What kind of canon do the lectionaries constitute?

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church inaugurated a three-year cycle of three readings from the Bible entitled LECTIONARY FOR MASS in Advent, 1969. Four U.S. Protestant Churches shortly produced their own patterned on it, one of them proposed for use by eight of the member Churches of the Consultation on Church Union (the ninth had its own). At present there are three in use, the Catholic lectionary that is internationally employed, one composed by the U.S. Episcopal Church for its revised BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, and the REVISED COMMON LECTIONARY of the Consultation on Common Texts. The last named has been adopted by the Lutheran, Reformed tradition, and Methodist Churches that had previously developed a lectionary of their own. The proclamation of God's life-giving and redemptive deed in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is the architectonic principle governing all the lections proposed. In aid of this, the ancient resort to typology has been employed, which sees a prefiguring of something in every Gospel pericope in some incident or passage in the First Testament. Fearful that the fullness of God's revelation to Israel may have been obscured by this technique, the RCL has proposed lengthier readings from that Testament unrelated to the day's Gospel for one half of each year. This article will attempt to answer the question posed in the title.

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When the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, an arm of the papal curia (the central administration of the Ecclesia Romana et Catholica) promulgated a LECTIONARY FOR MASS on May 25, 1969, it returned to an earlier tradition or rather amplified it. Since the promulgation of the MISSALE ROMANUM on May 19, 1570, the Church had been chanting or reading the same selections from a Pauline or deutero-Pauline epistle and occasionally Acts, and a gospel, on each of the fifty-two Sundays and major feasts. Mark's Gospel occurred only on the Tuesday of Holy Week, Easter, and one other Sunday. Epistolary writings other than Pauline were read on nine Sundays (after Easter and after Pentecost). There were rich selections from the Pentateuch and the prophets, chiefly Isaiah, on the weekdays of Lent and the three ember days in each of the four seasons. No reading from the First Testament was prescribed for any Sunday, while the Epiphany (January 6 and usually a weekday) was alone among the major feasts in that regard, with Isa 60:1-6 prescribed.

With the Reformation the Anglican and Lutheran service books continued to employ the same Sunday readings as the Roman Church, with some adjustments, the roots of which were in the early middle ages. An example would be those occurring in a Franciscan missal compiled by Friar Haymo of Faversham ([dagger] 1244). The ROMAN MISSAL provided great numbers of lections from the First Testament on seasonal weekdays, including the twelve "prophecies" as they were called, on Holy Saturday morning (three from Genesis, one from Exodus, the rest from books of the prophets). Unfortunately, none of these received a vernacular reading after the Latin as was normally the case on a Sunday, if only by way of a preacher's targumic paraphrase of one or other of the Sunday readings.

To remedy the situation of the world's Bible-starved Catholics in their Sunday worship--at least as regards the actual text since they knew the stories--the Second Council of the Vatican proposed in its first promulgated document Sacrosanctum Concilium (December 4, 1963) that "a suitable place be allotted to the vernacular ... especially in the readings" ([section] 54, 18) and that "the treasures of the bible be opened up more lavishly, so that richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God's word. In this way a more representative proportion of the sacred scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years" ([section] 51, 19). The LECTIONARY FOR MASS consisting of three readings in a three-year cycle for Sundays and feasts is what came of the world's Catholic bishops' legislative demand. Weekday readings in a two-year cycle, in which the gospel lections are constant while those from the First Testament alternate from year to year, were another component of the LECTIONARY. The inclusions and omissions arrived at by the scholars who designed it created a new canon, as has often been noted. This is especially true for Sunday and feast day worshipers who will always greatly outnumber participants in a weekday eucharist. The theology of biblical faith that underlies the choices made for Sundays and weekdays is the subject of this essay.

Two other lectionaries are currently in use, one in the revised BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER and the other the REVISED COMMON LECTIONARY produced by an ecumenical committee (Catholics included) of the Consultation on Common Texts. All three will be examined to discover, if possible, the theology of the Bible that was their governing principle. First, however, the origins of the genre lectionary, familiar to some but less so to others, may need to be briefly sketched. The practice of selecting certain passages of the Bible for regular reading in the assembly is not only ancient but primitive. The "canons" of the two Testaments--a term not used by the Rabbis who made the choices--were arrived at by consensus usage in communities of the two traditions. Some Christian scholars hypothesize that certain books in their collection came into existence precisely with a view to such reading on "the Lord's day" (Rev. 1:10). There is, after the early formative period of the Second Testament canon, ample evidence of patristic homilies on entire biblical books, chapter by chapter, for delivery in the assembly, although more probably at catechumenal services than the Sunday Eucharist. Emil J. Lengeling of the University of Munster published an instructive article in 1968 on the history of lectionaries. It was based largely on German scholarship but to a lesser degree French and English, and identified the Apostolic Constitutions, 8.5.11 (East Syria, A.D. 380) as the first source to state clearly that there was a "reading of the Law and the Prophets, of our Epistles and the Acts, as well as the Gospels" (131). The Armenian rite, among others, had one reading from the First Testament alongside two from the new. Similar testimony appears in the West in the fourth and the fifth centuries although not to as much use of First Testament materials. Two regular lections were the norm for Augustine, sometimes one from the First Testament. Only in Ambrose's Milan were there regularly three, including a First Testament one (132). By the sixth century books called lectionaries had begun to circulate widely, replacing copies of biblical books with a marginally inserted cross or the words lege, finit (130). For centuries these were the ways Christians were familiarized with the Bible in their vernacular Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin, until the emerging European tongues of the people rendered the last-named incomprehensible to them.

At a symposium on Bible translation that preceded the November, 1999 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Professor Theodore Stylianopolis of the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology said in his brief remarks that people in autocephalous churches such as his do not tend to think of the Bible as a whole but rather of liturgical "pericopes" (excerpts) derived from it for proclamation in the Divine Liturgy. He went on to say that he resisted a proposed modern English translation of the Bible from the Greek that he had been asked to take part in because it was not a traditional need of Orthodox Christians. More importantly, its main protagonists are recent converts from Protestantism whose linguistic biases are evangelical rather than the centuries-old catholic language of Orthodoxy. The recently named head of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of America is Archbishop Demetrius, who holds a doctorate in New Testament studies from the Harvard Divinity School and taught at the Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts from 1983 to 1993. He can be assumed to have approached the discipline critically but not historically in the manner of his graduate education; that is to say, as if the authors of the inspired collection had history as their primary concern. It became paramount in the minds of Western scholars of the Bible from 1800 on because ancient history was being used to discredit the Bible by calling it a tissue of myth and legend. They did not in the main lose sight of the biblical writers as religious men devoted to Israel's God. They did, however, decide what reasonable religion ought to be and often found biblical religion lamentably short of their ideal. Ancient history, they thought, would provide the best apologetic against nineteenth-century rationalism. They should, however, have paid more attention to the nature of ancient historiography. The reality was a matter of saga more than chronicle, metaphor more than literal statement, poetry more than prose. Who was the Pharaoh of the expulsion? And which Xerxes was Ahasuerus? Because the Bible told almost everything differently than a German professor might, many of them could not see the substance beneath the shadow or see that what they took for shadow was the substance. Most retained faith but in a different set of realities than those the hagiographers were interested in.

The Form of Earliest Biblical Proclamation

These lines are not the now familiar jeremiad against historical method. They are a lament that this method, despite its usefulness, has over the last two centuries unconsciously obscured an older method of interpretation. Instead of taking a cue from rabbinic exegesis, which told how persons of the culture responsible for these writings were understanding them, attention was paid to archaeology, paleography, and the historical monumenta of neighboring peoples. How did tiny Israel fit into the middle-eastern world, and how much of the uniqueness claimed for its revelation was derived from the religions of its neighbors? All this was important to know so long as the eyes were kept on the prize. The prize was some small comprehension of the worship of a people, unique because the God it adored and glorified was unique. As to Israel's daughter Christianity--a birth it never asked for and in good conscience could not acknowledge--much would have been better understood by its adherents if the gentiles of the new faith's first five hundred years were all of them Semites. Learned Syrians and Copts had been Hellenized like their Jewish cousins, but they never lost the gift of penetrating the writings of their first-century forebears. The entire Second Testament was written in Greek in the Jewish diaspora with an Aramaic accent. The epistles and gospels and treatises like Ephesians, Hebrews and Revelation were thought by their authors to be the long story of a people continued. Jesus crucified and risen seemed to provide a sharp break in the narrative, but the people's slavery in Egypt and exodus, its Babylonian exile and return, were just as sharp. There was one important difference. To those who believed that God had raised Jesus up from the dead, their story began to look to them like something that had led up to it. They were convinced they had experienced someone back from the dead utterly transformed in appearance, and that made them think differently about everything. That even included the way the centrality of their peoplehood now functioned in the world's history. What must it have been like to think of their people as one in a family of peoples well before the Final Days? They had never thought that way before. The evangelists and others of the Jewish people, chiefly the anonymous Pauline disciple who wrote Ephesians, tried to envision it.

