Personal Note: Bad liturgists. No biscuit.

[nebroadwe]

This is me ranting about the liturgical idiom of my faith community, a topic almost certainly of no interest to anyone except perhaps kanja177 and nateprentice, so behold! A cut!

I was looking ahead in the Roman Catholic liturgical year to Lent, stocking up on hymns at the website of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, when I ran across the following directive regarding the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday:

If you intend to read the Passion Narrative in parts, the traditional division is threefold: narrator, Christ, and crowd (all other voices). Some communities expand the number of voices, though it is probably not a good idea to give the congregation the "people's part" of this narrative, because that puts them in an adversarial relationship to Jesus. Instead, they should experience themselves as sharing not only in the sin that led to Jesus' death but also in his act of self-sacrifice to which they will soon join themselves once more in the Eucharist. Therefore, it might be good to proclaim this reading with the traditional three readers (which helps to hold attention), but break it at several points for a sung acclamation by the people.

Gah. Lookit. This is a development that's been gaining some momentum over the past couple of decades, but I do not like it and will not support it, for two reasons. First of all, it's boring. I've attended Masses where the congregation got to sing a little acclamation every now and then while the presider and a privileged couple of lectors got to proclaim all the interesting bits, and I nearly nodded off. Long gospel is long. Long gospel is also a fascinating piece of narrative, and ever since I was a child I've enjoyed playing my role in it, whether I was one of those privileged lectors or just J. Random Congregant. (The year I went to the Cathedral and heard the whole thing chanted, which I admit was pretty darn cool, I just picked up the chant line after the first few iterations and joined in with the choir on the crowd bits.) Having a part to play is the best way I know to "hold attention" -- you can't lose track of the narrative when you know you've got a line coming up soon that you have to say or the whole exercise grinds to a halt.

Second of all, I know no better antidote to an anti-Semitic interpretation of the Passion than having to say, year after year, "If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you" and "Crucify him! Crucify him!" and "We have no king but Caesar." An adversarial relationship with Jesus Christ? Yes -- but that's my daily life as a sinner; I just use different phrases to deny him. Twice a year I call a spade a spade. Ten minutes later I'll experience a different aspect of the story, whether in the Eucharistic prayer on Palm Sunday or the veneration of the cross on Good Friday, when I remember the solidarity I also have with him. And I am that much less inclined to make the crucifixion a story about Those People Who Killed God -- in fact, when I first learned about that interpretation, while I was in grade school, I found it ridiculous, because I knew the story wasn't about that. After all, weren't we the ones saying, "Crucify him!"? That's because it was our diseases he bore, our common human infirmities that he carried, just like the other reading says, right?

tl;dr: Don't take the crowd parts away from the congregation during the reading of the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. You know not what you do.

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I'll give them that last one to some extent, as a corrective to some very bad theology and history -- particularly with John's gospel, which tends to be totalizing in its portrayal of "the Jews" as the Bad Guys. I think the current research on that posits a bad relationship between the Johannine community and its surrounding Jewish milieu at about the time it was becoming clear that Christians weren't going to be another strain of Judaism, like Essenes or Sadducees or Pharisees, but were becoming another religion. IIRC, one of the current official teaching points on Good Friday is that "the Jews" of John's rhetoric are better understood historically as a) some of the guys in positions of authority in the Jewish community at the time and b) not the Jews of today. (Duh, but, again, due to the heritage of bad theology/history/sociology on this point, it has to be said.) I believe the official translation used on Good Friday does add the odd clarifying phrase in this direction, or reduce the adversarial group to an unmarked "they" when useful, but I'd have to check it against a Greek interlinear to make sure ...

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

can't argue with you there

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

[gets down off soapbox and retires bashfully]

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

haha