by CCW | 2 December 2021 16:00
The last Chapel services this term are three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons & Carols. They are a pageant of word and song, of music and light, coming to us in the darkness of the year both literally and metaphorically. In a way, the Services of Nine Lessons and Carols sum up the intellectual and spiritual journey of Chapel this term.
It is impossible to imagine the impact of this service when it was originally devised for Advent in 1918 at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “The war to end all wars” was finally over but the sombre realities of the immensity of the destruction and devastation of the First World War were only beginning to be felt. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922), captured something of the ambiguities of modernity and the sense of the catastrophic collapse of European civilization. All that remained were “fragments that I have shored up against my ruin”, he says, having observed by way of Dante’s vision of the vestibule of Hell, that “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Advent service of Nine Lessons and Carols undertook to speak to this sense of overwhelming loss and sorrow.
The readings and the carols proclaim hope and peace. They form a tableaux of scriptural revelation and weave a tapestry of spiritual understanding but perhaps the stronger metaphor is that of a pageant of word and song in which we are not simply spectators but actors engaged with what is being heard and said. The readings offer hope and peace to a fearful and dark world of uncertainty and despair.
The first lesson from Genesis 3 highlights the four questions of God to our wayward humanity but ends on the note of the proto-evangelium, the idea of the overcoming of sin and evil through the seed of the new Eve, Mary, later understood by Christians to refer to Christ. Yet the emphasis is on the questions of God which call us all to account. “What hast thou done?” The question reverberates down through the ages and speaks to human conscience then and now. The second lesson, also from Genesis, offers the promise of God which, through the seed of Abraham, grants a blessing for the nations of the earth. The context, alluded to in the reading, is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac preempted by God providing himself the sacrifice. (For Islam the story will be reimaged as the intended sacrifice of Ishmael.) But the idea of a universal blessing for all humanity is particularly moving and reminds us of the significant connections between religious and spiritual cultures in and through their differences.
The third, fourth, and sixth lessons from the prophet Isaiah are arresting and have influenced the great choral musical traditions, not the least of which is Handel’s Messiah. The third lesson from Isaiah 9 proclaims that the people who “walked in darkness” and who “dwell in the land of the shadow of death” have seen “a great light”, a light which shines upon them and engages them. From this follows the great prophetic claim so central to the Christian understanding that “unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given”, to whom the names or titles of “Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” are attributed.
The fourth lesson sets before us the gifts of the Spirit, gifts which are spiritual and intellectual, “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord”. The Latin Vulgate translation will add “piety” to comprise the seven gifts of the Spirit belonging to God’s engagement with our humanity. But the passage also provides a strong image of paradise restored: the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the kid (a baby goat), the young lion together with the fatling (a young calf). It is a vision of the harmony of nature rather than “nature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H); the earth as being “full of the knowledge of the Lord”.
The fifth lesson from Micah offers one of the few but potent references to Bethlehem in the scriptures which plays such an important role in the Christian imaginary of the season. The sixth lesson, again from Isaiah, points to the universal aspect of the coming of the light and the glory of God for Jew and Gentile alike and with images which anticipate the classical story of the coming of the Magi with their gifts, two of which are mentioned here, namely, gold and incense. The pageant shifts from the Hebrew Scriptures to the Christian Scriptures with the seventh reading about the Annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary and her response, the quintessential response of our humanity to God: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur’an than in the Christian Scriptures as the mother of Jesus, the Son of God for Christians, a prophet for Islam. The eighth lesson is Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus and his name or title of Emmanuel, meaning God with us. The ninth lesson from the Prologue of John’s Gospel grounds the entire pageant in God himself and in the idea of the Word made flesh, the Christian way of God’s being with us in the darkness and uncertainties of our world and day. Such is peace and joy, love and hope.
The readings are preceded by the verses of the Veni Emmanuel, the great hymn of the Advent, which proclaims the idea of God being with us, an idea which brings comfort and strength to a weary world of confusion and uncertainty. This week’s chapel services gather us into the pageant of God’s word coming to us which challenges and illuminates something of the nature of our ethical obligations and responsibilities towards one another. Thus we end with ‘a pageant of chapels’ as the place and occasion where we engage with words and ideas coming to us.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK Teacher,
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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