The massive influx of non-Jews into the religion of Israel that followed was a gentile camel that thrust its nose under the tent, at first unconsciously displacing the people with whom it was called to be one (Eph. 2:11-22). But before any of that occurred--within a hundred years, in fact--a handful of Hellenized Jews who had not lost the gift of their ancestors continued their people's story in what for them was a seamless tale. Everything that had gone before foreshadowed what had come to pass among them. It was the oldest principle of sacred narrative. The stories had told of Adam, of Abraham and Sarah, of Samuel and the judges, of David and the kings, of the prophets and the Maccabees. All these were recapitulated in this one liberator.

It was not long before these new writings were being proclaimed in the assembly along with the old. There is fragmentary evidence concerning which books were thought to be authentically apostolic and read in which churches. A consensus principle prevailed by about the year 200, at which time the Rabbis were also making their determination as to which scrolls "soiled the hands." We have no such early evidence, not even in Justin's I APOLOGY, of the pairing by believers in Jesus Christ of a reading from their Jewish Scriptures with one that, by now, was being called a "gospel," a Christian Scripture. Neither do we know if the emerging synagogue practice of a scheduled sequence of readings from the books of Moses (geri'at ha-torah) coupled with a sequence of selections from the prophetic books (haftarah, "conclusion" [of the Torah lesson]) was in any way influential. "Arguments ... that originally the Bible was read in a continuous fashion at Mass ... [resulting from a] dependence on the continuous reading of the synagogue [are] very improbable" (Lengeling: 133). Among modern liturgies, "only in the area of Syria ... [are] the two lessons from the OT ... and the two from the NT to be found" (132).

The earliest lectionaries extant are from the 400s and precede evangeliaries and epistolaries, which were often bound together. Two readings emerge as characteristic in the East and the West, both usually from the Second Testament with a reading from the First Testament on the feasts of saints of Israel's history. Lengeling collects the evidence for the claim that originally the Byzantine Liturgy had three pericopes, one from the First Testament, but the writings of Chrysostom, Maximus and Basil cited do not demand that conclusion (132). In general, two readings seem to be the norm with occasional exceptions on major feasts. In the West it is usually two from the Second Testament from the sixth century onward except for Christmas and some other days, when it is three. Lengeling provides tables of the frequency of readings from both Testaments in fourteen Western liturgical books but without indicating where there might be only one such usage on the vigil of a feast not celebrated widely. The impression created by these tables is that lections from the prophets far outran those from the Pentateuch, to be equaled in number by a few wisdom books, with other historical books a poor third. Epistles only are more numerous than the totality of First Testament selections as a first reading (132-33).

The Post-Conciliar Formulation of the Lectionary

Any more complete research than that reported on here is unlikely to yield a different result. Importantly, the typological principle featured in so many patristic and medieval homilies (and in artistic representations, e.g., the resuscitations reported of Elijah and Elisha in diptychs or stained glass to foreshadow Jesus' similar miracles) were not characteristic of Western lectionaries, if only because of the infrequency of readings from the Jewish Scriptures. Clearly, then, the team that devoted itself to constructing LECTIONARY FOR MASS could not choose from among many examples of typological practice from the past, make a selection of the best, and then amplify it to three-year cycle length. The story of their procedure is to be found in one printed source, a chapter compiled from the copious notes taken by Annibale Bugnini of the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists/Vincentians), who served as secretary of the Consilium (Consultation) for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy in 1964-75 (Bugnini: 406-25).

The coetus or "working group" on the task grew from eight to seventeen members and met twenty-two times between October, 1964 and November, 1967. Gaston Fontaine, a Canadian Canon Regular of the Immaculate Conception, served as secretary of the group throughout and, as relator ("reporter on progress"), first Godfrey Diekmann and later Cipriano Vagaggini, respectively U.S. and Italian Benedictine monks. In the nine months immediately following the Council Fontaine had made a systematic collection of the biblical passages used in service books ancient and modern in the following categories: Western--Roman, Gallican, Ambrosian, Spanish, and Italian (North and South Italy); Eastern--ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, Nestorian, Jacobites, Syro-Catholic, Syro-Malankar, Syro-Chaldean, Syro-Malabar, Jacobite of India, Maronite, Armenian, Coptic and, Byzantine; the Reformed Churches--Anglican of England and India, Reformed Church of France, Lutheran Church of the Scandinavian countries, Old Catholic Church of Germany. From these results of scholarly research, more than fifty comparative tables were made to show the use of the Bible in eucharistic celebration over the course of eighteen centuries.

