Quiet, ordinary Saturday, week of the Third Sunday after the Epiphany … and what are the Lessons appointed for Mattins on this unremarkable day of the Kalendar? Oh, only the following from Messiah HWV 56: I.5-6 (‘Thus saith the Lord’ with its ‘The Lord, whom you seek, shall suddenly come to his temple’, and then ‘But who may abide’—‘for He is like a refiner’s fire’) in the First Lesson and, in the Second, III.47-51: ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’, ‘The trumpet shall sound’ (as Master Samwise might say, ‘Glory and trumpets!’), and ‘Then shall be brought to pass’ that ‘death is swallow’d up in victory’, upon which one exults, ‘O death, where is thy sting?’—wherefore ‘But thanks be to God’.
Just another weekday (merely another workaday Daily Office—‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, Amen’—), brought to you by GF Handel and the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Lectionary…
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 