A distinguished evangelical whom I know expresses unease if, following the liturgy, he has to invite the faithful to ‘bless the Lord’. It offends his sense of the divine heirarchy: all right to invite the Lord to bless us, but not the other way round. Blessing can only be conferred by the greater upon the lesser. As a humble Reader, I know this to be true. I am not supposed to bless the congregation, but to pray, with them, that we may all be blessed.

But. I think that there is an English usage, albeit perhaps archaic, which swaps subject and object. ‘I’ll learn you!’ is an example. It means, colloquially, ‘I’ll teach you’.

I think that this curious idiom occurs in God-talk as well. In the Common Worship version of the Magnificat, Luke 1:54 is expressed as

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
to remember his promise of mercy,…

‘To’ remember here is problematical. It implies not that He is remembering – not as the NRSV suggests in cross-references to Genesis 8:1 and Psalm 98:3, or indeed as the AV and BCP translate the Greek ‘μνησθηναι ελέους, καθώς ελαλησεν προς τους πατέρας ήμων´, ‘He remembering his mercy …’, but rather that the use of ‘to’ implies that He causes Israel to remember, almost as if he had said, ‘I’ll learn them …’

If I am right in this, then I see nothing to worry my evangelical friend if he has to ‘bless the Lord’. It means, ‘May the Lord bless us’. Of course it is always possible that the sublime language of the BCP and AV is also a better translation than the sometimes stumbling prose of Common Worship or its cousin the NRSV ‘Anglicised Edition’ [sic]. But that is above the pay grade of humble Readers, I am told. May we always count our blessings.

Hugh Bryant

Reader in the Church in Wales

Advent

22nd December 2022