Another Good Friday hymn from Sing Praise today, and from completely the “other end of the candle” as we say in the Church of England: after two Catholic hymns on the theme, we have one from the well-known Evangelical hymnwriter Stuart Townend, “O to see the dawn of the darkest day”. The words contain explicit reminders of the violence of the Crucifixion: torn and beaten, nailed to a cross of wood, the pain on [Jesus’] face, his blood-stained brow, the earthquake as he died. I haven’t seen the movie “the passion of the Christ”, but it supposedly showed the likely true extent of the violence committed against him, which is minimised in most re-tellings of the story.
But the way Jesus was treated physically was not unique. Then and now, thousands of people ore tortured and killed for their religious or political beliefs, race or sexuality. There was something else going on at Calvary. The lyrics also remind us therefore of the purpose of Jesus’ death: “bearing the awesome weight of sin”, “through your suffering I am free, death is crushed to death, life is mine to live”; and in the chorus, “Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath, we stand forgiven at the cross”. The inclusion of reference to the Father’s wrath in several of Townend’s hymns is controversial: some Christians see this as essential to understanding what was happening on that awful day, that without Jesus bearing the judgement of God for our individual sins in a physical way we could never enter into a guilt-free relationship with God. Others see that as a perverted understanding of redemption, with an alternative interpretation that it was Jesus’ love for humanity that held him to the cross, not only demonstrating that peaceful resistance to evil is possible but somehow overcoming in those hours the dark powers outside ourselves that prevent us from a full and free relationship with God in this life and the next. My own inclination is towards the second of these, but there has to be some element of recognition of our own wilful sins being dealt with as well as the ‘sin of the world’. God’s love or his wrath – or a bit of both? Just part of the complex and ever-fascinating Easter story.
Well, of course, I think the references to Christ bearing God’s wrath for our sins are an integral part of the Gospel message as presented in the bible, and I rejoice in Stuart Townend’s including them in his hymns – so I’m unashamedly in the first of the two camps Stephen describes. And I very much enjoyed this hymn. It was new to me, and maybe I made the wrong decision in the speed at which I took it: but it seemed to me that it needed to pack a punch and keep its momentum up in the chorus, and for that reason must not be sung too slowly.
However I was very surprised at the mistakes in the music writing. The opening chords are really very weak: it seems obvious to me that the tonic needs to be the first chord, and the way Townend’s bass moves in parallel steps to the melody is really very unconvincing: so I changed the bass and harmonies here. And surely the last two bars need to be at half the speed at which they are written! So I corrected that as well.
It was said of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley that Watts was good at objective statement of biblical truth, but Wesley always tried to go into personal response as well. One of the things I like about Getty and Townend is the way they do try to go into response, and I particularly liked the personal application which opens verse 4: “Oh, to see MY NAME written in the wounds” (the same sentiment as in J S Bach’s Passion Chorale “Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended” in which v2 says “Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee”).
May I make an aside comment about “The Passion of the Christ” film? Yes, they used an inordinate amount of ketchup in the shooting of the flogging scene, and it provoked a lot of discussion among viewers. There were many who thought it was just a way of making the whole thing more gory. But as I came away asking myself why Mel Gibson had chosen to go overboard in this way, I decided that he must have been casting around for some explanation for why it was that Jesus died so quickly on the cross. Crucifixion was, after all, intended to be a slow death, and it wasn’t unknown for criminals to linger for days before succumbing to death. The other two criminals hadn’t died by the time the soldiers came to break their legs – so why had Jesus. I think Mel Gibson decided he needed to find an explanation for this, and hit on the flogging and scourging as giving a reason that Jesus was so weakened as to succumb to death so quickly.