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We have come to that time of year in which Holy Church has to “mind the gap”, as it were.
Because of the vagaries of the moon in relation to Spring, and therefore when Easter falls, there are often not quite enough formularies for Sundays after Pentecost to get through to the final green Sunday before 1st Sunday of Advent.
If there is a gap at the end of the liturgical year, that also means that green Sundays after Epiphany, way back after Christmas, get lopped off because Septuagesima comes around to start the Lent/Easter/Pentecost cycle.
Holy Mother Church is the original recycler. We take enough Mass formularies from Sundays after Epiphany and use them up. They fill in the gap between the 23rd Sunday – ehem – last week’s Sunday would have been the 23rd Sunday had it also not been the final Sunday in October and, therefore, the Feast of Christ the King – I digress – the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost and the 24th and (always) “Last Sunday” after Pentecost. Even if the 24th Sunday after Pentecost is really something like the 27the Sunday (as it is this year), the Last Sunday after Pentecost is always the “Last Sunday” … because we say so.
Clear?
This first Sunday after the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost brings out of the deep freeze the 4th Sunday after Epiphany.
The days are getting shorter and darker in the Northern Hemisphere. At this time in the liturgical year we are thinking a great deal about Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, the Four Last Things. This part of the year dovetails with Advent which is thematically more about the Second Coming that Christ’s first.
The Mass formulary bespeaks peril.
The Gospel reading for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany is from Matthew 8:23-27. This is not read in the Novus Ordo. However, it has parallels in Luke 8:22-25 and Mark 4:35-41 which is read every three years in cycle B on the 12th Ordinary Sunday. Let’s have it from the RSV:
[At that time, Jesus] got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O men of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”
A perilous situation.
This episode was important enough to be recorded in all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke).
The Sea of Galilee is not very large, but it is flanked by hills through which wind can rush to press upon the waters, riling them up swiftly and greatly. If you’ve ever been out on the water in a great storm, you’ll feel this reading. Keep in mind that some of the Apostles were professional fishermen and they were terrified.
Their situation in the storm was like to the end of the world. However, it was also like to the beginning of the world, when there were waters of chaos.
In Genesis God spoke a Word over the chaotic waters and order was the result. In Matthew’s account amidst the chaotic, boat-swamping waters of Galilee, the Word Incarnate Jesus speaks to the wind, rebuking it, to the sea, calming it. In this calming of winds and waters, Jesus revealed Himself to be God.
This episode also ties Christ to the figure in Ps 107, in which frightened people in a storm on the waters, probably also fisherman, cry to God for help. The Lord delivers them.
There’s more peril in this Sunday, but hidden behind the Collect, the first oration of the Mass which goes back to the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great (+604).
COLLECT (1962MR):
Deus, qui nos in tantis periculis constitutos pro humana scis fragilitate non posse subsistere: da nobis salutem mentis et corporis; ut ea, quae pro peccatis nostris patimur, te adiuvante vincamus.
I found this prayer in the Hadrianum, Augustodunensis, and the Liber sacramentorum Romanae ecclesiae ordine excarpsus.
Many prayers in the 1962 Missale Romanum survived the snipping and glue-pot pasting experts brought in by the Consilium under Cardinal Lercaro and Father Bugnini. Sometimes you can hunt them up pretty easily. Often prayers which were conspicuous and repeated on certain Sundays for centuries survived but in an altered form or removed to a remote corner, hardly ever to be heard again.
This one did not survive the cutting and pasting of the Novus Ordo.
Our Lewis and Short Dictionary shows that the complex constituo can mean “to cause to stand, put or lay down, fix, station, deposit a person or thing somewhere (esp. firmly or immovably), etc.”. It is thus a military term, “to station or post troops somewhere, to draw up, set in order”.
On the other hand, in Classical usage subsisto means “to take a stand or position, to stand still, remain standing; to stop, halt”. In military contexts it means “to stand firm, hold out; to withstand, oppose, resist”. In later Latin such as in the Vulgate in the Book of Job it is, “to remain alive”. Also in late Latin, it is “to stand or hold good, to subsist”. This is the tricky word used to describe the nature of the Catholic Church.
LITERAL VERSION
O God, You who know that we, set in such great dangers, are not able to hold out because of human fragility: grant us health of mind and body; so that, You helping us, we may vanquish those things which we suffer on account of our sins.
The juxtaposition of “such great dangers” and nos constituti, with the final word vincamus, suggests immediately the military image of us as being “drawn up in ranks”. We are, after all, members of the Church Militant.
Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, the great liturgist and one-time Archbishop of Milan, notes:
The Collect takes us back to the times of St Gregory the Great, when the Lombards were threatening the very capital] itself of the world. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries the Eternal City was repeatedly taken and sacked, and it is to such a state of things as this that this prayer of the Church alludes.
Our ancient Collect, from a time of mortal peril for the Church in Rome, gives us the image of the Christian as soldier, weary in mind and body, in danger both from the elements and the enemy. We are drawn up in ranks (constituti) at the moment the prayer is uttered by the priest, standing in the front of the ranks like an officer. We are drawn up facing our great Captain, our King. Christ the Lord is coming from the liturgical East. His banner is the Cross.
Without God’s help, we would be lost.
We have our Church and the help of grace.
The texts of the whole Mass present a serious, even stark, image of our situation in this vale of tears.
The attentive Mass-goer, provoked by the Mass texts, will more than likely engage in a good examination of conscience and go to confession. After all, the Introit invokes the image of captivity (Jeremiah 29, Ps 84). The Epistle speaks of our weaknesses through which the Enemy attacks us. The Gradual prays about those who hate and afflict us (Ps 43). The Alleluia and Offertory: “From the depths I cry to you, O Lord” (Ps 129 – De profundis). The Secret speaks of “fragilitas nostra” and asks God for protection. The Postcommunio cites the allurements of this world.
We are in perilous times.
Christ promised He would be with us to the end of the world and that the Church, to whom He gave His own authority to teach, govern and sanctify us, would in the end vanquish the enemy, who will not prevail.
The Enemy will not prevail either from without, like the battering of change-winds, fad-waves or the physical violence of modernist Lombards. The Enemy cannot win from within, even by means of crafty machinations of ecclesial power-brokers who urge us to walk together into the annihilation of the self-enclosed firing squad.
Our lot is hard right now. We stare out into a darkening world as soldiers in battle lines. In the end we, not the Enemy, will be victorious.
With God, we will vanquish (vincamus) whatever afflicts us.