Bugnini goes on to list the biblical scholars who were then asked by the coetus in 1965, thirty-one in all, to select all the passages from both Testaments that they thought would be suitable for liturgical use. All were Europeans except for two Canadians. Among the immediately recognizable names were Schnackenburg, Spicq, Feuillet, Schurmann and Lyonnet. The list of passages these men produced were sent to some one hundred catechetical experts or pastors who responded with twenty-five hundred slips that were then classified. A series of fourteen studies was assigned to coetus members to propose plans that would facilitate employing that mountain of response. Vagaggini, after two years of meetings, proposed that three readings be made obligatory and the move was carried. Kahlefeld and Schurmann had been arguing for four but lost in the vote. The practical result was that a semicontinuous reading of a synoptic gospel in each of the three years in the sequence Matthew, Mark and Luke was interrupted by the insertion of some readings from John. It was further decided that the three readings on the Church's great feast days should be chosen to contribute to an understanding of the mystery being celebrated (thus, Epiphany, Ascension, Mary's Sinless Conception). The same synthesis of the three was decided on for the Sundays of Advent, Lent and Easter's Fifty Days. This threefold interruption of Sunday readings from a Synoptic Gospel coupled with the Johannine interpolations has in some cases destroyed the possibility of a homilist's conveying the distinct theology of any one Gospel. Rather, what is provided is a Tatian-like Diatesseron over three years in which no incident from Jesus' public ministry is repeated and every one has a place. Since selections from a wide range of the canonical and deuterocanonical books are proposed on the prefigurement principle, the homilist is just as hard put to convey that the Deuteronomist had a distinct theology or the Chronicler, Job, Qoheleth and the rest.

Things are a little better in the matter of semicontinuous readings from St. Paul's epistles. Romans 1:1-7 is proposed for 4 Advent in Year A, in a setting of Isaiah 7:10-14 and Matthew 1:18-24. All three are concerned with the birth of a Davidic offspring, as prelude to the Feast of the Nativity. But on the Sundays "of the year" as the Latin LECTIONARY terms them ("ordinary time" in the English), the second lections go their way independent of First Testament and Gospel. For example, Romans 3:21-25, 28 occurs on the 9th Sunday followed by pericopes from the same letter on fifteen successive Sundays. Some are distressingly brief--three and four verses--but a homilist who knows the importance of the latter can expand the reading at either end to make a serious exposition. This is equally true for one Sunday or for over one half of a year. 1 Corinthians, interestingly, precedes it in year A on Sundays 2 through 8, but a late Easter is required for portions of the early chapters to be heard. That is because the last Sunday of the year, the Feast of Christ the King, is the 34th and they are reckoned back from there. The later the Easter and Lenten seasons, therefore, the more numbered Sundays are required.

To complete the account of epistolary occurrence: sequential Sunday lections from 1 Corinthians are heard in year B, 2 through 8 and C, 2 through 8; 2 Corinthians B, 7-12; 2 Thessalonians C, 31-33; 1 Timothy C, 24-26; 2 Timothy C, 27-30; Philemon C, 23; Hebrews B, 27-33; James B, 22-26; 1 Peter A, Easter 2-7; 1 John B, in the order Easter 3-7; Revelation C, 2-7. A reading from Philemon and 2 Peter is indicated once in the three-year cycle and 2 and 3 John and Jude not all, while Titus receives a hearing every year in the Masses at Midnight and Dawn. Similarly, Romans 6:3-11 is the only passage proclaimed at the Easter Vigil Mass, Colossians 3:1-4 or 1 Corinthians 5:643 every Easter, and Philippians 2:6-11 every Passion (formerly Palm) Sunday. A visual inspection of the above will show which epistles are proclaimed in which year and in what season of the calendar year. Since Sundays roughly 10-23, it should be recalled, are summer in the northern hemisphere and winter or rainy season in the southern, it can further be deduced which Catholics, north or south, hear which epistles, when. Further examination of the readings themselves disclose that they are in the main pastoral exhortations to a faithful and full life in Christ. As to Paul's theology of godhead, it is shown in the Sunday lections to be characteristically binitarian. His clearest trinitarian statement, 2 Corinthians 13:13, does not appear because it is the greeting of the restored eucharistic rite (Novus Ordo) every time it is celebrated. "The Spirit of holiness" of Romans 1:4 cannot easily be understood as a human spirit and the LECTIONARY proclaims it part of the brief trinitarian formula incorporated into Paul's salutation in year A, 4 Ad. vent, indicated above. A third Pauline statement of trinitarian faith is its diffused expression in 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b, read out in the same Matthew year (A) on the 29th Sunday. God as the Father of Jesus Christ and of all is likely to be heard whenever Paul is read.

