On an Advent Collect

Missal, with the text for Advent (Durham, England, 14th c.)

"Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer appoints the collect for the First Sunday of Advent to be repeated every day in Advent until Christmas Eve.  The prayer thus sets the tone for the whole season—indeed, for the whole liturgical year—and invites reflection.

“Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light”

The prayer opens with language taken from Romans 13:12, part of the Epistle lesson (Rom 13:11–14) associated since at least the medieval period with the first Sunday of Advent and retained in the first year of the three-year cycle of the current Revised Common Lectionary.  (The lesson appears, for example, in the 14^th-century English missal shown in the image above.)  The English reformers expanded the lesson to begin with verse 8: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  

The expanded lection helps us see that to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light is nothing more nor less than to love.  For St. Paul connects the love command (vv. 8–10) to the section about knowing the time (vv. 11–14) with a simple kai touto, “and this.”  Thus, St. Paul effectively says in verse 11 that we are to love, knowing that it is time to walk in the light of the coming day of salvation.  Because the night is far spent, because the reign of sin and death is near its end, we are to put on the armor (hopla, lit., “weapons”) of light (v. 12).  We are to no longer give our selves as “instruments of unrighteousness” (hopla adikias), but to present our bodies to God as “instruments of righteousness” (hopla dikaisoynes) (6:13), as “ a living sacrifice” (12:1).  In short, we are to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14), to immerse ourselves in the life of the risen Lord.  United with our Lord in a death like his in baptism, we are to “walk in newness of life,” living to God, considering ourselves “alive to God in Christ Jesus” (cf. Rom 6:4–11).  Knowing the time, we are to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.” (Eph 5:2).

“Now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility”

Now is when we are to love one another.  Like St. Paul, the collect assumes that we know the time, “that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.  The night is far spent, the day is at hand” (Rom 13:11–12a, KJV).  Now is the time of the shadows before the coming dawn, a time when the continuing effects of sin and death require from us sober watchfulness and mutual encouragement if we are to not be conformed to this devastated world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds (12:2).

Advent Prayers in "The Leofric Missal" (England, 9th–11th c.)

Now we are to let our minds be conformed to of Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8).

“That in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal”*

The prayer concludes by directing our attention to the second advent of our Lord, to the day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10–11).  In light of his coming, “what sort of people ought [we] to be in living lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” (2 Pt 3:12)  We are called to be a people whose lives of love point to the coming renewal of creation, “where righteousness is at home” (2 Pt 3:13).  We are called to be a people whose obedience to the Lord Jesus proclaims his sovereignty in a world that does not yet acknowledge Christ as King.

* The collect’s aspiration clause corresponds closely to a post-communion prayer in the Gelasian Sacramentaries of the 8^th century, a family of western service books from which, together with the Gregorian Sacramentaries, the Roman Missal derives.  (An early example of the prayer is found in the “Leofric Missal,” brought to England in the 10^th or 11^th century.  See the last prayer, beginning Preces populi tui, in the righthand image above.)  That prayer translates roughly as “...that they may rejoice at the advent of your Only-begotten according to the flesh, may at the second advent, when he shall come in his majesty, receive the reward of eternal life” (Trans. Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book [HarperOne, 1995], p. 165).