Saturday of the Fourth Week of Advent

Today's Mass Readings

We have arrived at the end of the Fourth Week of Advent. It is quite rare that the calendar allows us to celebrate a full week. What a blessing it has been. On Sunday, we heard about Saint Joseph, from the pen of the evangelist Matthew. Every day since, our Gospel selections came from the first two chapters of the Gospel according to St. Luke.

It is interesting to note that there are four canticles or hymns in those first two chapters: The two best known are Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s Benedictus (today’s Gospel).

A third hymn is the one sung by “a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests’” (Luke 2:13-14).

The fourth hymn is sung by the elderly Simeon when Jesus is presented in the Temple. It is known as the Nunc dimittis. “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word …” (Luke 2:29). We sing this every evening during Compline of the Divine Office.

Today’s reflection will focus on Zechariah’s Benedictus. My comments are based on some wonderful studies by the great Catholic scholar, Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S.

Fr. Brown points out that probably all four hymns were known to the early Jewish Christians in the Holy Land. St. Luke fits them nicely into the infancy narratives found in his first two chapters.

The Benedictus is a Christological hymn because Zechariah blesses God for the Messiah (the Christ, the anointed One), referring to Him as the “mighty Savior, born of the house of his servant David” (Luke 1:69). Practically all of the language here comes from the Hebrew Scriptures. After all, all the first Christians were Jewish. Fr. Brown asserts that in the Benedictus we have “perhaps the oldest preserved Christian prayer of praise wherein Jewish believers [the early Christians] expressed themselves entirely in the language of their ancestors” (emphasis in the original, Coming Christ in Advent, p. 59).

What a privilege it is to use the language of our Jewish sisters and brothers, as we praise God each morning.

Reflection by Archbishop Jerome Hanus, OSB