Regarding the way humanity is made just by God's gracious action through Christ's blood (A, 11th Sunday)--a free gift in the grace of the one man, following many trespasses (A, 1 Lent; 12th Sunday)--the necessity of a baptismal death with Christ as preliminary to rising with him to new life (A, 13th Sunday; ABC, Easter Vigil) is proclaimed, in which the Spirit of God is shown to be both a greater power than that exerted by the downward pull of sinful sarx and the one who gives life to humanity (14th, 15th Sundays). The faith of Abraham in God's promise, reckoned to him as justice or uprightness, will be reckoned to us who--i.e., if we--believe in the God "who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification" (4:24-25; A, 10th Sunday).

Paul on faith and "works of the Law" (his term for the special signs of Jewishness) gets a hearing not from Romans but Galatians 2:16, 19 in C, 11th Sunday. Justification by grace through faith is amply conveyed without the introduction of the first-century problem of the claimed need for gentile circumcision raised on quite different terms in the sixteenth. James 2:14-18 is read (B, 29th Sunday), a passage that sounds suspiciously like the corrective of an interpretation of Paul's teaching that the author has encountered. The misinterpretation would be that the good works the Bible had always enjoined were not necessary in light of God's gift in Christ. Whatever the Lectionary framers' motives were in including James and restricting Paul on faith and works, at least on Sunday, to the brief Galatians 2 statement, they prescribe for weekdays the more detailed Romans 4:1-8 (Friday of Week 28, Cycle I) and Gal. 3:1-5 and 3:7-14 (Thursday and Friday of Week 27, Cycle II). Homilists are required to explain to weekday worshipers what the "curse of the Law" might mean from which "Christ redeemed us" (Gal. 3:13) and also that "their [the Jews'] rejection" means rejection of the Gospel, not God's rejection of them--the few relative to their total numbers whom Paul had encountered over the previous twenty-five years. It is no wonder that the Sunday lections are taken more from Paul's pastoral concern for his churches than his, difficult for modems, rabbinic theology.

The Gospel Lections and Their First Testament Types

The elusive character of the theological project of each evangelist, given the way the Gospels are parceled out in the lectionaries, has already been spoken of. Many passages in each, especially when they are read on successive Sundays, give a clue to the gospel writer's major concern and mode of constructing a narrative. Each one hoped to persuade hearers even more of the truth of the Gospel they already believed. The fragmentation caused by the intervention of major feasts and seasons that feature other gospels than the one being read semicontinuously is overcome in certain instances. John is a case in point: both throughout the Easter's Fifty Days in Year C and with only one Lukan interruption in A and B; John's "bread of life discourse," read almost in its entirety on Sundays 17-21 in B; Luke in Year C--the most favored of all--on Sundays 3-34 in B when needed. The last-named Gospel is remarkably unthreatened by replacement except by John in the Paschal season, by an early Lent and Easter (reducing the early Sundays of the Year), and by feasts like Trinity Sunday. One of the four Roman basilicas, when it occurs on a Sunday, can achieve the same dislodgement. This is, after all, a rite of Roman origin, not Canterbury, York or Byzantium. One last point: in certain years it can be very hard to get Mark heard on successive Sundays until Lent, when it occurs only on 1 and 2, and not again until the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. Homilists need to be fully aware of the theology of each evangelist to establish the context at that point in the whole Gospel of the given pericope they choose to preach on.

