March 2, 2014
Sunday of the Transfiguration
By tradition, today is the last Sunday of the church year
that we sing an Alleluia in greeting of the Gospel. We will put the Alleluia to rest for the
Sundays of Lent, as a sign of the penitential and solemn nature of the season.
As a word, Alleluia is the Latin form of the Hebrew Hallelujah, which means “[let us] praise
the Lord.” In Jewish liturgy, the word
is associated with Psalms 104 – 150, where it is often found as a
congregational cry of joy, likely included to encourage the people’s
participation in the recitation of the psalms.[1]
In Christian use, the word signifies a cry of eternal praise
and joy. Augustine writes “it is in
praising God that we shall rejoice forever in the life to come.”[2] The eternal Alleluia has been described by
some as a heavenly hymn of praise sung by the angels that never ceases; when we
join the hymn in our worship, it is as if our earthly thread of song weaves momentarily
into the eternal chorus. The praise we
sing is both a rejoicing in the presence of Christ in our midst now and an
expectation of the great feast to come.
Use of the Alleluia as a greeting of the Gospel can be
traced to the third century. Since then,
the texts associated with the simple Alleluia have undergone many forms. In the medieval period, the Alleluia formed
the bookends to a recitation of a psalm between the reading of the Epistle and
the Gospel. At some point, the
recitation was shortened to just one verse of the psalm. This evolved into a pattern that we often
follow at First Lutheran. Many Sundays
we will sing the Alleluia, followed by a “Proper” verse, with a repetition of
the Alleluia closing the song. The Proper
verse, from the New Testament, relates directly to the Gospel text for the
day. In the historic Mass, the
distinction between the Propers and the Ordinary texts refers to the texts that
are always used at each celebration of the Mass as opposed to those that are “proper”
to a specific day. In the case of the
Alleluia verse, it is case specific, or recited only for a specific day, hence
its designation as a Proper.
In the medieval period, Gregorian chant often extended the
last syllable of Alleluia (the “ia”) with a lengthy series of musical notes
known as a melisma. This extension,
called a “jubilus,” was meant to portray the extravagant joy felt by the
presence of the Gospel. (As an aside, “jubilus”
refers to Jubal, the first musician recognized in the Old Testament – you may
have heard of Jubal’s lyre.)
Next week – commentary on the resting of the Alleluia during
Lent.
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