Ascended Christ


The Ascension painting, St James Bermondsey (John Wood, 1844)

Today is Ascension Day, and the selected hymn from Sing Praise is ‘Ascended Christ, who gained the glory that we sing’ by Christopher Idle.  The tune set with it is ‘Christchurch’ although I found the alternative suggestion of ‘Darwall’s 148th’ (‘Ye holy angels bright’) more appropriate. John took the trouble to compose one specially for the occasion.

Unlike yesterday’s ascension hymn, which I pointed out consisted of statements about Christ, this one is unashamedly a song of praise addressed to him. The first verse uses the same trio of titles as yesterday – Prophet, Priest and King – and I like the last line ‘by many tongues the Church displays your power and praise in all her songs’.

The second verse describes Christ as reigning ‘above each other name’ and verse three looks, as it were, in the other direction, with Christ ‘from your father’s side’ making us new and setting us free. There is a theological question here, whether after the Ascension it is Christ who acts on earth, or the Holy Spirit whom he sent. But that’s getting into discussion of the relationships within the Trinity, always a tricky area. 

In the fourth verse Christ is the one who ‘calls us to belong within one body here’ and notes that ‘in you are alone we are complete’.  It’s always good to be reminded, in this individualistic age, that the Church is ideally regarded as a unity, a single body, not just a group of people sharing mostly the same opinions.

The last line of the last verse is (as printed) ‘beyond all words creation sings the King of kings and Lord of lords’.  I think John sang ‘beyond all worlds’ but that makes equal sense: the true praise of God is more than mere words can express (an idea which leads us towards Pentecost) while the one whom we worship has indeed ascended ‘beyond all worlds’, present in time and space while also being beyond the dimensions we can perceive.

One thought on “Ascended Christ”

  1. Yes, I did sing “beyond all worlds” but that was a slip of the tongue, but I let it pass as it does still make sense – but not as good a sense as Christopher’s words: one of the things in this hymn is that he envisages the “gift of tongues” as encompassing also fluency in one’s own language, and the last line of v1 (which Stephen says he likes) also widens the meaning in this way. (I think I made another accidental mistake as well.)

    All in all I enjoyed these words very much, as I wrote in my entry for “Come see the Lord in his breathtaking splendour”, and I thought it was a liberating and refreshing hymn.

    The reason I wanted to compose another tune is that in almost all the verses the sense of line 1 runs into line 2, and the sense of line 3 runs into line 4, and therefore a tune that doesn’t put a longer note on the final syllables of lines 1 and 3 would be an advantage. (That’s also true of line 6 in each verse, but the version of “ChristChurch” printed in the book has omitted the longer note at the end of this line. And “Darwall’s 148th” puts a longer note at the end of line 5, which also doesn’t sit well with these words.) So I sang it to a tune I had composed without these long notes – but, of course, a new tune is harder than a familiar one.

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