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Prayers

The Gelasian prayers to repay good for evil

Two short prayers from an early Roman Mass book. They ask God for the love that repays good for evil, and that we may forgive as we ask to be forgiven.

Picture: Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son, about 1668

The words of the prayer

Plain English only: no traditional English wording is given for this prayer

O God, You made every creature in love,and You made man for such mercythat You would redeem even him from his ungodly ways.Give Your servants this love,so that Your example may move themto repay good for evil.Through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,and graciously grantthat we too may forgive our neighbourswhat we ask You to forgive us.Through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Plain English by Wiser Walk, from our own English, from the Latin of H. A. Wilson’s 1894 edition of the Gelasian Sacramentary. How the wording is made.

When it is said

In the Gelasian Sacramentary the prayer to forgive our neighbours is said after Communion, at a Mass that asks for love. The prayer to repay good for evil is the second prayer of the next Mass.

Here they stand the other way round, with an Amen at the end. Both are short enough to pray anywhere, whenever someone has wronged you.

Where it comes from

No author known

Where they come from

Both prayers come from the Gelasian Sacramentary, a book of the Roman Church’s Mass prayers. Its one surviving copy was probably made near Paris about AD 750, from older prayers of the church at Rome. No one knows who wrote them.

The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity, University of Oxford, record E07005; H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1894), pages 247 and 248

An older form

Both prayers are already in the Leonine Sacramentary, an older book of Roman Mass prayers. Its manuscript at Verona was written early in the 600s. There the prayer to repay good for evil opens simply on God the Father, without the words about creation and redemption. It also ends with one more line, which asks that God’s servants long for their enemies to be set right rather than delight in revenge.

C. L. Feltoe, Sacramentarium Leonianum (Cambridge, 1896), pages 63 and 76

The Scripture in it

For at just the right time, while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:6-8 Echoed Christ died for the ungodly while we were still sinners, the example the prayer asks us to follow.

Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.

1 Peter 3:9 Echoed Peter asks believers not to repay evil with evil, but with blessing.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Matthew 6:12-13 Echoed The Lord’s Prayer asks God to forgive us as we forgive others and to deliver us from the evil one.

Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.

In Latin

Deus, qui quum omnes creaturas diligens feceris,

in eam indulgentiam hominem,

ut etiam illum ab impietatibus redimeres, condidisti,

da servis tuis hunc caritatis affectum,

ut bona pro malis rependere tuo incitentur exemplo.

Per.

Libera nos, Domine, ab omni malo,

propitiusque concede

ut quae nobis poscimus relaxari,

ipsi quoque proximis remittamus.

Per.

From H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1894), pages 247 and 248.

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Berean Standard Bible