Oh, but I didn’t mention the music we’ve been having! Even starting two weeks ago, the week before Advent began, November 26, the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, we get someone from the Schola Cantorum doing a solo from Handel’s Messiah. On Christ the King it was Worthy is the Lamb. Last week it was Thus saith the Lord and But who may abide.

And this week it’s O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion. I don’t know the names of the singers in the choir, so this woman who sings it I always just call Kate. She vaguely reminds me of Kate Winslet. After Mass she’s out in the nave greeting what appear to be her grandparents, so I stop by and introduce myself and Dawn and tell her how good she was. And she introduces herself as Heather. Ah, not Kate. Heather.

And continuing the theme of waiting and anticipating, today’s Gospel reading, from St. Luke of course, gives us good old St. John the Baptist, preaching from Isaiah. And it’s those lines that Handel uses right at the beginning of Messiah.

A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The winding roads shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

So I’m totally expecting that as the Handel solo during Communion, Every valley shall be exalted, but, as I said, we get O thou that tellest instead. Or we could totally expect this part of Isaiah to be the first reading, right? Wrong again! We get Baruch instead. But, still, it turns out to be interesting in its own way. Check this out:

For God has commanded
that every lofty mountain be made low,
and that the age-old depths and gorges
be filled to level ground,
that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.

It’s the same thing! Cool and fun. Our man Baruch tying into Isaiah, or channelling Isaiah. Or maybe the other way around? Wonder which was written first? I’m guessing Isaiah, since he’s like such a rockstar prophet, while poor Baruch is deuterocanonical. (Or apocryphal, depending on your particular persuasion, right?) Some quick Wikipedia research puts Isaiah around 740 BC and Baruch around 580 BC.

I have to admit, though, that I’m a bigger fan of Handel’s old King James, with its rough places being made plain, rather than the NAB’s smooth.

And I especially like the beginning of the Gospel reading, setting the scene, placing it in historical context:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,
and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region
of Ituraea and Trachonitis,
and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene,
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas …

The way I understand it, there’s no contemporary record of Jesus, the Gospels all being written some forty to seventy years after the Resurrection. So I like this tie to events and people where there maybe are extant records. I don’t know if St. Luke’s account matches up exactly, like if Lysanias and Herod were in fact contemporaries, but it sounds good to me.