“Now About the Midst of the Feast” - Christ the Teacher in the Liturgy of Lent

Today’s Gospel in the Roman Rite, John 7, 14-31, begins with the words “Now about the midst of the feast”, referring to the feast of Tabernacles, which St John had previously mentioned in verse 2 of the same chapter. And indeed, the whole of this chapter is set within the context of this feast.

The Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple, the Gospel of yesterday’s Mass, John 2, 13-25; part of the St Wolfgang Altarpiece, by the Tyrolean painter Michael Pacher (1435 ca. - 1498), made in 1471-79. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Uoaei1, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

In the Byzantine Rite, this same Gospel, minus the last verse, is read on the very ancient feast of Mid-Pentecost, exactly half-way between Easter and Pentecost, a custom which was formerly also found in the Ambrosian Rite. In the Mozarabic Rite (which is an outlier among liturgies in many ways), the opening words seem to have been taken instead to mean something like, “When the feast was half-way arrived,” meaning the feast of Easter. The same Gospel is therefore read on the 4th Sunday of Lent, and the words “Mediante die festo” are used as that Sunday’s nickname, as Romans say, “Laetare Sunday.” The Roman Rite, on the other hand, seems to have ignored the timing given by the Evangelist as a detail of no particular importance, and places this Gospel on a day that isn’t halfway between anything noteworthy.

The beginning of the Mass of the Fourth Sunday of Lent in a Mozarabic Missal printed in 1804, with the subtitle, ‘Mediante die festo.’

Most of this text is taken up with a dispute over Our Lord’s authority to teach, since He “had not studied”, which is to say, He had not been formally trained as a rabbi. This dispute ends with Him saying, “He is true, who sent me, whom ye know not. I know Him, because I am from Him, and He sent me”, at which they sought to seize Him, but “no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.” Like the Gospel of the preceding day, St John’s account of the cleansing of the temple (2, 13-25), this reading begins to set the stage for the following week, when the Church shifts the focus of the liturgy to the Lord’s Passion.

The introits of these Masses, which are taken from two psalms in sequence, 53 and 54, also hint at this in their verses: on Monday, “For strangers have risen up against me; and the mighty have sought after my soul”, and on Tuesday, “I am grieved in my exercise, and am troubled at the voice of the enemy.” At Tenebrae of Holy Thursday, the lessons of the second nocturn are taken from St Augustine’s explanation of the latter verse as a prophecy of the Passion, in his great commentary on the Exposition of the Psalms.

A motet by Orlando de Lassus of the words of today’s Introit, the beginning of Psalm 54: “Exaudi, Deus, oratiónem meam, et ne despéxeris deprecatiónem meam: intende in me et exaudi me.” (Hearken, o God, to my prayer; and despise not my pleading; give heed to me, and hearken unto me.)

The epistle for this Mass is Exodus 32, 7-14, in which Moses is told by God to come down from the mountain, where he has been for forty days and nights, so that he may see that the people have rebelled against the Lord and made the golden calf. God offers to destroy them and raise up a new and great nation from Moses himself, but the prophet intercedes for them, “and the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against his people.” This lesson is clearly chosen in reference to Christ’s words in the Gospel (vs. 19), “Did not Moses give you the Law? and none of you keepeth the law.”

In the oldest lectionaries of the Roman Rite, a shorter version of this same reading, beginning at verse 11, was the fifth Old Testament lesson on the Ember Saturday of September, which falls near the beginning of the range of dates for the feast of Tabernacles. As I have described elsewhere, this reading is paired with an epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews (9, 2-12), which says that the Tabernacle of the Covenant was but “a parable of the time present… but Christ, being come as a high priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hand, that is, not of this creation: neither by the blood of goats, or of calves, but by his own blood, entered once into the holies, having obtained eternal redemption.”

