BBI, The Australian Institute of Theological Education
The Liturgical Appropriation of Gospel Texts: A Case Study in the Collect for Sunday Week IV in Ordinary Time in the Current Missale Romanum
The biblical nature of the collect prayer, a genre ever present in Roman and Anglican worship, has been underestimated, and in some circles suppressed. A review of the scriptural underpinnings of many orations, and perhaps the genre itself, is underway. This paper brings to biblical scholars an example of that research. With that, it also opens up a further avenue of interpretation and application of a well known Gospel saying.
The text we will explore is:
Concede nobis,
Domine Deus noster,
ut te tota mente veneremur,
et omnes homines rationabili diligamus affectu.
The use in the prayer of veneremur and rationabili raise difficulties for translation and also suitability, however they prove to be liturgical and cultural keys to the opening of a scriptural passage to new applications.
On a historical note, our text is from the collection of the earliest collect prayers, a form developed in the city of Rome in the mid fifth century at least in response to the transition from the use of Greek to Latin in the liturgy. The prayer was preserved in an ancient collection, left undisturbed across the 1500 years of the Missal textual tradition, and brought from obscurity into the Vatican II directed revision of the sacramentary.