A Brief Meditation on Today’s Mass Readings
Today’s Gospel passage is nested in a literary configuring which itself tells a story: the first two chapters, alone among the pages of Luke, recall a genre specific to early Judaism, known as a Haggadic Midrash. The priest Zechariah is wed to a woman of the tribe of Aaron; she, also, is of priestly stock. As such, Zechariah receives the annunciation of a child in state, before the altar of incense.
Disbelieving the message, Zechariah is struck mute. The office of singing God’s mercy is transferred to Elizabeth the daughter of Aaron, who is to be the first human person recorded in Scripture as proclaiming in words the presence of the Lord. (Her child John, priestly by lineage, will manifest the Messiah first, even before his birth, as the lame leaping up.) In all of this, we see the ancient heritage of God’s people embraced and cherished, and yet the transition into a new future of worship in spirit and in truth – Gabriel himself flies from the grandeur of Temple liturgy to the humility of Nazareth – a place theretofore not even mentioned in the Scriptures.
Today’s first reading speaks of a married couple of the tribe of Dan, whom the patriarch Jacob prophesied would achieve justice for his people (Gen. 49). They also are barren, promised a son to bring deliverance to Israel. Taken together, these parallel episodes foreshadow the One who fulfills the beautiful, mysterious title found first in the prophet Isaiah, and today in both the Gospel verse and the O Antiphon of Vespers: the Root of Jesse’s stem.
The Hebrew word nezer means shoot, or root, as it were. It also suggests the Semitic religious calling, the nazirite, like Samson in the first reading. Yet ultimately its full meaning is revealed in the inscription over the Cross: Jesus of Nazareth (ho Nazorãios), King of the Jews – a designation intended by Pilate as his place of origin, but testifying in truth to his identity and the nature of his mission. Here the abyss of death, barren and non-communicative, is overcome, and the wood of the Cross become the blossoming branch of an eternal Spring:
And I will live for the LORD; my descendants will serve you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought. -Ps. 22, 31-32
Image: “O Radix Iesse” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Lawrence OP
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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