In the article linked above, I postulated that these readings were paired thus for the sake of those among the early Christians in Rome who still felt themselves to be close to their Jewish roots, and remembered mid-September as the time of the High Holy Days. These people may well have seen the refusal of their former coreligionists to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah as a rebellion against God, similar to that of the golden calf episode. The reading from Exodus would thus serve to remind them that God had been merciful at the appeal of Moses, and suggest that He would be similarly merciful through the appeal of Christ, “the high priest of the good things to come, who by His own blood obtained eternal redemption by a greater and more perfect tabernacle.” And indeed, the Gospel for today in the Roman version includes the first part of verse 31, which is not read in either the Byzantine Rite, or the oldest lectionaries of the Mozarabic Rite, “But of the people many believed in him,” a reminder that many Jews did in fact accept the Messiah when He came.

The Worship of the Golden Calf, 1518-19, painted by Raphael and assistants in the loggia of the papal palace of the Vatican. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

This idea seems also to have determined the texts of the other chants of the Mass. The Gradual includes the first verse of Psalm 43, “We have heard, o God, with our ears: our fathers have declared to us the work which thou hast wrought in their days, and in the days of old.” As St Paul says at the very beginning of Hebrews, God “spoke at sundry times and in divers manners to our fathers by the prophets, (and) last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by his Son.” This would therefore profess that some of the Jews had in fact heard what God said by His Son when He was sent in the fulness of time.

The Offertory chant is taken from Psalm 39, and in this context, speaks of the longing of the Jewish people for their redemption: “Eagerly did I await the Lord, and He looked upon me and heard my prayers”, i.e. prayers for the coming of the Messiah. The next words, “And He put into my mouth a new song”, therefore refer to the establishment of a new people, a new Israel, and a new manner of worship. And thus the Communio is sung from Psalm 19, “We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we shall be exalted”, “salvation” being the meaning of the Holy Name of Jesus.

The Offertory Exspectans exspectavi, which is also sung on the 15th Sunday after Pentecost: “Exspectans exspectávi Dóminum, et respexit me, et exaudívit deprecatiónem meam, et immísit in os meum cánticum novum, hymnum Deo nostro. ~ Eagerly did I await the Lord, and He looked upon me, and put into my mouth a new song, a hymn to our God.”

The Communio Laetabimur in salutari tuo, recorded by the mighty brothers of OP Chant. “Laetábimur in salutári tuo, et in nómine Dómini, Dei nostri, magnificábimur. ~ We shall rejoice in Thy salvation, and in the name of the Lord, our God, we shall be glorified.”

In the oldest surviving sacramentary of the Roman Rite, known as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary (ca. 700 AD), the prayer “over the people” at the end of this Mass is as follows: “Pópuli tui, Deus, institútor et rector, peccáta, quibus impugnátur, expelle: ut semper tibi placátus, et tuo munímine sit secúrus. – O God, founder (or ‘teacher’) and ruler of Thy people, cast out the sins by which it is assailed, that being ever reconciled to Thee, it may also be secure in Thy protection.”

“Placatus” is one of the most commonly used words in the prayers of the Roman Rite, occurring nearly 60 times in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and more than 80 in the recent editions of the Missal of St Pius V. (In the former, many of these are within variable texts of the Hanc igitur for special occasions.) Ordinarily it refers to God, and means “placated” or “appeased.” However, in this one prayer, it refers to the people, for which reason, I have translated it as “reconciled” instead. [note]

This same word is used in the last sentence of the Epistle of this Mass, “and the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against his people.” In the context of this Mass, this expresses the hope that the Jewish people will indeed be reconciled to their teacher and ruler, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, whose hour has not yet come, but draws nigh.

“I am the light of the world”. Apsidal mosaic in the cathedral of Pisa, Italy, begun by Cimabue in 1302, completed by Vicino da Pistoia in 1321.

[note] At the end of the 8th century, this prayer was moved by the Gregorian Sacramentary, one of the ancestor texts of the modern missal, to the Mass of the following Thursday. The anomalous use of the word “placatus” described here was either felt to be inappropriate, or perhaps simply misunderstood, and is already found changed to “placitus – pleasing” in the Sacramentary of Hildoard (Cambrai, Bibl. Mun. 164) in 811-12. This latter reading is found in the majority of the early manuscripts, and carries through to the Missal of St Pius V.