Psalm 100:1
a time and a season
A psalm for David himself. Mercy and judgment I will sing to thee, O Lord: I will sing (Psalm 100:1 DR)
In many missals you will find an excellent prayer of St. Augustine for use following the reception of Holy Communion. It perhaps sums up the internal struggle that we all experience. An excerpt:
Before Thy eyes, O Lord, we bring our offences, and we compare them with the stripes we have received.
If we consider the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.
What we have committed is very grave, what we have suffered is very slight.
We feel the punishment of sin, yet withdraw not from the obstinacy of sinning.
Under Thy lash our inconstancy is visited, but our sinfulness is not changed.
(Prayer of St. Augustine)
There is a fascinating interplay of mercy and judgment at work in this prayer, and he deals with this same interplay in this verse from Psalm 100. He begins by noting that in our own human experience there is an uneven application of the two:
For when men judge, sometimes overcome by mercy, they act against justice; and mercy, but not justice, seems to be in them: while sometimes, when they wish to enforce a rigid judgment, they lose mercy. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 101, 1.)
But God is not limited in such a way, and in him mercy and judgment are not actually two different things but are the same divine act. Rather, our experience of this divine act is mediated through time, and thus we experience the same divine act in a variegated way. There are seasons of mercy and judgment:
But God neither loses the severity of judgment in the bounty of mercy, nor in judging with severity loses the bounty of mercy. Suppose we distinguish these two, mercy and judgment, by time; for possibly, they are not placed in this order without a meaning, so that he said not judgment and mercy, but mercy and judgment: so that if we distinguish them by succession in time, perhaps we find that the present is the season for mercy, the future for judgment. (ibid.)
He observes that God’s season of mercy comes first in time in the order of creation, how the sun rises on the evil and the good, and that this is not an injustice in the face of sin because God allows this season to give opportunity for repentance.
However, we are often quick to despise God’s mercy and forbearance, and will even presume upon it:
Hear the Apostle distinguishing each season, and do thou also distinguish it....Do you think, he says, O man, that judgest them that do such things, and doest the same, that you shall escape the judgment of God? And as if we were to reply, Why do I commit such sins daily, and no evil occurs unto me? …Now hear the season of judgment… But you, says the Apostle, after your hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up unto yourself wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 101, 2.)
From this verse in this Psalm he concludes that our hope in God’s mercy must not make us disdainful of his judgment, or imagine that the season of mercy is without end. The season of mercy is a great gift to be taken advantage of while it lasts precisely because it will not last forever. St. Augustine uses St. Paul as an example, the latter who was:
"...a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy." "...The Lord, the righteous Judge, shall render to me at that day:" he adds, "and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing" and His kingdom. (ibid.)
He concludes by exhorting his readers, much like he does in his wonderful prayer, to not presume upon God’s mercy nor to live with impunity, but to be sober-minded about one’s faults, and to cry out for mercy while it is still in season:
Since therefore, brethren, we have a season of mercy let us not on that account flatter, or indulge ourselves, saying, God spares ever... (ibid.)
For this animation I found this verse in the form of a Responsory from the Hartker antiphonary, which was a 10th century manuscript from St. Gall, Switzerland. It is one of the earliest examples that includes both the text and musical notation for the Divine Office.
The neumes used in the Hartker manuscript are not notation in the modern sense, in that they don’t indicate precise pitch but only do so in a relative sense. Instead, they give more of the “flow” of the music, which would presumably have already been memorized by those singing it and thus would have likely served as a reminder of what was already known rather than something to sight sing from.
At any rate, I took the first line of this piece and cut out each syllable and neume in Photoshop, retaining the relative vertical positions on the manuscript. I then offset them in time to create the animation, while still retaining the relative position of syllable to neume(s).
The red “R” with a dash over it at the beginning indicates in the manuscript that this is a responsory.
I originally had thought of doing the entire responsory, but that would have simply gone too fast, and I think it was a better decision to keep it more limited to the text of the Psalm. I also toyed with just having it move across from left to right, keeping the whole text in view, but I ended up going this direction for purely aesthetic reasons.
Enjoy.
A psalm for David himself. Mercy and judgment I will sing to thee, O Lord: I will sing.
(Psalm 100:1 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: