SACRED MUSIC

Musical art has a unique calling to instill hope in the human soul, so marked and sometimes wounded by the earthly condition. There is a mysterious and profound kinship between music and hope, between song and eternal life: it is no coincidence that Christian tradition depicts the blessed spirits singing in chorus, enraptured and ecstatic with the beauty of God.”
-Benedict XVI

VIRGA JESSE

he Alleluia text celebrates the ‘flower’ that buds from the stump of Jesse: the God-man, the mediator who will definitively reconcile God and humanity. It is sung on the Fourth Sunday of Advent in Year A and echoes one of the ‘O’ antiphons. The stump of Jesse’s root is a sign of God’s love for all people, having sprouted and blossomed into the Saviour.

O Root of Jesse’s stem,

Sign of God’s love for all his people,

Come to save us without delay.

However, this Alleluia is sung every year on the Feast of the Nativity of Mary, as she is the New Eve whose birth reversed the Fall of Man. During this feast, we remember the stump of Jesse as we read the Gospel account of the genealogy of Jesus.

We are all part of God’s family tree. Jesus has a genealogy.

It may seem surprising, but I have always been thrilled to hear the names mentioned in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. As the priest proclaims them, we trace Jesus’s royal lineage from Abraham to Joseph and Mary. We thank God for His lovingkindness in including sinners and women in it.

Our Cistercian Fathers loved this Feast and wrote beautiful sermons celebrating God’s mercy. I particularly love St. Aelred’s sermon on the Nativity of Mary. In it, he views Jesus’s genealogy as a miracle of God’s mercy.

“Today, God has begun to reveal his wonderful mercy and compassion to us, which he promised to Abraham many years ago. Through his descendants, all nations would be blessed. He says, ‘In your descendants, all nations will be blessed’ (Gen. 22:18; 26:4). Today, the seed from which Christ our God, the sun of justice, arose was born. (Ant. Nat. BVM). Not only one people, but all peoples have certainly been blessed in him because faith in Christ and his blessing are for all nations.”

Aelred also discusses the descent and ascent implied by the Matthean genealogy. He imagines it as a three-step staircase that Christ descended and that we must now climb.

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