Understanding our Faith

Early Development of the Liturgy of the Word

The way in which the Christian Liturgy of the Word came about gives us a good, if partial, insight into the early history of the first disciples of Jesus.

A good place to start is St Luke’s account of Jesus speaking in the synagogue of his home village of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30). Jesus takes up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and having read a passage, he rolled up the scroll, and said, “Today this text is being fulfilled in your hearing”. This is no casual claim, Jesus is really saying “I am the Messiah”. They rejected him and hustled him out of the town! 

So, Jesus reads a passage of the Old Testament and says to them, this passage is about me, you are hearing its fulfillment!

Now this sets a pattern for what will happen in the earliest days of Christianity, the disciples of Jesus going to the synagogues will keep pointing to the fulfillment of the Scriptures in the person of Jesus, the Messiah. As a result of this, conflict ensues, and gradually the followers of Jesus are ejected from the synagogues. This probably happens in a piecemeal fashion, as at least in his earlier journeys, St Paul still goes to the Jewish synagogues in the pagan cities and proclaims Jesus as the Messiah.

Because they have been ejected from the synagogues, as was Jesus, the Christians, who have been celebrating the ‘breaking of the bread’ in one of their homes on the first day of the week, now celebrate the word of God before their celebration of the breaking of the bread. And so, we gradually get the pattern that we are accustomed to at Mass: the Liturgy of the Word followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

Of course, from among those many people who heard of Jesus in the synagogues, there were those who did recognise that it was in him that the Scriptures were fulfilled and they became his disciples.

Seeing Jesus as the one who brings the Old Testament to fulfillment is a principle which is still at work in the way we do the Liturgy of the Word today. The gospel passage is the most important reading precisely because it is about Jesus. In the reform of the liturgy, when the readings were being chosen for use at Mass, it was always the gospel passage which was chosen first, and then an Old Testament passage was chosen as one which could be seen as being fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The second reading, from one of the other books of the New Testament, was not usually chosen because of a direct link with the gospel passage simply because it was not possible to do. So, we get a series of readings from the same book Sunday by Sunday for a number of Sundays of each of the three years of readings.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin