Today’s hymn is “In our darkness light has shone” by Timothy Dudley Smith, another Epiphany season hymn describing Christ as light coming into the world. The benefits of this for humankind are listed in the last lines of the four verses: “light and life of all the earth”, “grace and truth divine”, “we his name and nature share”, and “he shall lead his people home”. It’s a logical progression: in him we find enlightenment, through his grace we are led into truth, we become more like him, and finally come ‘home’ to eternal life.
Having said that, to me this is a surprisingly abstract and limited statement of Christian faith: Christ (the title of the ‘anointed one’) is mentioned once, but there is no mention of his human name (Jesus) or his life on earth. There is no hint here of the need for Jesus to suffer death in order for his mission to be accomplished. It smacks of ‘docetism’, the heresy of thinking of Jesus as only a manifestation of the divine, and not fully human. I’m sure that the hymn’s author, a well known Evangelical, didn’t mean it like that. But it’s a reminder that just like the Bible, the hymn book must be heard in its entirety to make sense of Christian belief and experience, and not quoted selectively.
When I saw the text and its footnote “based on John 1:1-4” I immediately thought this was a Christmas hymn, and wondered what it was doing in the “Epiphany” section of the book? I recognised it as being intended* in the same vein as “Jesus Christ is risen today” / “Christ the Lord is risen today” for the Easter season, or “Hail the day that sees him rise” for Ascension – probably for the same tune “Easter Hymn” from Lyra Davidica. And I think it works adequately for that purpose.
But I can’t say I felt it worked extremely well. The trouble with hymns which have “Alleluia” after every line is that the “Alleluia” really has to work in each place – so really there mustn’t be lines which only function as part of the larger joined-up whole of the verse. Does “All who now in him believe, Alleluia” work as a line? One is reminded of the way one’s lips quiver when asked to say, in Psalm 136, “Sihon, king of the Amorites – his love endures for ever – and Og, king of Bashan – his love endures for ever”. It’s a rare text which stands up to these demands! So I sung it to the tune Wurttenburg instead (which also makes it move a little faster).
As a setting of John 1:1-14 it has other problems. The word “Word” does occur, in the middle of v1 & v4, but the Johannine atmosphere of making the eternal Word into the subject of the whole prologue is missing: this text is about “Christ” who stands at the head of v2 and v4, but the word “Christ” isn’t actually used in John 1:1-14. Nor does John speak of a “child”, nor of the Word’s “birth”, nor of us being “led home”. I eventually concluded that although Timothy may have garnered phrases from John’s prologue to populate his hymn, he probably didn’t start from the text and try to express its glories metrically. I wish he had. I agree with Stephen saying that the hymn doesn’t express the whole Gospel – nor does it express the whole Johnannine prologue.
Nevertheless, there weren’t any sentiments I disagreed with in the hymn, and despite the Yoda-speak of the first two lines of verse 3 (Yoda is the character in Star Wars who his words in the wrong order always gets), it is still wonderful news that we who believe in him are born of God and given a share in his nature. Alleluia!
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* Timothy Dudley-Smith attended conferences of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland fairly regularly, and I once asked him about the tunes he envisaged for his various texts. His answer somewhat surprised me (and I paraphrase it here): he said he really had very little sense of music – some of rhythm but less of notes – and he had learned it was best to leave the choice of appropriate tunes to others. When writing he usually had a tune in mind, but more often than not it was the rhythm of the tune and the other texts to which it was sung, rather than the melody and harmony and overall atmosphere of the tune. He thought of hymn-texts much more as a branch of poetry than as a branch of song-lyrics. (I suppose the same could be said of George Herbert, in an earlier generation.)