The glory of Jerusalem, in the Gradual we just sang, is a quotation. Open the Book of Judith at the fifteenth chapter and there it is, word for word: thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou art the joy of Israel, thou art the honour of our people. Joachim the high priest has come down from the city with all his elders to see a widow from a small hill town, and that is what he says to her in front of everybody. The Church did not invent the glory of Jerusalem for today. It went and got it.

Look at what it did and did not change. In the first half of the Gradual the Missal quotes Judith again, this time from the thirteenth chapter, where Ozias says blessed art thou, O daughter, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the earth. Today’s version reads blessed art thou, O Virgin Mary.

The vocative is swapped. Everything else stands. Two words are lifted out and two words are dropped in, and the sentence carries over unbroken, and the glory of Jerusalem goes with it.

The same thing happens in the Alleluia. Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee is a line from a love song, the fourth chapter of the Canticle of Canticles, addressed to a bride by a man who is not thinking about doctrine. The Missal makes it O Mary, and then it adds four words that are nowhere in the chapter: of original sin.

So the Church has taken a love poem, changed who is being spoken to, and written its own theology into the second half of the line. It is not hiding this. It is right there on the page, one line above the glory of Jerusalem.

I want to stay with that, because it is the whole day. The Church’s highest praise of the sinless woman is not composed for her. It is borrowed, and the borrowing is visible, and the only thing altered is the name of the person being addressed. The glory of Jerusalem is a sentence that fits two women who have almost nothing in common.

Consider who the first one was. Judith is a widow of Bethulia. She fasts, she is respected, and when the town is under siege and its elders have privately agreed to surrender in five days if God does not act, she goes out through the gate with a maid and a bag of food. She goes into the camp of the besieging general, she lets him believe she has come over to his side, she waits four days, and on the fourth night, when he is too drunk to stand, she takes his own sword off the bedpost and cuts off his head. Then she walks back through the gate before dawn carrying it in the food bag, and the glory of Jerusalem is what they say to her when she gets there.

That is the woman the glory of Jerusalem was said to first. Not privately. Publicly, at the gate, by the high priest, with the whole town listening. And the same sentence, unaltered but for a name, is what the Church chose to sing over a girl in Nazareth who is about to say be it done unto me.

If the sentence were a purity ranking, it could not do that. A ranking is a measurement, and a measurement that returns the same value for a widow with a general’s blood on her hands and for the woman this feast calls all fair is not measuring anything.

The glory of Jerusalem is not a score. It is what a people say out loud about the one who stood between them and the thing that was coming for them. Ozias did not audit Judith. He did not have a list.

He named what she was to them, in public, and the whole assembly said amen to it. That is how the glory of Jerusalem gets said, both times it is said.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who took over the altar linens at her parish when she was twenty-six, because the woman who had done it before her died in the spring and somebody had to. She was still doing it at sixty-seven. Every Monday she came in through the side door, ran the flat iron over the corporals and purificators on a board with a scorch mark shaped like Ireland, folded them into thirds, and put them back in the shallow drawer of the linen press. Four decades and change. She had a bad opinion of three successive pastors and she never once said so where it would have cost anyone anything.

What she said, when a younger woman asked her near the end why she had kept it up so long, was that she had stopped thinking of it as something she did. It was more like a place she stood.

She said the parish had been going to have clean linen on that altar on Sunday whether or not she was the one who saw to it, and that the only real question, every Monday for forty-one years, was whether she was going to be the one standing there. This is what a lifelong faith actually looks like from the inside, and it is much less dramatic than either its admirers or its critics imagine.

The glory of Jerusalem is a title of exactly that kind. It is conferred by standing somewhere, not by scoring well. The glory of Jerusalem is not handed over for a result.

Now the doctrine, because it says the same thing in a harder register. The Church’s claim about Mary is not that she behaved better than everyone else and was rewarded for it. It is a claim about a condition, and about when that condition was or was not present.

The Catholic Encyclopedia puts the technical point as sharply as it can be put: the formal active essence of original sin was not removed from her soul, as it is removed from others by baptism; it was excluded, it never was in her soul. Preserved, not cleansed. Not a record that came out well. A condition that was never contracted, and the glory of Jerusalem sung over it.

Sit with what that means about conditions in general. Original sin, whatever else the doctrine holds, is defined as something inherited rather than committed. No one does it. It arrives with you.

It is present before you are old enough to have an opinion about anything, and the Church has always taught that the infant carrying it has done nothing wrong. That is the whole architecture of the claim, and today is the one day in the year the architecture is fully visible.