The choice of a passage from the First Testament that could be seen to look forward typologically to something in the Second was of great importance in lectionary construction. A typos strictly understood (L., figura) is not an allegory, defined in books on English rhetoric as a sustained metaphor. That is the meaning properly assigned to allegoroumena, the verb form used by Paul in Galatians 4:24, the Sarah-Hagar image. As found in Philo, Origen, and many of the Church fathers, however, allegory is not merely an illustrative technique as in the Pauline case or parables generally. It is the assumption that the Jewish Scriptures and the whole Bible had for Philo and Origen respectively, in many places, a deeper meaning intended by God as author than the evident one. Both mentalities could immediately discern the literal sense of a passage. Both operated on the premise that the prophetic Spirit of God could not be content with saying that little in a given place. The search was on for that which was deeper and more. Words on the scroll or page were the vehicle for the spiritual meaning of the Spirit's intent. That is the Alexandrian technique of allegory in written rhetoric that the learned hoped to discover in the sacred writings. Origen wrote that some things in the Bible have a "literal" meaning, as Aquinas would later call it (SUMMARY OF THEOLOGY I, 1:10): "the passages that are historically true far outnumber [the others] that were composed with purely spiritual meanings" (PERI ARCHON [ON THE PRINCIPLES OF DOCTRINE], 4.3.4). Augustine has often been ridiculed for interpreting the parable of the good Samaritan allegorically, down to calling the binding of the man's wounds the restraint of sin, the wine poured into them the exhortation to work with a fervent spirit, and the oil applied to the comfort of good hope. The significance attributed to the denarii given to the innkeeper and the Samaritan's own beast may seem even more far-fetched (QUAESTIONES EVANGELIORUM II, 19). Augustine may have meant his applications to be a simple exercise in imagination and not at all allegory in the Origenist sense. Whatever the case, there is nothing like it in the relation of type (First Testament) to antitype (Gospel) in the framing of lectionaries. There, it is always the foreshadowing of a type, never fullscale allegory. The evangelists made the choices easy in some cases, for example Matthew 2:12 on Epiphany with radiance from the East-and the "wealth of nations" brought to tiny Israel (Isa. 60:1-6) and Ephesians 2:2-6, in which the gentiles are now brought into one with the Jews. Easier still was placing 2 Kings 4:24-44 as anticipatory of John 6:1-15 on B, Sunday 17, a multiplication of barley loaves with some left over; and the resuscitation of the widow's dead son in Luke 7:11-17, patterned on Elijah's prayer that restored her son to the widow of Zarephath (1 Kgs. 17:17-24).

Surely the researches of Fontaine and Vagaggini brought to light any such typological parallels in lectionaries of East or West. (Matthew called ten or perhaps eleven of them "fulfillments"). When exhaustive inquiry provided none, the composers had to go in search. For the Sunday and feast day readings, nothing was used from Judges, Ruth, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther, 1 Maccabees, Song, Lamentations, Obadiah, Nahum or Haggai. All find a place in either of the two cycles of week-day readings. When it came to finding a type from some books to foreshadow the day's gospel, the framers were at times hard pressed. On B, 4 Lent, for example, the lections that are read in tandem (2 Chron. 36:14-16, 19-23; 1 Jn. 3:14-21) prove to have in common the multiplied infidelities of priests and people (v. 14) and in John the evildoers who hate the light (v. 20). Not even the most perceptive hearer might discern after the gospel was proclaimed why the first lection was chosen, and a homily on what for many Christians is the golden text of all the Gospels would be unwise to feature the one common element. Even more puzzling is the supposition that Joshua 5:9-12 adequately prefigures Luke 15:1-3, 11-32 (C, 4 Lent). Taken singly they are good choices because Lent is primarily a preparation for adults who will become Christians or new members of a particular communion on the Great Night of Easter. But again, the foreshadowing of the one by the other is elusive at best. The Joshua lection celebrates the possibility of Passover breads from the produce of agriculture in the new land. The meal upon the wastrel son's return celebrating the father's joy concludes the classic tale, but only that. Pesach like the Christian eucharist is the celebration of an entire people.

