Perhaps the most troubling thing in the modern Roman missal is the introduction to the Good Friday prayer for the Jews, which reads in the most recent translation, ‘Let us pray also for the Jewish people, to whom the Lord our God spoke first, that he may grant them to advance in love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant‘ (in sui foederis fidelitate proficere).
To ‘advance’ in something implies that one already has that thing. So the prayer implies that the Jewish people is already living in faithfulness to God’s covenant, but that it could be doing so more. But which covenant is it meant to be living in accordance with? Not the Mosaic covenant, since that doesn’t exist any more as a contract between God and man: it came to an end on the first Good Friday. Nor the Abrahamic covenant, since that is based on the faith in the promised Mediator, which they – alas – do not yet have. The same could be said of the Noahic and Davidic covenants.
The best I can do to save the orthodoxy of the prayer is to say that it should be taken materialiter: although the Jews are not in a covenant relation with God, since there is now only the new and eternal covenant, which has superseded all previous covenants, they are performing some of the outward actions which belong to the various covenants, e.g. circumcision or reading the Torah.
Still, as it stands the prayer is surely intolerably ambiguous. Since Pope Benedict XVI has said that the two forms of the Roman rite should enrich each other, without specifying how, perhaps celebrants of the modern liturgy should feel free to borrow a prayer pro Iudaeis from their elder brothers, the traditionalists…
March 28, 2013 at 6:48 pm
Don’t forget t here is ONE covenant made by God who never forsook it , his peole forsook it and so it was renewed by one who was uniquely able to do so as God and Man “firstborn”. To pray for the Jews to grow in knowledge of the covenant is to pray for them to discover Jesus Christ
bleesed TRiduum !
March 28, 2013 at 8:06 pm
“Are the promises of non effect? God forbid”. St Paul
March 29, 2013 at 2:20 pm
God’s promise are certainly of effect, which is why the Jews can still obtain the salvation that was offered to Abraham. Only they need first to believe in the promised seed of Abraham, and we should pray that they do.
March 29, 2013 at 2:18 pm
I agree that that is what we ought to be doing, and always did explicitly on Good Friday until 1969. The problem with the modern prayer is that it suggests that the Jews are already in a covenant relation with God. Fortunately even the revised liturgy prays explicitly at other times for the conversion of the Jews; only it’s not on Good Friday or at Mass, so most people don’t know about it.