O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you:
Mercifully accept our prayers;
and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace,
that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(BCP, 216)
Historical introduction
This ancient prayer dates from at least the late 7th century and was used in several seasons across the various medieval sacramentaries and missals.[1] In the 1662 English BCP, this Collect was used for the First Sunday after Trinity; in our present BCP, this Collect was moved forward in the church year to the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany.[2] In our 1979 use, the revisers changed from “the weakness of our mortal nature” to simply “our weakness.”[3] Our 1979 use has retained Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s revision of the Latin from “we can do nothing” to “we can do nothing good.”[4]
This Collect, like The Collect for The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, does not appear to be summarizing a theme from all three Gospel lessons.
The Preamble
While the Preamble, “O God,” doesn’t provide us with details about to whom we pray, the Acknowledgement and Petition do. In the Acknowledgement we profess aspects of who God is to us and in the Petition we confess our dependence upon God.
The Acknowledgement
The Acknowledgement, “the strength of all who put their trust in you” echoes Psalm 28:7 and Isaiah 12:2 (note: Isaiah 12:2-6 is the beginning of Canticle 9, The First Song of Isaiah, used in Morning Prayer, BCP 86). God is described as our strength; God’s strength is in contrast to our weakness, which we confess in the Petition. God, our strength, is another way of describing God’s abundant response to the petition we pray in The Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day in which we ask to share in the divine life of Christ who is the Life of the world (John 6:35, John 11:25, and John 14:6).
That God is our strength is relational and experiential—God, our strength, is what we experience as the result of our trusting in God rather than in the things that the world considers to be dependable for our security: our own understanding apart from God (Proverbs 3:5), weapons of war (Psalm 20:7), or rulers or nations (Psalm 146:3). Trust is our response to God’s self-revelation as the One who is strong and who shares that strength with those who love God.
The Petition
The Petition, “Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace,” begins with calling upon another aspect of how God reveals God’s self to us – as the Merciful One.
As already noted, the translation of what we currently have as “our weakness” was, prior to 1979, translated as “the weakness of our human nature,” providing a poetic contrast between God’s divine nature and our human nature. While there is much to ponder in this poetic contrast, the baptismal life that God is inviting us to live feels like a struggle when we try to become Christ-like in our own power and by our own choices. Living into the Baptismal Covenant reveals our weakness and our need to abide in Christ. That is, being able to do anything that is good is the result of abiding in the fullness of our Triune God through Jesus Christ (John 15:4-5). God alone is good, but through the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are undergoing transformation so that we are able to imitate God, expressing the character of God in how we live (Galatians 5:22-25; see also The Collect for Proper 17, BCP 233), and shining with the radiance of Christ’s glory (see The Collect for The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, BCP 215).
The Aspiration
In the Aspiration, “that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed,” we ask for strength to do what is good not for the sake of doing good alone, but so that we are able to live lives that are pleasing to God. The desire to please the one whom we love is an act of love. We seek to will and do what we know our Beloved desires, not to win our Beloved’s love, but because we are already loved (1 John 4:10-13). In The Collect for Proper 25 (BCP 235), we pray for grace to love what God commands through the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. In The Collect for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (BCP 225), we ask for grace to love God. This Collect continues this ongoing petition and provides us the reason we need this petition granted, expressed in different ways in different Collects: we need God as our strength to help us to live lives that, through our desires and our actions, express what God desires, and, in the willing and doing, please God.
The Pleading
The Pleading, “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen,” orients our prayer to address all three persons of the Holy Trinity—God our strength is realized and experienced through being caught up in and living in the power of the Holy Trinity.
For your consideration:
To consider what God’s strength looks like in the baptized (even if you were baptized before 1979 or in a different denomination), look through the Prayers for the Candidates (BCP 305-6) and the prayer prayed after baptism (BCP 308).
In what ways has God revealed your weakness during this past year? In what ways has God revealed God’s strength so that you can find new ways to will and do what is good?
In what ways has God revealed our weaknesses as a parish, as a diocese, and as a denomination over the past year? In what ways has God revealed God’s strength working in us? In what new ways are we being invited to will and do what is good and pleasing to God?
O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you:
Mercifully accept our prayers;
and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace,
that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
© 2021 Donna Hawk-Reinhard, revised in 2022 and 2023; edited by Kate McCormick
Want to know more about the Collect format or this series of meditations? You can find that information here.
[1] In the Gelasian Sacramentary, this is the first collect for the Sixth Sunday after the Paschal Octave (the Seventh Sunday of Easter); in the Gregorian Sacramentary, the Sarum missal, and previous Prayer Books, and it was appointed for First Sunday after Trinity Sunday which is the Second Sunday after Pentecost in our reckoning of time). In both the Bobbio missal and the Missale Francorum, it was used later in the liturgy: in the Bobbio Missal, it was the offertory prayer in the second of five Masses; in the Missale Francorum, it was prayed before the list of persons remembered in prayer. Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 172.
[2] Paul V. Marshall, Prayer Book Parallels, (New York: Church Publishing, 1990) II.100-1.
[3] Marshall, 2.100-101 and Hatchett, 172.
[4] Hatchett, 172.