Antiphons are little refrains which are used around elements of worship (often the Gospel or the Psalms) in more established worship. They often help to set the tone for that day, telling people where we are in the cycle of the Christian year, for instance. The “O” antiphons were little bookends, used in the church through the centuries before Mary’s song in the evening services leading up to Christmas, kind of like we might use an Advent candle – to count down, and even more importantly, to point to some of the hopes and expectations that were fulfilled in Jesus. They would be said or sung for the last 7 days of the Advent period, up until the evening before Christmas Eve. You may not know the antiphons (or you might!), but they form the basis for the hymn: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, which you may be more familiar with. That’s how they get their name, by the way: They all begin with “O”…
The first of them, O Sapientia or “O, Wisdom” is here:
O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.
This little piece draws on two of the books which are apocryphal to some of our denominations: They are recommended books but not considered part of the Bible in some of the Protestant churches, but are used in some of our older traditions. Here the Book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. Just like we see in Proverbs, there is reference to “Wisdom” as a person, (in Proverbs, she is a woman), and we understand this “Wisdom” to ultimately refer to Jesus, the Messiah who is to come.
In the past, looking forward, there was great longing for this coming Wisdom, who would order all things, rule fairly, give good judgements, and who would bring the world order of The Most High into our reeling world. Jesus, so we believe as Christians, did that – he showed us what God is like, he taught about the kingdom of God, and he died and rose again to overcome the forces of evil that taint the world and make it and us in it tend to go awry. This is the past coming of Christ, the first Advent, the one that happened in historical time some 2000 years ago and which we celebrate at Christmas.
Here and now, as we look around us at the world, we also realise that the Kingdom of God has not yet come in its fulness. And so, if we think of the “present Advent”, Messiah coming into our hearts here and now, we might pray that we, ourselves, may be more and more aligned with God’s plan, that we might be wise and well-tuned to the workings of God, that we might be pure channels, well-polished mirrors to send the God-light into the world. We might ask God that we would have the grace to let him do his own praying in us, that we would be attentive to what God desires, that we would allow God’s own inspiration to land in us and enlighten us like the dawn on the shore not far from where I am…
And then there is the future Advent. This is the time, also some point in history, for which we are still waiting and hoping and praying. When we look to regimes that trouble us with their disregard for human life, when we hear about prisons with unspeakable horrors inside, when we look with concern at world leaders, or the internet, or the amount of human trafficking, pollution or illnesses that we can’t yet fix, and we turn to God in prayer and say: “God, you promised that it would all one day be okay; we are not there yet, God. Please act.”, then this is what we pray for: The final coming of the Messiah, of whose wise and peaceful reign there will be no end.
O Wisdom, come and teach us the way of prudence.