March 2021 – Page 3 – The Raynville Rambler

This is your coronation

“The Saviour with the Crown of Thorns” Vasili Nesterenko

The last in this block of specifically Good Friday hymns is another modern one, “This is your coronation” by Sylvia Dunstan. The suggested tune, however, is Bach’s Passion Chorale (actually an older tune than Bach, but his use of it in his passion oratorios ensured its lasting fame and association with Good Friday).

The theme of the Crucifixion is the same as yesterday’s, and some of the same ideas are there: the cross of wood, Jesus’ physical suffering, the blood on his face, his death as a sacrifice, the pardon for our sins that he achieved. But the tone is so different: the tune is sorrowful rather than triumphant, Jesus is presented less as bearing the Father’s wrath towards humanity, and more the willing actor in this cosmic drama.

The three verses each look at one of the traditional images of Jesus Christ: King (verse 1, “this is your coronation”), Judge (verse 2, “Eternal judge on trial”) and High Priest (verse 3). The cross is portrayed as the king’s “throne of timber” (a lovely image), the judge who is condemned by humanity still acts with love to pardon us, and the priest offers himself as the final sacrifice. These three images mirror to some extent those of the gifts of the Magi at Epiphany: gold for a king, incense for a priest and myrrh for a sacrifice.

Altogether this seems a more satisfactory hymn to sing on Good Friday than Townend’s offering yesterday.

O to see the dawn of the darkest day

Another Good Friday hymn from Sing Praise today, and from completely the “other end of the candle” as we say in the Church of England: after two Catholic hymns on the theme, we have one from the well-known Evangelical hymnwriter Stuart Townend, “O to see the dawn of the darkest day”. The words contain explicit reminders of the violence of the Crucifixion: torn and beaten, nailed to a cross of wood, the pain on [Jesus’] face, his blood-stained brow, the earthquake as he died. I haven’t seen the movie “the passion of the Christ”, but it supposedly showed the likely true extent of the violence committed against him, which is minimised in most re-tellings of the story.

But the way Jesus was treated physically was not unique. Then and now, thousands of people ore tortured and killed for their religious or political beliefs, race or sexuality. There was something else going on at Calvary. The lyrics also remind us therefore of the purpose of Jesus’ death: “bearing the awesome weight of sin”, “through your suffering I am free, death is crushed to death, life is mine to live”; and in the chorus, “Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath, we stand forgiven at the cross”. The inclusion of reference to the Father’s wrath in several of Townend’s hymns is controversial: some Christians see this as essential to understanding what was happening on that awful day, that without Jesus bearing the judgement of God for our individual sins in a physical way we could never enter into a guilt-free relationship with God. Others see that as a perverted understanding of redemption, with an alternative interpretation that it was Jesus’ love for humanity that held him to the cross, not only demonstrating that peaceful resistance to evil is possible but somehow overcoming in those hours the dark powers outside ourselves that prevent us from a full and free relationship with God in this life and the next. My own inclination is towards the second of these, but there has to be some element of recognition of our own wilful sins being dealt with as well as the ‘sin of the world’. God’s love or his wrath – or a bit of both? Just part of the complex and ever-fascinating Easter story.

O Cross of Christ, immortal tree

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another Good Friday one, addressed ostensibly to the cross itself. Yesterday’s comments about it being better to worship Christ himself apply here too; not surprisingly it is from the Catholic community at Stanbrook (see also 14 January and 26 February).

Taking the words at face value though, the cross is seen in verse 1 as a shelter for the world, from what is not stated, but perhaps from the pain of death. In verse 2 the dead wood of the cross itself is contrasted with the ‘tree of life’ that it represents, that is the tree at the heart of the Garden of Eden which Adam and Eve never reached, but which in the book of Revelation appears again at the heart of the heavenly city as a symbol of eternal life in Christ.

In verse 3 there’s another contrast, between the ‘ages running their course’ and the cross that ‘stands unmoved [as] foundation of the universe’. This suggests the doctrine that Christ’s saving death was part of God’s plan even before the world was made, and thus outside time. There is no space here to go into questions of how cosmology and theology interact: other writers such as Polkinghorne have gone much further in that direction than I could. Enough to say that the more scientists try to understand the nature of time and space, the stranger they seem, and writing off God as creator, redeemer (perfector) and sustainer of the universe may not be as obvious as it may seem.

So taking these three verses together, we have the cross (i.e. Christ’s saving death) as a shelter from death, a symbol of eternal life and a constant in a changing and inexplicable world. No wonder that this Christian symbol is still popular in art and personal devotion.

The final verse exhorts us to ‘give glory to the risen Christ’, therefore a verse for Easter rather than on Good Friday.

As Royal banners are unfurled

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another Good Friday one, and a twentieth century translation of a much older sixth century Christian text, ‘Vexilla Regis’ (‘the King’s banner’). In the hymn book it’s set to a version of the traditional monastic chant, but John has played it to a better known English hymn tune ‘Gonfalon Royal’ that also allows for the Amen at the end.

I looked up the original on Wikipedia where several English translations are offered. The Latin original is said to have been written to celebrate the arrival of a large relic of the True Cross which had been sent to Queen Radegunda. The ‘banner’ may therefore be intended as meaning the cross itself as a sign and symbol of our salvation, although another interpretation would be Pilate’s sign above the Cross, “Iesus Nazarei Rex Judaeorum” (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).

The hymn celebrates the same paradox of ‘sadness and gladness’ that I explored yesterday but goes into more detail of how the scandal of the cross is for Christians a sign of hope. The optional verse 6 sums it up concisely: “The saviour, victim, sacrifice, is through his dying glorified; his life is overcome by death and leaps up, sweeping death aside”.

The ‘veneration of the cross’ is of course a Catholic practice which is not part of the Christian tradition I come from. As the Catholic News Agency website explains, “Adoration or veneration of an image or representation of Christ’s cross does not mean that we actually adore the material image, but rather what it represents. In kneeling before the crucifix and kissing it we are paying the highest honour to our Lord’s cross as the instrument of our salvation. Because the Cross is inseparable from His sacrifice, in reverencing His Cross we, in effect, adore Christ.” But why not ‘cut out the middleman’ and worship Christ himself rather than the inanimate wood on which he hung?

A time to watch, a time to pray

Calvary shrine in the grounds of the church of Our Lady and St Peter, Laisterdyke, Bradford

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is, unusually for this book, a Victorian one rather than a modern one: J M Neale’s “A time to watch, a time to pray”. Like the other hymns for this weekend it is intended for Good Friday and helps us look forward to that commemoration of Jesus’ death at the end of Lent.

In a few verses it tries to capture the paradox of the day that is reflected in its name. If you do a web search for “why Good Friday?” you will find articles not only from religious websites and Wikipedia, but secular newspapers and other sites too. What is good about a ‘blameless’ (if controversial) prophet and healer dying in agony after an unfair trial on false charges?

There are two traditional explanations for the name: as a corruption of “God’s Friday” because Jesus is regarded by his followers as a manifestation of God; or because we also believe that the suffering and death of Jesus was ‘good’ because it was actually part of God’s plan for him and achieved the goal of taking away the effect of human sin by bearing the penalty of separation from God on our behalf.

Hence the second part of verse 1, “the saddest, yet the gladdest [day] too, that earth or heaven ever knew”. Verse 2 explores the sadness in the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, and verse 3 the gladness in our sin being borne away. The last verse praises him as saviour – “Yours is the glory, ours the shame; by all the pain your love endured, let all our many sins be cured”.

Going back to the opening line, “A time to watch, a time to pray”. Even those churches that normally try to ensure their main Sunday service lasts no more than an hour will invite people to pend several hours on Good Friday in a programme of hymns, Bible readings, maybe following a solemn procession around the church (the “stations of the cross”) or around their local community, and taking time for personal reflection. Good Friday (and Easter day – the two are inseparable as neither makes sense without the other) are the true centre of the Christian year, not the more popular celebration of Christmas, and deserve that “time to watch and pray”.

A purple robe, a crown of thorns

A Good Friday procession to the Church of the Assumption, Beeston, Nottingham

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Timothy Dudley-Smith’s “A purple robe, a crown of thorns”. In one way this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves as it’s clearly a hymn about the Crucifixion, so would better be set for Holy Week, but the hymn book has so many hymns for Holy Week that I have to start getting them in early so that I’m not still singing songs about the Passion after Easter!

The copyright information doesn’t say when the lyrics or melody were written, but it was probably still quite new when I first came across it. It was as a newly committed and confirmed Christian, so probably around 1981/82. Up to that point I only knew the mainly traditional hymns that were sung at school assemblies, so to discover that there was a whole world of different styles of music in worship was rather exciting. The church I attended as a student sang many contemporary ‘choruses’, which sound rather dated forty years on, as well as some older hymns.

This one fits nicely between the two. It’s not a typical 1980s chorus but nor is it a traditional hymn (i.e. several verses sung to the same tune). I’m not even sure whether to describe it as a ‘hymn’ or a ‘song’. It’s a ‘hymn’ in so far as it has five verses with a regular metrical pattern of words and the words are mostly making factual statements about Christ’s death. On the other hand the words are in the first person – “I see my Saviour stand … I see my Saviour go … I see my Saviour bear [the cross and all our sins] … I see my Saviour die … I sing my Saviour’s name” which is more the style of a worship song.

Musically, it’s noted as “common metre” so that it could in theory be set to any number of traditional hymn tunes, but that would rob the hymn of its character. The music by David Wilson appears to have been written especially for these words, and the five verses have three melodies in a pattern of A-B-C-A-B which is found commonly in more recent worship songs. The melodies themselves however are in a minor key, as befits the solemnity and despair of Good Friday. The final verse sings of Jesus’ reign on high, so should probably be omitted if it’s actually sung in Holy Week when we try not to anticipate the ‘happy ending’ of the story.

So this is a hymn that although it has not achieved widespread popularity in churches, even on Good Friday itself, is a firm favourite of mine. It’s unique, and it reminds me of the early days of my own walk with God.

[N.B. for once I’m writing these notes the day before the post is published, so I don’t know what John might say about it on Friday].

Behold the Lamb of God

Today’s choice for a Lenten hymn is actually another very simple song, which as John says in his morning prayer video might be used in various ways such as in between intercessions. The text is a form of the ‘agnus dei’: “Behold the Lamb of God, Behold the Lamb of God, He takes away the sin, the sin of the world”. Those are the words of Jesus’ relative and forerunner, John the Baptiser ,as recorded in John 1:29.

I wrote a blog post on 6 February about an image of the Lamb of God. This title, one of many for Jesus in Christian history, is one that seems to have endured. The idea of the all-powerful One becoming as weak and helpless as a baby sheep is intriguing to the outsider, and maybe comforting to small children. From an adult perspective it is one of many apparent contradictions in our faith. It is perhaps the end of the development of the idea of the Messiah being the ‘servant of God’ in Isaiah: a servant (or more precisely a slave) has no choice in whether or how they serve their master or mistress, as a result of which there is a strong human tendency to treat servants badly.

The particular scandal of the image of Jesus as a Lamb is the association of lambs with the Temple sacrifices in the older form of Judaism and other religions. So the idea that Jesus as God’s servant was forced to an excruciating and humiliating death on the cross is taken as evidence that our (Christian) concept of God is of a wrathful father punishing his servant / son as a substitute for everyone who has angered him. That is of course a simplistic way of putting it, and the idea of atonement is more subtle and complex than that, but it’s how some humanists view Christianity and what puts them off.

There is however a second image at play when we think of the Lamb of God: that of Passover, when the blood of the sacrificed lamb is sprinkled around the doors of the Hebrews’ dwellings, not to punish but to save. Those households alone were spared the destruction of the firstborn of Egypt, just as Jesus himself was saved from Herod’s massacre of innocent children. For the sake of balance, and to show that the images of ‘atonement’ and ‘saviour’ are a contrast and not intended to reinforce each other, here’s an interesting view from a Jewish writer.

So taking the two images together, sacrifice for sin and sacrifice for redemption, we come closer to the Christian understanding that Jesus had to die in order that we might live. His sacrificed body has a purpose: to “preserve our bodies and souls unto everlasting life” to use the words of the old Prayer Book communion. These two images also frame the Lenten journey from the confession of Shrove Tuesday to the celebration of our salvation at Easter.

Kyrie Eleison

My choices of hymn/song from Sing Praise for both the 2^nd and 3^rd of March (and adjacent in the book) are settings of the Greek text ‘Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison’ (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). John Hartley’s comment on my post of 28 February is worth reading and there’s not much more I can add, other than to say that No.184 (an anonymous setting of ‘a Ukrainian traditional chant’) was familiar to me from somewhere, while 183 (a setting by Dinah Reindorf and Geoff Weaver) was not. It’s more of an acclamation in style, whereas the Ukrainian melody is more meditative. Unlike John I don’t move in compositional circles, and Geoff Weaver is one of the few composers/writers in this book whom I have met personally.

Purify my heart

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another devotional song, “Purify my heart”. Although relatively recent (like all the songs in this book – this one was written c.1990) it has become popular in many churches. Unlike yesterday’s song which was corporate (“Father, hear our prayer”) this one is personal (“Purify my heart”) and it fits the theme of Lent, as it asks Jesus (not named but it is obviously He who is being addressed) to “purify my heart” in various ways.

The first verse asks that I become “as gold and precious silver … as gold, pure gold”. This, and the chorus (addressing Jesus as the Refiner’s Fire) refer to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, where the Lord’s messenger is said to be coming like a refiner’s fire to “sit as a refiner and purifier of silver” to refine the descendants of Levi (i.e. the Temple priests) “like gold and silver until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness” (Malachi 3:2-3). In other words, it is asking Jesus to strip away all the impurities that are preventing me from serving him as I should.

The second verse is more direct: “cleanse me from within and make me holy … cleanse me from my sin, deep within”. It recognises that sin is not just my relationship with the outer world – the things I say and do wrong – but also my inner life, my thoughts, desires and attitudes. Those are harder to deal with, and that’s why I have to ask Jesus to deal with them. The other prayer in the chorus is that I should be “set apart for you, ready to do your will”. So the purification of the inner person is not only for my own sake but so that I can serve Jesus better.