Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Chur ch Mat ter s : Ret r i ev i ng the Great Trad i t i on

A Theology of the Christian Year, continued

The Rest of the Year If we were to draw the “irregular ellipse” of the church’s year, we should find the line fading into brokenness shortly after the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) until just before Lent (for many centuries the West had the pre-Lenten Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima), and then again from Pentecost or Trinity Sunday until just before Advent (the twentieth-century Roman feast of Christ the King, now placed on the Sunday immediately preceding Advent, is but the most recent instance of anticipating the season). For long the “green” Sundays – the most “neutral” color for liturgical vestments – were numbered “after Epiphany” and “after Pentecost” or “after Trinity.” Beyond the first week or two, these scarcely constituted coherent season, although there may still be continuing tendencies to thematize the earthly life and ministry of Jesus (particularly the former) and the ongoing life and mission of the church in the second. The current Roman Catholic bluntly designates these periods as “ordinary time” ( per annum ). “Ordinary Sundays” remain, however, precisely Sundays. That fact calls the preacher to bring the Scripture readings and the sermon into relation to the pivotal event and mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Lectionaries Lectionaries do not fall directly from heaven. Rather they codify and promote patterns in the liturgical reading of Scripture that have commended themselves to the church over a greater or lesser ex tent of time, space, and confessional tradition. They are necessary because it is impossible to read the whole of the Bible in a particular service of worship; they are valuable insofar as they allow the broad range of the biblical witness to be heard. Lectionaries perpetually exhibit a certain tension between the reading of entire biblical books in course ( lectio continua ) and the eclectic selection of passages from the canon that are appropriate to particular times and occasions. The more definite the theological or Christological content of a feast or season, the more likely are the lessons from the Old Testament and the New (Epistle and Gospel) to be arranged for their typological and thematic point and counter point; this is a strong testimony to belief in the unity of the