The Principle Underlying LM and Its Predecessors

Preachers who prepare genuine homilies that by definition are elaborations of the biblical material just heard are frequently distressed by the brevity of the first and second lections. The late Gaston Fontaine was challenged on it in a talk to a large audience of the liturgically informed in Washington, D.C. not long after LECTIONARY FOR MASS was in place. His reply was both surprising and disheartening. After the work was completed, he said, it was sent to a wide variety of parishes in Europe (only!) for critique. The overwhelming response of pastors was that the readings were too long, that congregants would be unaccustomed to hearing so much of the word of God and be impatient at the hearing. In consequence, many lections were edited down. Presiders and readers the Catholic world over deplore the brevity of much that occurs in the work of 1969 (imperceptibly edited from Rome in 1981 and not touching the Sundays). Lengthening would undoubtedly achieve better the Council's hope for richer fare at the table of God's word. It would at the same time make the reason for the First Testament choices even more mystifying since the type corresponding to the antitype often resides in a few phrases as demonstrated above. Protestant congregations that use a lectionary have pulpit Bibles but no book of that name. A printed pamphlet contains the readings of the three-year cycle for preachers, readers and choir. The psalmody that responds in theme to the first reading is important to choirs and leaders of song as they prepare for the upcoming Sunday. The Bible's very presence on a lectern is an encouragement to begin or end a reading at a different place for conveying its sense in context. LECTIONARY FOR MASS, a handsome volume in several publishers' editions, constitutes an inhibition, even though any liturgy team is free to elongate from a Bible on its lectern. In such case, the typological sense may be lost but the theology underlying the biblical book will be better conveyed.

The basic proclamation of any lectionary in current or recent use is that of the Christian Bible, so that any canon that emerges from the lections chosen will inevitably reflect the biblical concerns. Only a set of perverse because non-representative choices, which is unthinkable, could render it otherwise. More fully representative choices would obviously make a better canon. It has been widely argued over the last thirty years that that should be done and the BCP and RCL have attempted it. In doing so, neither has deserted the main direction taken by LM, as of all previous lectionaries of East and West. The Lord's Supper by whatever name has from the beginning been the ritual enactment of a meal, memorial in character (eis ten emen anamnesin, 1 Cor. 11:24, 25), and likewise sacrificial. It portrays in a symbol that partakes uniquely of reality the self-offering of the obedient Jesus Christ to his Father for the salvation of the world. His death, resurrection, and the expectation of his coming are embodied in bread and wine, his body and blood. Called from an early date "the mystery of faith," this rite has had as its setting by long tradition, readings from the Church's sacred writings, which it both received from the Jews and later composed. The faith of the Church in those Scriptures was, from their first existence as canon, that they told of God's gracious dealings with Israel from Abraham to Jesus, indeed from Adam to Christ. The shape of the collection is a forward movement in divine self-disclosure of a covenantal relation with a particular people, extended in Christ to encompass a non-Jewish world. The writings culminate in accounts of God's redemptive deed in Christ and the gift of God's Spirit to believers in his Resurrection. It is no surprise that carefully selected portions of those writings should have the same shape. The gospels from ancient times have been thought to convey the Christ event in word as the eucharistic banquet does in deed. There is one remaining question to be faced. Do lectionaries as traditionally fashioned, present Israel's story over two millennia as a mere preparatio evangelica (the title of a book by Eusebius, but not its content, despite its supersessionist tone)? Has the longstanding practice in the West of reading from the Second Testament only, at the Lord's Supper, prevailed once again? That is assuredly not the case in the two cycles of weekday readings that are provided by LM or those for weekdays in BCP. The number of opportunities is far greater and those able to participate far fewer, so this is not a satisfactory answer.

A Lectionary on a Different Principle

Urged by encouragement from pastoral theologians of the reformed and catholic wings, the Consultation on Common Texts produced first a COMMON LECTIONARY (1983), then the REVISED COMMON LECTIONARY (1992) that faces the problem of insufficient attention to God's centuries-long successive revelations made to Israel.

