By Paul Inwood, November 18, 2025
Advent is a time when musicians can run into difficulties with their pastors. If you’ve never encountered this yourself, you may think you needn’t be bothered by what follows, but in fact it concerns all of us ― because the problem lies in the structure of Advent itself.
Often the first hint the musician has of an impending difficulty is when the pastor unexpectedly forbids the use of the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel before the 3rd Sunday of Advent. The reason for this is that the priest is working out of an older tradition that he will have received during his seminary training. In this tradition, the structure of Advent is in two sections: (1) up to December 16, and (2) after December 16. For many centuries the Divine Office used the “O Antiphons” (so called because each one begins with the word “O”) as the Magnificat antiphon in the run-up to Christmas. Traditionally these ancient antiphons, rooted in the Old Testament, were not begun until December 17, and then one was sung each day until Christmas, before and after the Magnificat.
The hymn O come, O come, Emmanuel is a translation of these “O” antiphons (though with the antiphons in a different order from that in the Office). This is why some priests do not want to hear these words until after December 16 ― the Church formerly did not allow them to be used before December 17, and the current Divine Office still continues with this arrangement.
Table 1 shows the twofold structure of Advent.
Table 1
STRUCTURE OF ADVENT (Weekday Lectionary and Divine Office)
| Up to December 16 | “O” Antiphons traditionally forbidden |
| December 17-24 (excluding the 4th Sunday of Advent) | “O” Antiphons, one each day (Divine Office and Weekday Gospel Acclamations, but NB: the sequence of antiphons is not identical) |
As you can see from Table 1, not only does the Divine Office still maintain this twofold structure of Advent, but so does the current Weekday Lectionary. Each scripture verse laid down for the Gospel Acclamations for December 17-24 also is one of the O Antiphons. However, once again the order of the Antiphons is not identical with that of the Magnificat antiphons in the Divine Office. (Here, we are reaping the rewards of two different working groups of the Consilium, the body responsible for the postconciliar revisions. One group worked on the Lectionary, another on the Office. Unfortunately they didn’t see a need to communicate with each other!)
So the confusion which now exists is compounded. The Advent Weekday Gospel Acclamations do not match the sequence of antiphons in the Divine Office, and the order of verses in O Come, O Come, Emmanuel does not match either of them. Worse still, different translations of the hymn have the stanzas in differing sequences!
Table 2 attempts to show how this looks in practice:
Table 2
“O” ANTIPHONS ANALYSIS
| December | Divine Office | Weekday Lectionary | J.M. Neale et al. translation(19th/20th centuries) | T.A. Lacey translation (18th century) |
| 17 | 17 O Wisdom | 17 | 23 O come, O come, Emmanuel | 23 O come, O come, Emmanuel |
| 18 | 18 O Adonai | 18 | 17 O come, thou Wisdom from on high | 17 O come, thou Wisdom from on high! |
| 19 | 19 O Root of Jesse | 19 | 18 O come, O come, thou Lord of might | 18 O come, O come, Adonai |
| 20 | 20 O Key of David | 23 or 20 | 19 O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free | 19 O come, thou Root of Jesse, draw |
| 21 | 21 O Dawn | 20 or 23 | 21 O come, thou dayspring, come and cheer | 20 O come, thou Lord of David’s Key! |
| 22 | 22 O King of the nations | 19 or 22 | 20 O come, thou Key of David, come | 21 O come, O come, thou Dayspring bright! |
| 23 | 23 O Emmanuel | 22 | 22 O come, desire of nations, bind | 22 O come, Desire of nations! show |
| 24 | —– | 21 |
Now we come to the crux of the problem, which is that the Sunday Lectionary in Advent has a completely different structure, one which bears no relation to the structure used in the Divine Office nor the one in the Weekday Lectionary. On Sundays, which is what our pastoral musician is normally concerned with, Advent is divided not into two but into three parts. This division was first noted by John Ainslie in 1971 and incorporated into the organisation of the UK hymnbook Praise the Lord, revised and enlarged (Geoffrey Chapman, Wimbledon, 1972). The three sections of Advent in that book were entitled Christ’s Second Coming, Preparing for Christ’s Coming, and Preparing for Christmas. Table 3 uses different terminology but the meaning is the same:
Table 3
STRUCTURE OF ADVENT (Sunday Lectionary)
| The Second Coming | 1st Sunday of Advent |
| The Coming of Our Redeemer | 2nd Sunday of Advent 3rd Sunday of Advent |
| Pre-Christmas | 4th Sunday of Advent |
This structure is based on an analysis of the scriptures for each day, and it is the same in all three years of the Lectionary cycle.
