Blue or Not, and Who Might Care

Here’s a recondite little liturgical matter for you. I was mildly surprised to see photos of a couple of my clerical colleagues from deeper in the Anglo-Catholic world than my own location having celebrated mass on New Year’s Day resplendent in blue for the BVM, which would never had occurred to me: at Swanvale Halt we kept it as the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus and, as a Feast of Our Lord rather than Our Lady, in gold.

I hadn’t picked up on the fact that in 1969 Pope Paul VI reclassified January 1^st as ‘The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’, I suppose concentrating on the Virgin’s maternal role, which is all very well. However I do wonder whether this is less about her as such, and more about the slight squeamishness we moderns may feel in approaching the fact of Jesus’s, or rather his parents’, obedience to Jewish custom in this inescapable respect. The old Anglican Prayer Book collect is, as usual, brutally upfront about the whole business:

Almighty God, that madest thy blessed Son to be circumcised, and obedient to the law for man: Grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit; that, our hearts, and all our members, being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts, we may in all things obey thy blessed will.

This is authentically medieval, reflecting the theology implicit in that wonderful New Year hymn ‘Hac in anni ianua’, that Christ’s circumcision is part of his perfect fulfilment of the Old Law and therefore the liberation of humankind from its curse – liberation to obey God’s will in the Spirit rather than by rule-following. The modern Common Worship collect is basically the same as the 1980s version which replaced the BCP, with a bit more inclusive language:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was circumcised in obedience to the law for our sake, and given the Name that is above every name: give us grace faithfully to bear his Name, to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit, and to proclaim him as Saviour of the world.

You will note that, even though the circumcision of Jesus is mentioned, it’s no longer the major theme of the collect; it’s the element of Jesus being named which has taken over. It does seem very odd to be celebrating the genital mutilation of a small child, however culturally specific and theologically glossed. Perhaps the squeamishness, thinking about it, is less to do with taste so much as the prospect of small children in church (assuming there might be some) lisping innocently to a hapless parent, ‘Mummy, what does circumcised mean?’ However, our Lord’s de-foreskinification did happen (Luke 2.21), and at least the Anglican Church seems actually to be less reluctant to face the fact than our Roman brethren are, or were in 1969 anyway. 

Over on LiberFaciorum a friend-of-a-friend commented on this that ‘Our Lord must shake his head in bemusement at us all’. My question in reply of ‘What does he know about it?’ was only half-facetious. These feasts, fasts and seasons are all means by which we limited human beings encounter, understand and appropriate the unfolding mystery which is Him, and I imagine he is more than content to let us work out for ourselves what best achieves it. What we choose to do with this particular day depends entirely on what signals we might want to send about how we think of ourselves and the Christian communities we are part of. Now, I am no great Marian, and I think Our Lady is a retiring character anyway, surely as satisfied as I am without yet another feast day in addition to her Annunciation, her Dormition, Conception, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, all those peculiar Roman Catholic ones, and, my personal favourite, Our Lady of the Snows on August 5^th (inconveniently for Anglicans, St Oswald’s Day as well). The inescapable carnality of the Circumcision positively forces people to face up to things about Jesus I think they may sooner not, and so is worth it for that.