Today the Church says of one person that the inherited thing simply was not there, by an act performed before she existed to earn it or to forfeit it. The glory of Jerusalem is what it sings while saying so.

Which means the feast cannot be used the way it is usually used. The glory of Jerusalem is not held over anyone’s head. If an inherited condition says nothing about the worth of the person carrying it, that is either true generally or it is not true at all, and the Church has staked a solemn definition on it being true.

Here is where the day’s own text obliges us to be specific, because there is a version of this that has done real damage. Disabled people, and people living with congenital and inherited conditions, have been told for a very long time, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that what their body carries is a statement about them. That the condition is a verdict, or a consequence, or something to be read for meaning.

The Church’s own most exalted teaching about an inherited condition says the opposite in the plainest terms it has: a thing you did not do is not a thing you did. The glory of Jerusalem, sung today over a woman defined entirely by what she did not contract, is not a ranking of bodies.

It is the one feast in the calendar that makes the ranking impossible to build. You cannot hold the glory of Jerusalem over somebody as a standard, because the day it belongs to has already ruled that an inherited condition says nothing about the person carrying it.

This is a different claim from the one about merit, which came up only three days ago in any merits of ours. That question was about whether we can put anything on the table when we come to God, and the answer was no, and it was a comfort. Today’s question is not about the table at all, and the glory of Jerusalem is not an answer to it. It is about whether a condition that arrived without you is evidence of anything, and the answer is that the Church has defined, at the highest level of solemnity available to it, that in at least one case it was simply absent, conferred by an act, unconnected to conduct. The glory of Jerusalem belongs to that second argument, not the first.

For anyone reading this who holds none of the theology: the ethical claim underneath stands on its own without a word of the doctrine. A person is not responsible for what they inherited. Praise given to one person is not an accusation against everybody else. Both of those are ordinary common sense about fairness, and the strange thing about this feast is that it is the place the Church wrote them down most emphatically.

Look once more at the Epistle, which is Wisdom speaking in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, and which the Church reads today as being about Mary. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. That is the verb the feast turns on, sitting in a text a thousand years older than the feast, and the Missal found it there. This is the same book, a different chapter, from the one we read on the nineteenth of November in let her works praise her; that passage was about a woman assessed by her output, and this one is about someone who was there before there was any output to assess. The glory of Jerusalem sits closer to the second than the first.

And notice the mood of the passage. Wisdom is not working in it. Wisdom is playing before him at all times, delighted every day, and her delights are to be with the children of men. Whatever else the Church means by reading this today, it is not describing an examination. It is describing somebody enjoying herself in the presence of God before the foundations of the earth were balanced.

That is the frame the Epistle hands us for the glory of Jerusalem, and it is a lighter one than we usually bring.

The Introit does the same work with clothing. He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation: and with the robe of justice he hath covered me. The garment is put on from outside, which is exactly the image we had eight days ago on the first Sunday of Advent in put on the armour of light, where the same picture ran the other way and we were the ones told to put something on.

Both are true and they are not in competition. On the first Sunday of Advent we dress ourselves. Today somebody is dressed. The glory of Jerusalem is a garment of the second kind.

The Gospel is three verses long, which is the shortest reading we have had in this season, and it stops in a strange place. It stops at blessed art thou among women, before Mary has said anything at all. We do not get her question, we do not get the angel’s answer, we do not get her consent.

The Church cuts the Annunciation off at the greeting on purpose, because today is not about what she agreed to. Today is about what was already true of her when the angel walked in. The glory of Jerusalem is announced before the conversation starts.

That is the last thing, and then I will stop. All three of the borrowed sentences in today’s Mass are addressed to somebody. Blessed art thou. Thou art the glory of Jerusalem. Thou art all fair.

Every one of them is second person, spoken out loud, to a face. The high priest came down from the city with his elders and said it where everyone could hear. Gabriel is sent into a city and comes in and says it.

None of this is hidden and none of it is private. None of it is a conclusion anybody reached about her afterward by going through the evidence. The glory of Jerusalem is a thing said to her, in the open, before she has done the thing she is remembered for.

So if this feast has a use for the rest of us, and I think it does, it is not as a standard. The glory of Jerusalem is a demonstration that the Church’s best sentence is portable, that it was said first to a widow who had done something terrible and necessary, and that when it was moved it was moved whole.

What the day asks is not whether you measure up to Mary. It asks whether you are willing to hear the glory of Jerusalem said to you before you have earned it, in public, by people who need you. And then to not spend the rest of your life arguing them out of it.

↑ The order resumes below.