Chapter 39 · ~14 min read
The Long Memory of the Church
what the calendar remembers
The modern Christian, when she thinks about reading scripture seriously, usually pictures the reading happening alone. She sees herself sitting in a chair with her Bible open, perhaps with a study guide, perhaps with a commentary, perhaps with a friend or two in a small group. The reading is private. The reading is hers. She brings her best attention to it. She comes away from it with what she’s been able to recover by her own effort.
This is good. This is one of the great gifts the Reformation made available to ordinary Christians — the Bible in their own language, in their own hands, read with their own minds. The modern Christian inherits a tradition that has, for five hundred years, told her to read scripture for herself and to trust the Holy Spirit to teach her. The book in her hands has been carried through fire by people who paid for it with their lives so that she could read it.
But for most of Christian history, the deepest, most consistent, most disciplined reading of scripture hasn’t happened alone. It has happened together, in the church’s liturgical life — in the church year, in the lectionary, in the weekly cycle of readings that takes a congregation through the great themes of scripture over and over again. The liturgical churches — Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and others in that broad family — have inherited a tradition more than a thousand years old of reading scripture in patterns. Certain passages are read at certain seasons. Certain texts are paired with certain feasts. The same gospel is read every Christmas; the same psalm is sung every Good Friday; the same vigil is kept every Easter eve. The patterns aren’t arbitrary. They’ve been refined over centuries, and they encode certain readings that the church has wanted to keep in front of its people.
The recovery this book has been making in many of its chapters — slowing down at a word, hearing the Septuagint resonance, listening for what the first audience heard — is a recovery the liturgical churches have been quietly preserving the whole time. The lectionary is, among other things, a recovery practice. The church year is, among other things, a recovery practice. The reader doesn’t have to become liturgical to learn from this. But she’ll find, if she pays attention, that the liturgical tradition has often been doing for fifteen centuries what scholarship has more recently had to work to reconstruct.
four readings the church has kept in view
A few specific examples show what the long memory of the church has carried.
The Magnificat at Advent. Mary’s song, after she greets Elizabeth — Luke 1:46-55, my soul magnifies the Lord — has been chanted in monasteries every evening at Vespers for sixteen centuries, and it appears in the Sunday lectionary every year during Advent. The work of recovering Mary’s voice as the wild, prophetic, politically pointed thing it is (Chapter 20) has had to be done in modern scholarship across many decades. But the liturgical churches have been singing the song every evening the whole time. They’ve never lost the Magnificat. They’ve kept it, unchanged, in the form Mary first sang it. The recovery scholarship has had to work for has been preserved in the daily prayer of the church.
Isaiah 53 on Good Friday. Every year, in every liturgical church around the world, the first reading on Good Friday is Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 — the fourth Servant Song, the one that begins see, my servant shall act wisely and ends he bore the sin of many. The first reading is followed by Psalm 22 — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me — and then by the Passion narrative from John 18-19. The pairing puts the suffering servant, the psalm Jesus quoted from the cross, and the crucifixion account next to each other every single Good Friday. The liturgy is teaching the church to read these texts together, year after year, generation after generation, in the same way that the New Testament writers themselves read them together. The scholarly argument that Isaiah 53 was being read as messianic before Christ — that the first Christians didn’t invent the connection but inherited it — is a recovery that historical-critical scholarship has spent two centuries working on. The liturgy has been making the connection every Good Friday for fifteen hundred years.
John 1 at Christmas. On Christmas Day, in every liturgical tradition, the gospel reading at the principal Mass or Eucharist is John 1:1-18 — in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. The Christmas service doesn’t, in the liturgical tradition, settle for the nativity story alone. It won’t let the Incarnation be sentimentalized into a baby in a manger. It puts the cosmic prologue of John right beside Bethlehem — the Logos who was with God in the beginning, who made all things, who was the light of the world, who became flesh and pitched his tent among us (the literal sense of the Greek eskēnōsen, the word that calls back to the tabernacle in the wilderness). The work of recovering John’s Logos as the most concentrated theological claim about Christ anywhere in the New Testament (Chapter 24) has been done in modern scholarship. The Christmas liturgy makes the claim every year. It reads the prologue at the manger. It refuses to let the cradle be smaller than what the cradle held.
