The Gospel According to St Luke
Posts in Comfortable Words credited to ‘The Gospel According to St Luke’
Posts in Comfortable Words credited to ‘The Gospel According to St Luke’
A short prayer to Mary, blended from the greeting of the Archangel Gabriel and the greeting of her cousin Elizabeth.
This famous acclamation joins the greeting of the Archangel Gabriel when he announced to Mary the conception of her child Jesus, to the greeting of her cousin Elizabeth when the two women, now both pregnant, subsequently met. In both East and West today, additional lines are usually added; in the service books of the English Church of the Middle Ages, these two lines were enough.
The Virgin Mary’s spontaneous hymn of praise when she told her cousin about the angel Gabriel.
When the Virgin Mary told her cousin Elizabeth about the visit she had received from the angel Gabriel, she suddenly burst into this song, a very clever weaving together of Old Testament prophecies. This translation is taken from the English Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549.
The Song of Simeon, or ‘Nunc Dimittis’, which Simeon sang as he took the infant Jesus in his arms.
When Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple at Jerusalem, as the law required, to present him to God as their firstborn, old Simeon saw in the tiny baby the fulfilment of all his hopes. The translation is from the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549.