Suffrages
In the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, right after the Lord’s Prayer come the “suffrages.” These are prayers in the versicle-and-response form, with the leader saying the versicle (V) and the people the response (R). Of course, if you are saying the service by yourself, you say both. Over the next few months I want to look at these in their traditional form in the 1979 Prayer Book. They draw upon older versions going back to 1549; in their current form they are about 50 years old. In my view, they have held up well. I have two things I want to explore: first, the meaning of each particular pair of V&R, and second, the intelligibility of their ordered arrangement.
The suffrages bridge between the Lord’s Prayer and the particular collects (prayers) of the week and day. Unlike the Lord’s Prayer, they lack the authorization of coming from Jesus’ direct teaching. But they do have a universality, unlike the more specific prayers that follow, of applying to any time, any day.
I should also say that, with its customary creativity, the 1979 Book presents alternatives alongside these. But these that I will be looking at, which are called “Suffrages A” in both Morning and Evening Prayer, are the only forms provided for both morning and evening, and between morning and evening there is no variation in them.
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The first V&R is:
V. O Lord, show thy mercy upon us;
R. And grant us thy salvation.
—The first request we make of God is for mercy. We, who have sinned and fallen short of God’s intentions for us, begin by asking for mercy. But what is mercy? The response asks God to “grant us thy salvation.” Mercy is demonstrated by God’s gift of salvation.
This is interesting. Often when we ask for mercy we are asking to be graded on a curve, to get a bit more than we strictly deserve. This is different. This is to say mercy = salvation, and the first and most important thing for us to ask is for salvation; the greatest gift for God to give us is salvation. It is, in particular, “thy salvation.” It is not a pardon from the governor, not a lenient sentence from a judge, not a passing grade on a test we deserved to fail. But, to push the question further, what is God’s salvation?
Salvation is: life with God. It is friendship with Jesus. This life of divine friendship is received now with a promise of its eternal reality—which means, yes, salvation entails the avoidance of hell! But what is it that one has instead of hell? It is life with God, a divine friendship that means sharing in God’s own life in Jesus. And this life with God is enjoyed in common with others: “show thy mercy upon us”—not “upon me”—"and grant us thy salvation.”
This is where the suffrages begin, with the ongoing, daily petition for God to show mercy by granting his salvation to us. The suffrages begin with the big picture. What follows are important, more specific implications of living in the mercy of God’s salvation.
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Out & About. Sunday, January 19, I am to preach at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff in Dallas, and on Sunday, January 26, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will be discussed at “Good Books & Good Talk” on Sunday, January 26, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s. Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation. We meet in Garrett Hall: when you leave the parking garage, it is across the beautiful close and to your right.