One of the things I enjoy about older forms of liturgy is how they are designed to tell the Christian story, through both their words and their actions. Nowhere is this better demonstrated in my experience than in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is the main Eucharistic liturgy used in the Eastern Orthodox Church (except during Lent, which is a bit ironic for this project). Its movement centres around two ‘entrances’, the first representing Christ’s incarnation and ministry, the second his entrance into Jerusalem before his Passion. Today I’d like to talk about three prayers, known colloquially as the antiphons, sung in the build up to the first of these ‘entrances’, and reflect on what they tell us about the story the liturgy is telling us.
The so-called ‘first antiphon’ (I believe technically it is the ‘first stasis of the Typica following the First Antiphon, but nobody calls it that!) is an abbreviated version of Psalm 103:*
Bless the Lord, O my soul Blessed are You, O Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, Bless His Holy Name. Blessed the Lord, O my soul, And forget not all that he has done for you:
Who is gracious towards all your iniquities, Who heals your infirmities, Who redeems your life from corruption, Who crowns you with mercy and compassion, Who fills your desire with good things; Your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
The Lord performs acts of mercy and executes judgment for the oppressed. He has made His ways known to Moses, unto the sons of Israel the things He has willed. Compassionate and merciful is the Lord, longsuffering and great in mercy.
Bless the Lord, all you His angels mighty in strength, Who perform His word, to hear the voice of His words. Bless the Lord, all you His hosts, His ministers that do His will. Bless the Lord, all you His words, in every place of His dominion.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, Now and ever and unto ages of ages, Amen. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His Holy Name.
Blessed are You, O Lord.
This is honestly an incredible hymn of praise from the prophetic or Wisdom tradition; it tells you everything you need to know about the character of God. God is great, but this greatness is defined by God’s mercy and compassion.
The second antiphon then takes its text mostly from Psalm 146:
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit:
Praise the Lord, O my soul, I will praise the Lord as long as I live, I will sing unto my God for as long as I have my being.
Put not your trust in princes, in the sons of men in whom there is no salvation: His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return to his earth. In that day all his thoughts shall perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God Who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them. Who keeps truth unto eternity, Who executes judgment for the wronged, Who gives food to the hungry.
The Lord looses the fettered; The Lord makes wise the blind; The Lord sets aright the fallen; The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord preserves the proselytes, He shall adopt for His own the orphan and the widow, and the way of sinners He shall bring to ruin.
The Lord shall be King for ever, Your God, O Zion, unto generation and generation.
Again we have a hymn of praise, deeply rooted in the concerns of the prophets, that focuses on God’s character. It makes sense at this part of the service, before the Little Entrance and its incarnational symbolism, because it’s so reminiscent of the words from Isaiah that Jesus took as his own prophetic manifesto:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (Luke 4.18-19, quoting Isaiah 61.1-2)
It’s because of this connection that I particularly love how the Slavic tradition handles the third antiphon: It takes as is text the Beatitudes (Matthew 5.3-12):
In Your Kingdom, remember us, O Lord, when you come in Your kingdom:
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are you when men shall revile you and shall persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.
In this way, the antiphons bridge the gap between the Old Testament and the New, between the Prophets and the coming of Christ, preparing us to hear the words of the Epistle and Gospel readings. As Christians, we often struggle to manage this gap. Either we flatten Scripture and so lose the evolution of ideas about God, or we act as if the New Testament nullifies or replaces the Old. But as we saw in the last series about the development of understanding of God throughout the Scriptures, there is both change and continuity. (Like any tradition, it is a dialectic, or push and pull, of sedimentation (what has been) and innovation (what might be).) Yes, as Christians we believe that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God in our world, but there would be no Jesus without the faithful witness of the Law, Prophets, and Wisdom tradition.
The first two antiphons remind us what true greatness looks like as we see and know it in God’s character. We ‘bless’ God for God’s mercy and compassion, for God’s justice towards the oppressed, and care for those who need healing. The third turns that blessing on us, reminding us that in God’s Kingdom, in the way God’s economy works, it is the poor, the grieving, and the humble who are blessed. These are truths we must not forget and which our world needs badly to hear.
Bless the Lord, o my soul!
* The Psalm numbering here will follow our Western Bibles. In Eastern Orthodox Bibles, this is Psalm 102. As a general rule, for Psalms 10–146, Bibles from the Septuagint tradition the number is one lower than for Bibles from the Hebrew tradition, due to joining or splitting texts in different ways.
Matthew Root 