The prayer of the Church is always biblical—i.e., expressed in the language, images, and symbols of the Holy Scriptures. If the Bible contains the Divine Revelation to man, it is also man’s inspired response to that Revelation and thus the pattern and the content of man’s prayer, praise, and adoration. For example, thousands of years have passed since the Psalms were composed; yet when man needs to express repentance, the shock of his entire being at the challenge of divine mercy, he still finds the only adequate expression in the penitential Psalm beginning, “Have mercy on me, O God!”
Every imaginable situation of man before God, the world, and other men, from the overwhelming joy of God’s presence to the abysmal despair of man’s exile, sin, and alienation has found its perfect expression in this unique Book which, for this reason, has always constituted the daily nourishment of the Church, the means of her worship and self-edification.
During Great Lent the biblical dimension of worship is given increased emphasis. One can say that the forty days of Lent are, in a way, the return of the Church into the spiritual situation of the Old Testament—the time before Christ, the time of repentance and expectation, the time of the “history of salvation” moving toward its fulfillment in Christ.
This return is necessary because even though we belong to the time after Christ, and know Him, and have been “baptized into Him,” we constantly fall away from the new life received from Him, and this means lapse again into the “old” time. The Church, on the one hand, is already “at home” for she is the “grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit”; yet, on the other hand, she is also “on her way” as the pilgrimage—long and difficult—toward the fulfillment of all things in God, the return of Christ and the end of all time.
Great Lent is the season when this second aspect of the Church, of her life as expectation and journey, is being actualized. It is here, therefore, that the Old Testament acquires its whole significance: as the Book not only of prophecies which have been fulfilled, but of man and die entire creation “on their way” to the Kingdom of God.
Two main principles govern the use of the Old Testament in Lenten worship: the “double reading” of the Psalter; and the lectio continua, i.e., the reading virtually in their totality of three books—Genesis, Isaiah and Proverbs.
Psalms have always occupied a central and indeed unique place in Christian worship. The Church sees in them not only the best, the most adequate and perfect expression of man’s prayer, repentance, adoration, and praise, but a true verbal icon of Christ and the Church, a revelation within the Revelation. For the Fathers, says an exegete of their writings, “only Christ and His Church pray, weep, and speak in this Book.”
From the very beginning, the Psalms constituted, therefore, the very foundation of the Church’s prayer, her “natural language.” They are used in worship first as “fixed Psalms,” i.e., as the permanent material of all daily services: the “evening Psalm” (Ps. 104) at Vespers; the Six Psalms (Psalms 3, 38, 63, 88, 103, 143), the Praises (Psalms 148, 149, 150) at Matins; and groups of three Psalms at the Hours, etc. From the Psalter are selected the prokeimena, verses for the alleluias, etc., for all feasts and commemorations of the liturgical year. And finally, the entire Psalter, divided into twenty parts or kathismata, is chanted in its totality every week at Vespers and Matins. It is this third use of the Psalter that is doubled during Lent; the Psalter is chanted not once but twice every week of Lent, and portions of it are included in the Third and Sixth Hours.
~Adapted from Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent
