The Prayer of Humble Access is a precious treasure of the Anglican liturgical tradition. Here it is in the form it has taken for most of its history:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
This prayer has led something of a nomadic existence, moving from place to place in the liturgy. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer composed it for his 1548 Order of the Communion — the first (incomplete) Communion service in English. Cranmer designed the Order (which consisted of exhortations, general confession, absolution, comfortable words, and what would become the Prayer of Humble Access) to be inserted into the Latin Mass after the priest’s Communion and before the Communion of the laity. The Prayer of Humble Access entered the first Book of Common Prayer (1549) in a similar place, namely, after the canon, before Communion. But in the 1552 Prayer Book, Cranmer placed the prayer before the prayer of consecration, following the Sanctus — which is where it has remained in the English prayer book (1662). It remained in this same place in the first editions of the American prayer book (1789 and 1892). But in the 1928 American revision, it moved back to its approximate location in 1549 (immediately before Communion)—and it is found in roughly the same spot in the Rite I service in the 1979 BCP.
While Cranmer’s second placement of the prayer has its merits (perhaps especially because the movement from the Sanctus to the Prayer of Humble Access parallels the response of the prophet to his vision of the thrice-holy LORD in Isaiah 6), I prefer its original location as a Communion devotion, simply because this is where I know it.
What of the prayer itself? The Prayer of Humble Access is Cranmer’s own composition. Characteristically, he makes good use of biblical language and draws from the riches of the Church’s historical liturgies. (More on these below.) Notice, first, the balance of the prayer; it divides perfectly into two halves of 53 words. Each half is beautifully proportioned. The first half is made up of two parallel thoughts, which, as in the psalms, build upon each other:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness,
but in thy manifold and great mercies. [25 words]
We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.
But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. [28 words]
The second half is similarly balanced, although weighted toward the final clause:
Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood, [21 words]
that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body,
and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, [20 words]
and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. [12 words]
Thus, in the structure of the prayer, our unworthiness is counterbalanced (and subsumed) by our merciful Lord, who, through his “manifold and great mercies,” gives himself to us, to the end that “we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”
Let’s look more closely at the language of the prayer, considering it line by line.
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.
This sentence follows closely the structure and language of a prayer of the prophet Daniel: “We do not cast our prayers before thee in our own righteousness, no: but only in thy great mercies” (Dan 9:18, Great Bible, 1539, modern spelling). Cranmer basically quotes this, adding manifold for amplification. Looking at the full prayer in Daniel reveals further resonances with Cranmer’s prayer. For example, Daniel prays, “O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, unto us pertaineth nothing but open shame” (9:7). And again, “Unto thee, O Lord our God, pertaineth mercy and forgiveness” (9:9). Cranmer follows Daniel in basing his plea on the character of the merciful Lord.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.
The imagery of gathering up crumbs from under a table comes from the Gospel story of the Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman (Matt. 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30). Traveling near Tyre and Sidon — important centers of the Phoenicians, the people renowned in antiquity as seafarers and traders — Jesus encounters a Phoenician woman, who begs him to heal her daughter, who has an unclean spirit. Jesus rebuffs her, first with silence, and then (apparently) harshly, saying to her: “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). To this, the woman responds, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). (Or, as Matthew has it: “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” [Matt. 15:27]). And Jesus says to her, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29).
Luther says that the woman “catches Christ in his own words”:
He compares her to a dog, she concedes it, and asks nothing more than that he let her be a dog, as he himself judged her to be. Where will Christ now take refuge? He is caught. Truly, people let the dog have the crumbs under the table; it is entitled to that. […] Now whoever understands here the actions of this poor woman and catches God in his own judgment, and says: Lord, it is true, I am a sinner and not worthy of thy grace; but still thou hast promised sinners forgiveness, and thou art come not to call the righteous, but … ‘to save sinners’ [1 Tim. 1:15]. Behold, then must God according to his own judgment have mercy upon us. (Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, Church Postil, [WA 17/2])
Likewise, Cranmer makes the woman’s words his own. He invites us to approach our Lord alongside this Gentile woman, to share in her faith, to take her words on our lips, remembering that we “who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13).
But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.
This sentence belongs with the previous one and completes its thought. Its language comes from a collect in the Gregorian Sacramentary, first translated by Cranmer for his 1544 Litany:
O God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive; Receive our humble petitions; and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us; for the honour of Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Advocate. Amen.
I know this prayer from the Ash Wednesday service in the 1928 American prayer book, and I find it deeply moving to pray in that context. Both prayers name the Lord as having the “property” of always having mercy. Which is to say that it is utterly characteristic of the Lord to have mercy; the Lord just is merciful. It belongs to the very nature of God to be merciful. It is who God is.
Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood … that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.
The second half of the Prayer of Humble Access draws on Christ’s great Bread of Life discourse in the Gospel of John:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:53–56)
This text, of course, is central for the Church’s teaching about Holy Communion. And it is a text that Cranmer draws on elsewhere. For example, in his Exhortation, he writes of the great benefit that we receive, “if with a truly penitent heart and lively faith we receive this holy Sacrament”: “for then we spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ, and drink his Blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we be made one with Christ, and Christ with us.”
This, in the end, is where the Prayer of Humble Access leads: to union with Christ. This is the desideratum, the end that we seek, in coming to the Table of our merciful Lord. Or, perhaps it would be better — and more true to the spirit of Cranmer’s prayer — to say that this is why our Lord brings us to his banquet and bids us welcome at his Table: that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.