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Liturgy and the Incarnation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Joseph Blenkinsopp S.D.B.
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In the West the word ‘liturgy’ is used to cover a considerable number of acts addressed ideally to God, but the very multiplicity of forms which it subsumes tends to obscure what might seem a fact too obvious to comment on. Sometimes the question is put in a rather naive way: Who is the object of our worship as Christians: God or Jesus Christ? (distinction of persons); Has Jesus Christ, in whom is certainly the fulness of the godhead, ‘taken over’ from the God of the Old Testament as the centre of our liturgy? Before dismissing such a naive formulation too hastily we might remember that exegetes are not always unanimous on who the kyrios, addressed here and there in the prayer of early Christians as recorded in the Acts, really is—whether Yahweh (as in the Septuagint translation) or Jesus raised to the right hand of the Father.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 17 , Issue 193 , September 1962 , pp. 51 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 1958, p. 459.

2 Ps. 51. 16-17. A spontaneous utterance which proved somewhat embarrassing for the very liturgical and sacrificially minded generation after the Return, as can been seen from the addition in v. 18-19.

3 e.g. Lk. 1. 23; Heb. 9. 21; 8. 6; 1 Clem. 32. 2; 40. 2.

4 The mixing of wine and water is primarily a symbol of the Incarnation in the Syriac rite; in the Armenian there is no mixing.

5 If this transposition is legitimate which, pace Harnack, it certainly is, we might go on to ask whether it is final. That is, even given the fact that it has become, through the accident of cultural history, the ‘received’ formulation in the Church, is any other formulation possible? For example, in the category of the Buddhist avatar a? A missionary problem of some importance today.

6 The title is evidently taken from the passage ‘I will send my messenger'— Mal’ aki. (3.1).

7 Ps. 110, Dixit Dominus, is generally taken to refer to one of the Hasmoneans and in fact to contain an acrostic on the name of Simon.

8 Dillersberger, Gospel of St Luke, p. 64.

9 C. Spicq, Epitre aux Hèbreux, 1952, p. 214.

10 Tne notice or inscription can now be read from actual finds in 1871 and 1938. It goes: ‘No foreigner may enter within the balustrade and enclosure around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will render himself liable to the death penalty which will inevitably follow.’