Monastery of the Holy Cross

“And when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah [2 Chr 20: 22)."

This passage marks the fallout of the interesting scene (found only here, and not in the books of Kings) from which the Roman liturgy takes a famous Christmas Eve antiphon.  Doing lecto divina over this passage recently, I was struck that God's saving power goes into action as the assembled community begins liturgical song of some kind.  The prophet Jehaziel, in predicting the overthrow of the forces massed against Judah, reassured the people by noting, "The battle is not yours but God's [20: 15]… you will not need to fight in this battle; take your position, stand still.”

This battle strategy calls to mind the most famous deliverance in the Old Testament.  ”Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord…The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still [Ex 14: 13-14].”  The major difference is that the people of Israel in the story of the Exodus were at best unwilling participants, and probably couldn’t have fought if they had thought of it.  A few verses earlier, they cried out, “It is because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? [v 11]”  Gallows humor!  I figure that the people walked into the Red Sea as much out of desperation as faith.  As we find out later in Exodus when the people prove stubborn, God acts for the sake of Abraham and His own Name, and so the descendants of Abraham have that to be thankful for.  In any case, the liturgy in Exodus does not begin until the Egyptian army has met its end in the sea.  Chapter 15 of Exodus recounts Moses’ famous song, which ‘the people of Israel’ also sang.  So the people under Jehoshaphat some four hundred years later, by singing God’s praise in anticipation of the battle, are demonstrating their faith in the God Who saves.

In preparation for Vespers each evening, our community lines up silently before processing into the church to sing.  This formation is known as statio, echoing the prophets advice to ’stand still’, but also echoing the Roman idea of standing sentinel.  Monastic literature regards this tradition as military in derivation, and this theme goes back to the Rule of Saint Benedict and beyond.  It is the ‘battle-line of brothers’.  We prepare ourselves for the battle that liturgy is.  Whenever we try to pray, we encounter the cleavage in our hearts between the converted and the worldly.  As one Desert Father put it, prayer is warfare to the very end.  Immediately, we are assaulted with all kinds of distractions.  And yet, as St. John Climacus put it so beautifully, “War against us is proof that we are making war.”  And if we are making such war by singing and praising God, we can be sure that God is ‘maintaining our cause’ [1 Kings 8: 45].  The victory is assured, no matter how improbable it can feel on any given day.