“For Thou, O Lord, art the God of those who repent, and in me
thou wilt manifest thy goodness”
Beautiful words from a beautiful prayer. Called The Prayer of Manasseh, it is a classic of penitential adoration. Tucked away in the Apocrypha, texts belonging to the inter-testamental period, between the collecting together of the Jewish Scriptures known to Christians as the Old Testament and the collecting together of the writings known as the New Testament, there is this beautiful literary and theological gem.
A kind of literary masterpiece in its own right, The Prayer of Manasseh is also a puzzle. We are not even sure in what language it was originally composed: Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek? It has survived in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopic. There are varying Latin translations; the one in the Latin Vulgate differs from an older Latin translation. For Anglicans, it is listed among those works read not “to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners,” following Jerome, as Article 6 of The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion puts it.
Chances are pretty good that you have never heard or read it. It is part of the Church’s public reading of Scripture, though rarely; in this case, at Morning Prayer on The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity but only in a year in which there is a Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity and then only when the Advent Sunday of that year was an even year! Advent Sunday of this Church Year was in 2012. We come to the end of one Church Year, which is not the same as the civil or secular year, and so to the beginning of a new Church Year. Endings and beginnings.
I love the readings in these times of endings and beginnings. They call us to a kind of contemplation and reflection. They challenge and disturb us. You have just heard the entire Prayer of Manasseh. I wonder what you make of it.
What happens to a culture and a people when we are no longer capable of being moved by beautiful words, beautiful music, beautiful spaces? Here are some very beautiful words, it seems to me. Words which I hope can literally move our souls.
Paradoxical as it may seem, this apocryphal book, short as it is, actually captures one of the beauties of our Anglican understanding. It captures the idea of penitential adoration, itself a paradoxical concept, perhaps, and yet one which belongs to the very essence of our Christian understanding. Here is a little work of great beauty; where there is beauty there is truth and goodness. And yet the beauty and the truth and the goodness here is found in the realization of the ugliness, the lies and the evil of our lives. The beauty here lies in a prayer of repentance and forgiveness.
It concentrates wonderfully, I think, the marvelous idea of human redemption found in God’s forgiveness. A work, perhaps, of the second or first centuries before Christ (perhaps, because we don’t even really know that for sure!), it is notionally the prayer of Manasseh, a figure from much earlier in Israel’s history, a figure described in The Second Book of Chronicles as the wicked king of Judah, a really wicked king who in exile composed a prayer entreating divine forgiveness. The prayer is not found in 2nd Chronicles. This work, the so-called Prayer of Manasseh, is a later literary fiction, and yet one which captures this profound idea: the power and the truth of God’s forgiveness which is always and everywhere greater than the worst of human wickedness. Wow. Not just our waywardness but our wickedness. If there is hope for Manasseh there is hope for us all!
It signals an important insight into the nature of God and of his essential goodness and love towards us, themes which for Christians are concentrated in Jesus Christ. Here is an anticipation of the theme of God’s redeeming love in the Crucified, the one who prays on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Here is a prayer that contributes to the logic of our liturgy, especially in its Anglican dress; the idea of penitential adoration.
What is that? The love or adoration of God by us in the knowledge of our betrayals of God’s love. Repentance is a redire ad principium, a return to the truth of our being, to God out of an awareness of our having turned away from his beauty, truth and goodness. The idea of divine forgiveness is predicated upon a deep insight into the truth and goodness of God which is and must be greater than all of the folly and wickedness of our humanity. There is no shortage of examples of such folly and wickedness especially in the parade of horrors than define the twentieth century and remain with us in our world, the horrors of genocide and holocaust before which even the destructive forces of nature seem so much less, which is not to downplay in any way the extent of the loss of life and destruction in the Philippines occasioned by Typhoon Haiyan. My point is simply to consider the greater extent of human evil.
There is something wonderful in the idea of a notorious sinner, complicit in the greatest and grossest acts of idolatry in the history of Israel, seeking God’s forgiveness through deep and heartfelt repentance. Special pleading? An exaggerated and self-seeking enterprise? No. The Prayer of Manasseh is a theological as well as a literary masterpiece. The central insight is the goodness and the truth of God. Therein lies its beauty.
We can cheapen it with our cynicism and despair, to be sure. We are rather good at that. But then, we show ourselves incapable of being moved by the beauty of words, words whose beauty lies in the truth and the goodness they convey, the truth, the beauty and the goodness of divine forgiveness. Repentance and adoration are constantly intertwined in the liturgy of the Prayer Book, inseparably coupled, married, we might say. We can only return and repent out of an awareness of the eternal truth and goodness of God. Such is the beauty of repentance. It recalls us to the beauty of God, to the beauty of the idea and the reality of divine forgiveness.
“For Thou, O Lord, art the God of those who repent, and in me
thou wilt manifest thy goodness”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XXV, 2013 MP