The Easter Vigil. On the night before Easter Sunday — Holy Saturday into Sunday morning — the liturgical churches keep what is called the Easter Vigil, the most important liturgy of the entire year in the Catholic tradition, the central liturgy of Holy Week in the Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox traditions. The Vigil is a service of readings, baptisms, and resurrection celebration that walks through salvation history in a single long night. The readings, in the Catholic and Anglican lectionaries, traditionally include: Genesis 1 (creation), Genesis 22 (Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac), Exodus 14-15 (the crossing of the Red Sea), Isaiah 55 (the call to come to the waters), Ezekiel 36 (the new heart and new Spirit), and Ezekiel 37 (the valley of dry bones) — culminating in the resurrection gospel. The Vigil is what the New Testament does theologically, enacted as liturgy: it reads the resurrection inside the whole story. Creation. Abraham. Exodus. The new heart. The dry bones rising. Then the empty tomb. The scholarly project of reading the resurrection inside the whole biblical narrative — of seeing the resurrection as the climax of a story that includes the new creation, the binding of Isaac, the Passover, Ezekiel’s promise of new life — is a project the Easter Vigil has been performing every year for at least fifteen hundred years. The Vigil is the recovery, enacted.
These four examples could be multiplied. The Annunciation is celebrated on March 25 — exactly nine months before Christmas — because the church preserved the connection between conception and birth as a theological claim about the Incarnation. The Transfiguration is celebrated on August 6, forty days before Holy Cross Day on September 14, because the early church saw the glory on the mountain and the cross as one event. Genesis 22 — Abraham binding Isaac — is read in many traditions during Holy Week alongside the Passion, because the church has always read the binding of Isaac as a foreshadowing of the Father giving up his only Son. The Sanctus that the church sings at every Eucharist — holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts; heaven and earth are full of your glory — is taken from Isaiah 6:3, where the seraphim cry out before the throne. The liturgy is layered with these connections. Each one of them is something the scholarly recovery work has had to argue for. Each one of them the liturgy has been quietly keeping in view the whole time.
why liturgical reading carries what scholarship sometimes forgets
The Reformed philosopher and theologian James K. A. Smith, who holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview at Calvin University, has spent his career arguing that liturgical practices form Christians at a deeper level than ideas alone can. His three-volume Cultural Liturgies series, beginning with Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009), makes a case that has reshaped how a generation of evangelical and Reformed Christians think about worship. Smith’s central claim is that humans aren’t primarily thinking beings who occasionally feel and act. We’re loving and desiring beings whose loves are shaped by the practices we participate in. What we do, week after week, shapes what we love. And what we love shapes what we believe, more deeply and durably than what we’re taught. Smith comes at this argument from inside the Reformed tradition, drawing on Augustine on the ordering of loves, on philosophical anthropology, on cultural criticism. The book has been read across denominational lines — by Catholics and Orthodox who recognize their tradition in Smith’s framing, and by evangelicals and Reformed Protestants who find their own tradition challenged and enriched by it.
Smith’s argument explains something the modern reader may not have noticed about how liturgical churches handle scripture. The lectionary is more than an efficient way of getting through the Bible. It’s a practice that shapes the church’s reading. A church that hears the Magnificat every Advent for forty years is a church whose ear has been trained, week after week, year after year, to hear Mary’s voice as the wild prophetic announcement it is. A church that hears Isaiah 53 every Good Friday is a church whose ear is trained to hear the cross inside the Servant Song and the Servant Song inside the cross. A church that hears John 1 every Christmas is a church whose theology of the Incarnation has been formed by the Logos prologue, not by the nativity story alone. A church that keeps the Easter Vigil is a church whose imagination of the resurrection has been shaped by the whole biblical story, every year, for the whole of its life.
