Enough Already!

Many years ago, the Church of England didn't make much provision for weekday worship on days when nothing very much was going on liturgically, and Anglo-Catholic churches got used to making use of the material provided for their Roman counterparts. Here at Swanvale Halt we've used the 1970 Roman Daily Missal for years (albeit in a post-1970 copy!). Of course I never use the Collects: they are almost always vapid variants on the theme of 'Jesus loves us so may we love him', which is all very well but gets you only so far. I am also used to making on-the-hoof amendments to the texts of the Jerusalem Bible which is what the Daily Missal uses, when those texts seem clunky and awkward.

This morning, though, I opened the Missal before the assembled masses in the Lady Chapel (all four souls) and found my eye and brain confronted by Hebrews 2.5:

He did not appoint angels to be rulers of the world to come, and that world is what we are talking about.

Now the J.B. tries to improve comprehension of the text by removing any doubt at all about what it might mean, which I suppose is a characteristically Roman approach. But this just reads horrendously. For a second I flailed as I tried to come up with an alternative that both kept the sense of Holy Writ and expressed it in a way which treated the ear less brutally, and failed, and apologised for my failure. By way of comparison, let us turn to The Message, which is the most extreme paraphrastic version of the Bible in general use, and which renders the same verse thus:

God didn't put angels in charge of this business of salvation that we're dealing with here. 

To me this is nowhere near as bad. It does scarcely more violence to the text than the J.B. and at least reads energetically and appealingly within its American idiom. The NRSV which we would use on Sundays says:

Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. 

This is by no means the most elegant of sentences and some people may fight shy of the subordinate clause in the middle. But it is more stately and less banal, and the subordinate clause slows the phrase down, giving the listener the chance to digest what is being said: it comes to rest on the word 'angels' who are the point of the statement and the thought behind it. The verse leads into the discussion of the role of human beings, to whom creation has been subjected, based on the quotation of Psalm 8. It is better in every respect. From now on I think the Missal will remain on its shelf in the vestry.