Stained glass window in All Saints, Barwick-in-Elmet (Leeds)
image (c) Stephen Craven 2019
Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Timothy Dudley-Smith’s “Not for tongues of Heaven’s angels” which is based on St Paul’s famous description of true (Godly) love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. The tune, “Bridegroom” is more familiar to me set to the words “Like the murmur of the dove’s song” which we will come to in a month’s time at Pentecost, but these seem to be its original words.
It’s suggested as a hymn for a marriage service, but the love of which Paul writes is not that of romance. It is a love that expresses commitment, but commitment to serving other people at whatever cost. This love, in one of the most often quoted verses of the Bible, goes along with faith and hope, but is the greatest of the three, and all of those are greater than the “tongues of angels”. The final line or refrain of each verse is “May love be ours, O Lord”.
Verse 1 takes the idea from the Bible passage of contrasting this love with the more spectacular spiritual gifts of tongues (a special language given by God to some people with which to pray and praise), discernment (a form of prophecy that can see people’s hidden thoughts and feelings) and ‘the faith that masters mountains’. That last refers to a saying of Jesus that even a tiny amount of faith ‘like a mustard seed’ can move mountains.
The second and third verses list the qualities of this true Godly love: humble, gentle, tender, kind, gracious, patient, generous; never jealous, selfish, boasting or resentful but long-suffering. These qualities, some of which are sometimes called ‘fruits of the Spirit’, will indeed help make for a happy and stable marriage, but the real challenge is to allow God’s Spirit to make us loving like this to everyone we meet.
The last verse reminds us that the effort we make in this life to be loving will not go unnoticed in the next, and can perhaps be seen as a rehearsal for the real thing. “in the day this world is fading faith and hope will play their part, but when Christ is seen in glory love shall reign in every heart”. If we are used to loving like Christ now, we will not find his second coming as much of an upheaval as those who have not discovered this true love.
As Stephen says, this hymn is not a wedding hymn, and the text doesn’t make any claims to be such. I thought this hymn was a worthy attempt at applying an important chapter of St Paul, but that somehow it didn’t quite hit its mark.
The first line, with its reference to “heaven’s angels”, gets it off to a bad start, because Paul isn’t actually referring to angelic tongues specifically but to the gift of tongues in general: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am nothing”, and he only mentions them to discount them in favour of love, whereas this lyric positively invites the singer to start wondering about the nature of the angelic tongues. Also, Paul is NOT saying that we shouldn’t desire these other gifts of the Spirit – he explicitly says we should (14:1a, 14:5, 14:18).
The middle two verses are unexceptionable, but I don’t think they particularly add any insights to what Paul has said in his letter, and I think myself that the problem we need to address in the modern world is how to see such things as whistle-blowing, corporate negotiations in unionised industries, the concerns of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, press coverage of standards in national life, … as expressions of love. It is true that love is patient and does not insist on its own way, but most commentators would say this does not mean that love is a doormat, and the nuances of how one thinks one can be lovingly opposed to the company’s policies and the arbitrary decisions of one’s employer are part of the issue.
And then, in the last verse, it took a while for the grammar to become clear to me. Paul does say that tongues and prophecies and knowledge will cease in heaven (13:8), but I don’t see that he says faith will cease there. Surely 13:13 is saying that love is the greatest of the three ON EARTH – he says “now” – he is not making a comment about heaven at this point.
And then, finally, the lyric with the suggested tune doesn’t throw the stress on the word “love” in the climax final line. Rather the tune throws the stress on the word “may” which comes before it. To rescue this aspect of the hymn one would need a different tune, but I’d really want to rewrite the words first.