In this antiphon the Church remembers Sinai. The Lord is the Lawgiver. Adonai is another name for the LORD. Adonai is used about 340 times in the Old Testament and is usually translated as Lord. Adonai was used in Israel as a substitute for the divine Name, Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton. Adonai evokes the majesty of the one true God who gave His Law on Sinai and before that appeared in the burning bush to Moses. When Adonai appeared to Moses it was with the promise of the divine Name: I AM. The great I AM would save His people Israel from slavery in Egypt. He gave the Law to save us from ourselves, for without law we resort to brutality in word and deed. The Old Adam needs God’s Law.
Flannery O’Connor was a novelist and short story writer and for what it’s worth, one of my favorite writers. She lived a short life, because of lupus, and she was a devout Roman Catholic living in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the “Christ obsessed south”, as she put it. After she published a novel, Wise Blood, it was reviewed in Time and she wrote to a friend about the attention it was receiving:
Although I am a Catholic writer, I don’t care to get labeled as such in the popular sense of it, as it is then assumed that you have some religious ax to grind. However, since the review in Time, my mail has been full of attempts to save me from the Church…
This letter is dated 23 April 1960. Not much has changed of the secularist society trying to save us from the Church or Christians from Christianity, or believers from the Bible, or the faithful from the Lord. Curious isn’t it? By so saving us, then we won’t be narrow minded and mean spirited. Granted that there are such in the Church, yet it was by God’s grace, that ‘narrow-minded and mean spirited’ Christians developed schools and universities, hospitals and orphanages, cared for the dying, fed the hungry, did not abort their young, nor sought personal revenge. They did so not to be saved but because they were saved from their own idols. Why did Christians so serve? God’s Law showed them by His Law the way to go, and when in sin, the Way out: He sent His Son to bear our sin and be our Savior.
In a secularist post World War I Germany, which earlier in the century had developed a Biblical scholarship denying the Bible as God’s Word, it was ripe in it’s secularist liberalism for open mindedness. It has to be remembered that the Nazis were both anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. The path to tyranny is a Church-less, Word-less, God-less, Law-less, Christ-less world. It’s in the novel Wise Blood that Hazel Motes becomes a street preacher proclaiming “the Church without Christ”. Sadly timely. The soul is made to adore and without the Lord, will adore the idols of this world and the Leader can step into the temple of our souls and the soul becomes the haunt of the new Baals. It is into the idolatrous world that the Lord came, born of the Virgin Mary, to save us from those trying to save us from the Lord…and for our would be ‘saviors’ as well. And this is the reason the Church is called to pray and sing till the end of all days:
Concordia and Koinonia 