Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is ‘Now all the world belongs to Christ our Lord’ by Michael Perry. Thus the title: the first line of the refrain is ‘Fling wide the gates’ which gives a better clue to the content. The phrase is taken presumably from Stainer’s oratorio ‘The Crucifixion’, but is based on ‘lift up your heads, O ye gates’, a verse of Psalm 24 on which the whole hymn is based. It is a paraphrase or adaptation of the psalm, rather than a literal rendering.
The original is a ‘song of ascents’ to be sung as pilgrims climb the hill into Jerusalem and enter the Temple with its massive doors. In Christian use it is associated, as John reminded us this morning, with Holy Week and in particular Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. The tune suggested is also associated with Holy Week, through the hymn ‘Lift high the Cross’.
So what’s it doing in the Advent section of the book? It makes sense if you look from the other side of the door, so to speak. In the Psalm and on Palm Sunday we are with a crowd outside the city, outside the Temple (symbolic of heaven), longing to go in. Whereas in Advent we are trapped in this increasingly Godless world and longing for Jesus to fling open the gates from heaven and break into our world in triumphant return.
So, whereas in the Psalm, those who have ‘clean hands and pure hearts’ are counted worthy to stand on the holy hill, i.e. in the Temple, in the hymn such people win the right to worship Christ. The ‘vindication from the God of their salvation’ that the psalmist promises becomes ‘He will declare them free from guilt and shame’. Of course we know that our sins can already be forgiven even in this life, but Christ’s return will be for his true followers a complete vindication in him.
Thanks, Stephen, for the Advent / Palm Sunday discussion. About it, I find it instructive to try to think oneself into the “Christian Year” as envisaged in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (in the days when, strangely, there were no liturgical “Harvest festivals”). The “Sunday next before Easter” had no element of “palm” in it: it was simply the beginning of Passiontide in which the readings of the long passion accounts in the gospels were begun (Matthew on Sunday, Mark on Monday …), and the Sunday before that wasn’t “Passion Sunday” because the Passion was adequately marked during the week before Easter. The point in the year at which Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem featured … was Advent Sunday, for his triumphal entry was seen as foreshadowing the time he will come again to judge the living and the dead. Hence Psalm 24 here.
I find Psalm 24 a striking Psalm, and both Christopher Idle and I have set it to different trumpet voluntaries (Christopher to Jeremiah Clarke’s and I to Henry Purcell’s). In different mode I have also set it to Edward Naylor’s “From strength to strength” (often sung to “Soldiers of Christ arise and put your armour on”). I was very pleased to find another hymnwriter with the same kind of idea here – well done Michael Perry! The downside of making “Fling wide the doors” into the chorus is that it does get a bit repetitive, and I wasn’t sure that the doors-cause rhyme was convincing enough to bear this repetition; but the upside is certainly that it focuses the mind on the unrestricted access which we have to God through Christ. Alleluia!