Can we pray the third Good Friday collect?
There is a long history of unease with this, the third Good Friday collect in 1662. PECUSA 1928 retains the collect but replaces the reference to "Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks" with "all who know not thee as revealed as thou art revealed in the Gospel of thy Son". Canada 1962 omits the collect from the Good Friday provision.
Ireland 1926 and Scotland 1929, however, take a different approach in revising the collect, keeping the specific reference to the Jewish people:
Have mercy upon thine ancient people Israel, and all who know not thee as revealed in the Gospel of thy Son - Ireland 1926:
Have mercy upon thine ancient people the Jews, and upon all who have not known thee, or who deny the faith of Christ crucified - Scotland 1929.
The Irish and Scottish revisions have much to commend them, with the Irish version being somewhat superior. Unlike 1662, they both recognise the particular place of the Jewish people in the economy of salvation: "thine ancient people". This affirmation recognises the Lord's words that "salvation is of the Jews". It also echoes the Apostle's declaration concerning Israel:
to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.
If 1662 does not explicitly affirm this with its wording, neither does removing any reference to the Jewish people from the collect or omitting the collect. Good Friday - caught up with the frequent Gospel references to the Passover - is a particular time to pray for the Jewish people and to recognise how the Christian revelation is fundamentally dependent "upon thine ancient people".
Where the Scottish approach can be questioned is in its reference to "all who have not known thee". There is an ambiguity at this point: does this also refer to the Jewish people? It is at least open to this interpretation, an interpretation which is both dangerous and unScriptural, contrary to both the Lord's words ("we know what we worship") and those of the Apostle ("so worship I the God of my fathers"). In other words, legitimate use of the Scottish version is dependent upon recognising that the phrase "all who have not known thee" does not and cannot refer to the Jewish people.
This is what makes the Irish version superior: "who know not thee as revealed in the Gospel of thy Son". The Jewish people stand apart from God's revelation in the Cross and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This, after all, has been necessary for the salvation of the Gentiles. The mystery of Israel's rejection of the Messiah has been, in the words of the Apostle, "the reconciling of the world".
What of the remaining two petitions in the 1662 collect, retained by the various revisions? Firstly, we pray "take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word". If this sounds harsh to our ears it is because we have ceased to pray in this manner for ourselves. In the Litany, we pray "have mercy upon us miserable sinners", "from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment, Good Lord, deliver us" and "forgive us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances". In the third collect of Good Friday, then, we pray for the Jewish people and all others who do not believe the Christian revelation what we should also be routinely praying for ourselves.
The final petition - "and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord" - can be prayed as an expression of the Apostle's eschatological hope: "until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so shall all Israel be saved". In other words, the eschatological character of this hope does not contradict or undermine the understanding of the Jewish vocation outlined by Robert Jenson:
God, in the time between the times and when there is no temple, wants a community that studies and obeys the Torah as Judaism does.
By doing so, Judaism thus recalls the Church to its fundamental dependence upon the covenant with Abraham and the truth that the Incarnate Word "was made of the seed of David according to the flesh". The eschatological hope which lies at the heart of this final petition of the collect, and its reference to Israel, can be summarised using words of Richard John Neuhaus:
Along the way to that fulfillment, Christians and Jews will disagree about whether we can name the name of the Lamb. And when it turns out that we Christians have rightly named the Lamb ahead of time, there will be, as St. Paul reminds us, no reason for boasting; for in the beginning, all along the way, and in the final consummation, it will be evident to all that the Lamb - which is to say salvation - is from the Jews.
We can pray the third Good Friday collect because it prays for others what we should be praying for ourselves. We can pray this collect because it gives voice to the Church's eschatological hope, the gathering in of the peoples at the end of the ages. Those versions which particularly mention the Jewish people witness to the mystery of Israel's vocation and the Church's dependence upon the witness of "thine ancient people". As for the 1662 version, its inclusion of "Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks" gives a universal vision, embracing Islam, atheism, and Christian heterodoxy, praying that all would receive what the Church prays for itself daily: "have mercy upon us, miserable offenders".
None of this is to deny that there are difficulties with the various iterations of this collect, or that careful teaching is required regarding its use (being particularly alert to misreadings of the collects promoting anti-Semitism or hostility towards Islam). Mindful of this, it is part of the Church's mission to plead for the world before the Cross of Christ on Good Friday, that all would receive mercy and not only "this thy family", in anticipation of the end of the ages when all will be brought to the One who is "a Lamb as it had been slain".
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The quotes from Jenson and Neuhaus are from their respective essays in the excellent Jews and Christians: People of God (2003), eds. Carl E. Braaten & Robert W. Jenson.
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