Extol the God of Justice

The return from exile (artist unknown)

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Martin Leckebusch’s “Extol the God of justice”, a traditional three-verse hymn, with a suggested tune by Vaughan Williams, but John played it to the tune of “Stand up, stand up for Jesus”. The theme is similar to that of yesterday’s hymn, but this one is specifically based on Psalm 9.  

The first verse includes the line “remember all his wonders”, a theme that occurs throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Any temptation to doubt God’s ability to intervene in human affairs is countered with remembrance of past events, supremely the Exodus from Egypt and later the captivity in Babylon and subsequent return from exile.  Even those events, involving whole nations or races, are seen as God rewarding one or punishing another according to the level of obedience or disobedience to him at a national level.  That’s hard to understand in a society that is so focussed on the individual. As individuals we may or may not try to “labour for what is true and right” but it’s important to lift our eyes and see what’s happening on a larger scale in the world.

The second verse gives more specific examples of God’s justice: one who “hears the cry of victims and senses their despair”.  The third reminds us that “however dark the day, the hope that calls for mercy will not be turned away”. God is the unchanging one who, while allowing human freedom and independence up to a point, is willing to act in world events when nations allow that freedom to take them too far from his ways, whether to save from oppression or to punish the oppressor.  Noah, Abraham and Lot, Jeremiah and many others in Israel’s history experienced that, and for us Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus were the ultimate intervention from which everyone can benefit – if we are willing. 

It is, then, appropriate to pray on a macro scale for justice in the world, as well as at the micro level of praying for individuals.  Returning to the second verse, “in faithfulness he honours the faith that sparks our prayer”.

One thought on “Extol the God of Justice”

  1. Martin Leckebusch is a modern hymnwriter I admire, and I enjoyed singing this hymn. I think he has a refreshingly direct way of putting thoughts into words, and I appreciate both the way that he sticks close to the thought of the Psalm and the way he makes the hymn hang together with its consistent rhythm and rhyme structure and its verbal refrain in the constancy of the first line. Well done, Martin.

    And, of course, Ralph Vaughan Williams did us all a great service in his going round the country, collecting the traditional melodies from many places, and arranging them so they could continue to be sung and valued across the churches of our land – and I don’t actively dislike this tune, although I don’t find its very strict ABBA format especially convincing either, and I guess three verses is the maximum one could sing before it became very tedious. But somehow Sullivan’s “Morning Light” (“Stand up stand up for Jesus”) conjures up the atmosphere of resolution and defiance which I felt was appropriate for this hymn.

    However, as an exercise in setting the Psalm, I feel there is a new avenue of approach to be struck. The footnotes in the bible say Psalms 9 & 10 were perhaps originally one Psalm which may have been an acrostic poem: what that means is that the beginning of Psalm 9 and the end of Psalm 10 do follow the beginning and the end of the Hebrew alphabet, but that in the middle there are a number of letters missing or jumbled, and it is hard to discern what is going on. Martin’s imposition of his constant first line is one way of trying to reimpose uniformity on the poem as a whole, but I continue to wonder if it might be possible to make the whole cohere in a different way? A project for my retirement, perhaps?

    It occurs to me that I haven’t made enough of the links between these “God and the World” hymns, all about social justice, which are coming at this time of year – and the book of Deuteronomy, which is all about how you put the faith revealed in the desert into practical action once you’ve arrived in the Promised Land. It’s a task that faces the church in our generation as well (indeed, faces every generation), and I ought to point out the connections when I’m conducting Morning Prayer.

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