Today, and still more than three weeks ahead of time, we move on from Good Friday to Holy Saturday (or Easter Eve). This is the most solemn day of the Christian year, as if we try to put ourselves in the place of Jesus’ disciples, their last hope of him being saved from the cross has gone. This is the theme of the service of Tenebrae.
This hymn, “Dark is the night” by Paul Wigmore, actually takes the theme of darkness as it features three times in the Gospel stories. The other theme the three verses have in common is reference to Jesus’ friends (his closest disciples). Verse 1 is set on what we call Maundy Thursday with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper and after sunset. The darkness is natural and real, but there’s a sense of moral darkness here too, as friends sleep while the Temple police come to arrest their Lord. “Lanterns and swords no radiance, no defence” – they are dealing with an irresistible force in the face of which there is nothing to be done with the tools available, and they turn and run.
The second verse is set on Good Friday as all his friends (except for several women including his mother, and just one male disciple conventionally identified as John) deserted him or stood far off – “hiding from his death and loss”. The gospels record that the sun was darkened that day as Jesus died. Whether that is literally true or a metaphor we cannot say, but if not literally true, perhaps in the way that some people say they feel cold in the presence of a ghost or can sense an evil spirit. The other events that occurred at the moment of his death were more physical – an earthquake that shook the rocks and caused the Temple veil to split. A ray of hope is suggested by the reference to the thief promised forgiveness and paradise by Jesus, the “first fruits of salvation”.
The third is set in the early hours of Easter day, before dawn and with the added darkness of a rock-hewn tomb, not to mention the grief of the friends (again women, initially) who come to complete the embalming of his body. Perhaps the notion in these words that they have come “to find if death has won indeed, or risen he” is premature, as they seem to have had no idea that the body might have gone until they get there. Likewise the final line “we … prepare in faith his wondrous face to see” is anticipating the surprise of Easter. For the moment, let’s stay in the darkness, because it’s only when we appreciate just what horrors happened on Good Friday and how bereft the world was with the death of its saviour, that we can be emptied enough to be filled with Easter joy when it comes.
After a number of attempts during which I did actually sing the whole hymn through a few times, I decided not to sing it “officially” as part of Morning Prayer, and thus opted out of Stephen’s challenge.
What first discouraged me was the tune, which seems to me a shapelessly meandering melody with harmonies which fail at several points: notably the missing E at the beginning of the third line and F and A in the two chords leading up to the final cadence. I did try to get my head around it, but couldn’t. So then I tried the suggested alternative “Song 24” which we sung to “O God be gracious to me in your love” (Psalm 51) a few weeks ago, and discovered that part of my difficulty was that the words, as well as being depressing with their focus on “dark”, are written in a convoluted manner such that my usual technique for singing whilst playing didn’t work. So I then tried singing it to the tune “Ellers” (“Saviour, again, to thy dear name we raise”) and found the same problem. Let me explain:
In order to sing whilst playing the piano, when words and music are set separately from each other, I basically glance at the line of words before the music line begins, and my eye takes in the phrase I’m about to sing. Then I look at the chords whilst playing and singing that line. At the end of the phrase I glance at the words and assimilate the next phrase, and then my eye returns to the next line of music. I think this technique relies on something similar to the “phonic loop” of the human brain: my eye translates the words into sounds which are then stored in a short-term loop, and they issue from my mouth in time to the notes which issue from my fingers. (Self-analysis of this kind of activity is notoriously lacking in objectivity.) To make this work, the words have to have a natural cadence which easily issues from the mouth: so a straightforward lyric is much easier to sing than a convoluted one.
Well, basically this hymn lacks a natural sense of rhythm for the words. In verse 1, take the word “Gethsemane” in line 2: it is simply dropped in to fill a space in the meter – but as a word it just breaks up a list of adjectives which clearly belong together. In the next line he means “lanterns without real radiance and swords which are impotent to deliver defence”, but to make the rhythm work he puts the two nouns “lanterns and swords” together and then just pads the line out with the descriptors, so you get the absurd image of “swords without radiance” in the middle of the line. And in the fourth line the word “pallid” is likewise just dropped in as a space-filler – there’s no warrant for it in the biblical text which is entirely silent on the question of the weather on that day. There’s nothing instinctively 10.10.10.10 about any of the thoughts this hymn is trying to express, and the whole thing is an attempt to wrestle something into an artificially imposed meter. The other verses are no better: line 3 of verse 2 and line 2 of verse 3 are particularly bad in their Yoda-speak.
And then, verse 2 is clearly intended to describe the scene as darkness comes on the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour (Mark 15:33). But the temple veil is torn AFTER his death, whereas his conversation with the penitent thief comes BEFORE it. His friends are specifically NOT hiding at this point, for Mark 15:40-41 records that the women watched and Luke 23:49 adds that the group included “all those who knew him”. The comment that they met “in secret for fear of the Jews” (John 20:19) is about Easter Day in the evening, not Good Friday! And, finally in this verse, in what sense is the penitent thief’s meeting Jesus in paradise a “FIRST-FRUITS of salvation by the cross” – wouldn’t Abraham, Moses and Elijah already be there, rejoicing to see his day?
And then, in verse 3 – well, of course, we know the ending, but surely when the disciples came to the tomb after the women reported what they’d seen, they didn’t really come with the attitude of “let’s find out if he’s dead or whether he’s risen”. Thoughts of resurrection were nowhere in their horizons at that point: they came to find out what had happened without any idea of him possibly being risen. Again the word “indeed” is just a space-filler in line 2, and the word-order is terribly mixed. And we, the audience from the future, already know what has happened: to describe us as “coming through doubt and despair to prepare ourselves to see his face as he rises” is beyond my imagining, at least.
And then, there’s a conceptual problem in the last line. As I remember in sequence the events of that Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday, it’s true I can IMAGINE what it is like to go through them, but it isn’t as if I ACTUALLY do go through them and see him on the Sunday. The risen Lord Jesus is with us throughout the week. The celebration of his presence with us is not ACTUALLY him dying and rising again this year, any more than a celebration of someone’s birthday is a recapitulation of them being born. The writer has misunderstood what Easter means to me as I celebrate it.
I think this hymn is a badly-written travesty of hymnody. I think it lacks basic craftsmanship skills of writing. I think it distorts the biblical accounts of what actually happened. I think its focus on “dark” is profoundly depressing, and it misunderstands the nature of the celebration. And I decline to include it in worship of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.