It does this by proposing for Year A semicontinuous readings from Genesis and Exodus, then one or two each from Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges between Trinity Sunday and the Reign of Christ, all with fresh psalmodic responses but in no typological relation to the day's gospel. The LM first readings are retained as alternates but with some change of incipit and conclusio and a few different psalms. The same is done for Year B, the biblical books being 1 Samuel (5 Sundays), 2 Samuel (7), 1 Kings (2), Song (1), Proverbs (3), Esther (1), Job (4) and Ruth (2). "In this way a more representative part of the sacred scriptures [are] read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years" ("The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy," [section] 51, Flannery: 17). In Year C, 1 Kings is read from on 4 Sundays, 2 Kings (2), Amos and Hosea (2 each), Isaiah (only 3 because so well represented in seasons and feasts), Jeremiah (8), Lamentations, Joel, Habakkuk and Haggai (1 each). The limited number of Sundays must have made choices difficult as in the case of LM. BCP departed notably from LM in the lectionary it proposed in 1970 and adopted in 1977, probably without advertence to the ecumenical advantage of having the same readings, if editorially modified, heard country-wide. The other defunct lectionaries did the same but RCL is fully sensitive to the question. The next step to be hoped for is that U.S. and Canadian bishops quietly allow RCL in their parishes and report the decision to the Roman See. The current papacy tends to stress ecumenism with the East more than with the West, and is especially unhappy with initiatives that come from regional bodies of bishops, as was legislated on positively by the world's episcopate in Sacrosanctum Concilium, [section] 22.2 (of Vatican Council II, Flannery: 9). Fritz West (1997:160-77) distinguishes in his detailed study between the LM and RCL (and by attraction that of BCP) by using the terms Sunday/Sunday Version and Sunday/Cycle Version, respectively, meaning the LM's consistent typological technique and BCP's three-year cycle of First Testament readings after Pentecost. He correctly identifies the principle on which LM is built by quoting Pope Paul VI who wrote in promulgating it: "Celebration of the Paschal Mystery is of supreme importance in Christian worship and the cycle of days, weeks, and the whole year unfolds its meaning" (161). Hence, LM has a "paschal hermeneutic," meaning the centrality of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ in governing the text selections from both Testaments for the liturgical year. West identifies the combination of patterns employed in the RCL's Sunday/Cycle version as deriving from the tradition of the Reformation churches which largely departed from lectionaries and knew the whole Bible as a printed book, while the Catholics stayed with their tradition of excerpted selections in a pulpit service book. He is clear on the point that the Sunday gospels and epistles keep both traditions trained on the mystery of salvation as God brings it about in Christ and the Spirit: a new gift to God's people, now the whole human race. Equally, West affirms the ecumenical importance of lectionary proclamations whether in catholic or reformed communions because of a new biblical heritage possessed in common. His work is a theological inquiry that lays bare to scholars, preachers and public readers exactly how the lectionaries can be expected to functions in practice. Normand Bonneau, a bilingual Canadian, has written a simpler book that all congregational worship committees, on which it is to be hoped the homilist regularly serves, can study with profit. It presents in clear expository prose the ideas summarized in this essay. Nubold is a German Catholic scholar who does something similar to West but with LM only and the thoroughness we associate with his people.

A considerable periodical literature, popular and scholarly, has appeared over the last three decades either praising the lectionaries or faulting them for their selections. In the second category the bulk of writing has been largely about the absence of the women of the Bible, good and bad, from people's regular hearing, and about the dangers of renewed antisemitism in Christian minds and emotions as a result of infelicitous choices, pairings, and silences. But these important matters are the subject of another essay.

Works Cited

Bonneau, Normand. 1998. THE SUNDAY LECTIONARY: RITUAL WORD, PASCHAL SHAPE. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press.

Bugnini, Annibale. 1990. 26. THE LECTIONARY OF THE ROMAN MISSAL THE REFORM OF THE LITURGY 1948-75. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press.

Flannery, Austin., ed. 1992. Sacrosanctum Concilium ("The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy"). VATICAN COUNCIL II. THE CONCILIAR AND POST CONCILIAR DOCUMENTS. New rev. ed. Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company.

Fontaine, Gaston. 1969. Commentarium ad Ordinem Lectionum Missae. NOTITIAE 4: 259-62. Citta del Vaticano.

Funk, F.X. 1905. DIDASCALIA ET CONSTITUTIONES APOSTOLORUM. I, 477. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh.

Lengeling, E.J. 1967, Pericopes. NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA 11: 129-38. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

MISSALE ROMANUM, EDITIO XIX. 1936. Ratisbon (Regensburg): Friedrich Pustet.

Nubold, Elmar. 1986. ENTSTEHUNG UND BEWERTUNG DER NEUEN PERIKOPENORDNUNG DES ROMISCHEN RITUS FUR DIE MESSFEIER AN SONN- UND FESTTAGEN. Part I. Paderborn: Verlag Bonifatius-Druckerei.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 1977. New York, NY: The Church Hymnal Corporation.

West, Fritz. 1997. SCRIPTURE AND MEMORY. THE ECUMENICAL HERMENEUTIC OF THE THREE-YEAR LECTIONARIES. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press.

Gerard S. Sloyan, Ph.D. (Catholic University of America), is Emeritus Professor of Religion at Temple University, Philadelphia, and currently serves as Distinguished Lecturer in the School of Religious Studies, The Catholic University of America and Georgetown University, both in Washington DC (e-mail: [e-mail]). His most recent publication is THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS: HISTORY, MYTH, FAITH (Fortress Press). An associate editor of this Journal, Sloyan is a priest of the diocese of Trenton.