What are the implications of this structure? Well, on the 1st Sunday the readings encourage us to think about Christ’s coming again in glory at the end of time. On the 2nd and 3rd Sundays the theme is Christ the Liberator, the Redeemer, the Messiah, who comes to set his people free, bringing justice and peace. On the 4th Sunday, we are looking at the historical prelude to Christmas, with the narratives of the Annunciation, etc.
The 2nd and 3rd Sundays, therefore, are the optimum time to sing O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, with its emphasis on the Messiah who sets his people free (free thine own from Satan’s tyranny) and prepares to lead them to the Kingdom (make straight the way that leads on high). John the Baptist appears on these Sundays as the forerunner of the Messiah. The hymn does have verses which tie in somewhat with the Second Coming, but the primary thrust of this hymn makes it fit most comfortably on the 2nd and 3rd Sundays, and not so well on the 1st and 4th Sundays. This is in contradiction to the older tradition, which would have the hymn only on the 3rd and 4th Sundays but not on the 1st and 2nd.
Which should we choose? 2nd and 3rd (Sunday Lectionary) or 3rd and 4th (Divine Office/Weekday Lectionary)? It is my contention that it is the current Sunday Lectionary that people experience in our parishes, and therefore this must be considered as taking priority over the older tradition of the Office. Most of our parishioners do not pray the Office, and many do not attend Mass on weekdays. What they are nourished with is the Sunday scriptures, and the music we select is based on those scriptures and not on whatever may or may not be happening in the Office. Perhaps one day both the Office and the Sunday and Weekday Lectionaries will be revised to bring them into closer harmony….
All of this means that we need to take extra care when planning our music for Advent. Anyone who uses O Come, O Come, Emmanuel as a kind of signature tune on all four Sundays of Advent may be just as much mistaken as the priest who won’t let that hymn be used at all until December 17. If we look at the readings, they will tell us what to do.
Finally, just to make life even more complicated, in one sense Advent actually begins before Advent! Some people are already very familiar with this. The theme of Christ’s Second Coming can already be found in the Sundays of Ordinary Time that precede the beginning of Advent itself, and this means that we can already be “preparing the way” by using hymns and songs on this theme before Advent itself starts ― see Table 4. If this seems strange, Advent in the Ambrosian Rite lasts for six weeks, not four, and some non-Catholic denominations have different numbers of weeks too. There is nothing sacred about a four-week Advent, and in fact different regions of the Church have had widely differing lengths for the Advent season at different times in history.
Table 4
THE SECOND COMING (Sunday Lectionary)
| Year C (Ordinary Time) to Year A (Advent) | Year A (Ordinary Time) to Year B (Advent) | Year B(Ordinary Time) to Year C (Advent) | |
| 32nd Sunday | Yes | Yes | No |
| 33rd Sunday | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 34th Sunday (Christ the King) | No | Yes | Yes |
| 1st Sunday of Advent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The 2nd Reading begins this “last times” theme even earlier, on Sundays | 29, 30, 31 | 30 | 32 |
© 1979, 1982, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2013, Paul Inwood
[This article has been revised, expanded and refined over the years, and also used as the basis for workshop presentations. In fact it started off life as a workshop at a Los Angeles Liturgy Conference in 1995, and some material is taken from an article in the St Thomas More Centre resource book He Comes to Set Us Free (1979). The string of copyright dates might pre-empt anyone tempted to comment that they have heard some or all of this before somewhere, or wondering if the author has stolen it from someone else!]
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