Benedictus (Canticle of Zechariah)

Luke's infancy narrative gives the Benedictus a dramatic frame. The priest Zechariah, serving in the Temple, is told by the angel Gabriel that his aged wife Elizabeth will bear a son, and because he doubts, he is struck mute. Nine months later, when the child is born and the neighbours assume he will bear his father's name, Zechariah writes on a tablet, his name is John, and at that moment his tongue is loosed, and his first words are the canticle, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people.

The song falls into two movements. The first blesses God for raising up a horn of salvation in the house of David, remembering the holy covenant and the oath sworn to Abraham, in language so saturated with the idiom of the Hebrew scriptures that scholars have long noted how thoroughly Jewish a text the church sings each morning. The second movement turns to the infant, and you, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, and closes on the canticle's great image, the dawn from on high that will visit those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, and guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke adds that fear came upon all the neighbours, and that the story of the mute priest whose speech returned as praise was repeated through all the hill country of Judea, the canticle's first audience.

The Benedictus is the Gospel canticle of the morning. In the Western Divine Office it crowns Lauds, the office of daybreak, every day of the year, standing to the morning as the Magnificat stands to the evening and the Nunc Dimittis to the night, and the assignment is no accident, for the canticle's closing image of the dawn from on high visiting those in darkness makes it the natural song of first light. It is sung with ceremony, the congregation standing and signing themselves as at the Gospel, and it carries a proper antiphon that changes with the feast, so that the fixed text is continually reframed by the calendar around it.

The Book of Common Prayer appointed it for Morning Prayer after the second lesson, giving the canticle a continuous English choral tradition alongside its Latin one. The office of Lauds for the dead gave the Benedictus a place in Christian burial, and its verses about being freed from the hand of enemies to serve God without fear have sounded over graves for centuries. Behind its liturgical career stands its theological one, for the canticle is a bridge text, a Jewish psalm of covenant and redemption standing at the threshold of the Christian story, sung by a priest of the old Temple about the forerunner of the new, which is why the church has never begun a morning without it.