThese antiphons cover all time, from the beginning when Wisdom ordered all things, to when God called and gave his chosen people the Law, to the Incarnation of God’s Son, who is God-with-us, to David’s key who unlocks heaven’s gate, to the dawning of God’s Kingdom, over which, Jesus, the Son of David, will rule forever.
O sacred Lord of ancient Israel, who showed yourself to Moses in the burning bush, who gave him the holy law on Sinai mountain: come, stretch out your mighty hand to set us free
O Flower of Jesse’s stem, you have been raised up as a sign for all peoples; kings stand silent in your presence; the nations bow down in worship before you. Come, let nothing keep you from coming to our aid
O Key of David, O royal Power of Israel controlling at your will the gate of heaven: come, break down the prison walls of death for those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death; and lead your captive people into freedom
O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death
O King of all nations, the only joy of every human heart; O Keystone which makes all one, come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust
O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, desire of the nations, Savior of all people, come and set us free Lord our God
For those who pray the Angelus, a prayer Catholics are urged to pray three times daily (morning, noon, and evening), our Collect for today will sound familiar. It is a slightly modified form of the prayer that ends the Angelus. This prayer certainly shows us that looking back to the future isn’t just some strange thing odd deacons urge you to do from the ambo during Advent, but how you live the tension between the already and the not yet of God’s kingdom every day. Living this tension can be described using one word: faith. Hope, of course, is the flower of faith, and charity is its fruit.
Poised in present, the intersection of the past and the future, recognizing that the wood of the manger becomes the wood of the cross and the wood of the cross the Tree of Life, again we pray:
Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord,
your grace into our hearts,
that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son
was made known by the message of an Angel,
may by his Passion and Cross
be brought to the glory of his resurrection9
1 Roman Missal, Fourth Sunday of Advent.↩
2 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, sec. 19.↩
3 2 Samuel 7:8.↩
4 Romans 16:25.↩
5 Luke 1:38.↩
6 Luke 1:54-55.↩
7 Luke 1:51-53.↩
8 Frequencies of God: Walking Through Advent with R.S. Thomas, 92.↩
9 Roman Missal, Fourth Sunday of Advent.↩
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