The non-liturgical Christian can pick up the same shape, even without the liturgical practice. She can notice that the church for fifteen hundred years has connected these texts to these seasons. She can ask why. She can read the Magnificat at Advent, even if her tradition doesn’t chant it at Vespers. She can read Isaiah 53 in Holy Week, even if her tradition doesn’t assign it as the first reading on Good Friday. She can read John 1 alongside Luke 2 on Christmas. She can mark the night before Easter by reading through the great salvation-history texts. She can learn from the long memory without joining the long tradition. What the liturgical churches have preserved, in other words, is available to every Christian reader who wants to draw on it.
The deeper point Smith and others have made is that the liturgy preserves more than text. It preserves a way of reading. It preserves a pattern that puts certain readings next to certain other readings, that lets a verse from Isaiah sit next to a psalm sit next to a gospel passage, that lets the church’s confession of who Christ is be performed every year on the same days in the same shape. The pattern is the meaning. The lectionary is the meaning. The church year is the meaning. The texts mean what they mean partly because the church has been reading them in these particular combinations for fifteen hundred years.
The modern Christian — liturgical or not — inherits the long memory of the church whether she realizes it or not. The hymns she sings in her evangelical worship service are full of phrases the lectionary preserved. The creeds she recites are summaries the liturgical churches taught generations of Christians to confess. The structure of her Christmas service, even in a small Baptist church in the rural South, owes more to the Roman Christmas liturgy than most contemporary Christians realize. The reading of the Lord’s Prayer in church, the doxology at the end of hymns, the amen at the end of every prayer — all liturgical inheritances, preserved by the long memory of the church and passed on to traditions that may not call themselves liturgical at all.
the church remembers what scholarship sometimes has to recover
The recovery this chapter is after isn’t a call to convert. The book isn’t asking the non-liturgical Christian to become liturgical. The Reformation traditions had real reasons for the choices they made about worship, and those reasons still hold. The recovery is simpler: it’s the recognition that one of the great resources for reading scripture well, in the modern world, is the long memory of the church preserved in its liturgical life. The reader who wants to know what the church has thought important about scripture, year after year for fifteen centuries, can look at the lectionary. The reader who wants to know which texts the church has paired with which seasons, and why, can look at the church year. The reader who wants to know how Christians have been forming their imagination of the Incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, can look at how Christmas and Holy Week and Easter have been kept.
What the long memory carries is more than information. It’s the church’s collective answer, refined over many centuries, to the question of how to read scripture as the people of God. It says: read Mary’s song in Advent, because Advent is the season of waiting for the One who is coming, and Mary’s voice is the voice of the waiting. Read Isaiah 53 on Good Friday, because the cross is the fulfillment of what the Servant Song saw. Read John 1 on Christmas, because the baby in the manger is the Word who was with God in the beginning. Walk through the whole biblical story on Easter Eve, because the resurrection is the climax of a story that began at creation. The liturgy says these things by doing them, year after year, in every congregation that keeps the church year. The doing is the teaching.
The reader who hears this, whatever her tradition, has been given a great gift by a great cloud of witnesses. The Christians who built the lectionary didn’t build it for themselves. They built it for the church to use, century after century, for as long as the gospel was being preached. They built it because they wanted the people of God to keep reading scripture in the patterns that would form them as the people of God. They built it because they knew that what we read together, in the same shapes, year after year, will shape who we become. The lectionary is a gift the early church left to every generation that would come after. The reader can receive the gift even if she never opens a missal. She can let the long memory of the church be one of the voices she reads scripture with. She can hear, every Christmas, what the church has been saying every Christmas. She can hear, every Good Friday, what the church has been saying every Good Friday. She can let the church’s pattern of reading begin to shape her own.
And when she does — when she sits down with her Bible and reads what the church has been reading for fifteen hundred years, in the shapes the church has been reading it — she’ll find that she is reading with the church. She is reading with the monks chanting the Magnificat at Vespers in Cluny in the year 1000, and with the deacons reading Isaiah 53 at Good Friday Mass in Constantinople in the year 600, and with the catechumens baptized at the Easter Vigil in Rome in the year 400, and with every Christian who has ever heard in the beginning was the Word read aloud on Christmas Day. She isn’t reading alone. She has never been reading alone. The church has been reading with her the whole time. And the church will keep on reading, in these patterns, long after she has put her own Bible down and joined the long cloud of witnesses on the other side of the page.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.