Tag: disciples

Prepare a room for me

East window, St Edmund’s, Kellington – photographed today
Copyright Diocese of Leeds.

Today’s song from Sing Praise is ‘Prepare a room for me, your Saviour’ by Herman G Stümpfler Jr.  It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in the alternating verses (six in all). It’s suggested that a choir sing the part of Jesus (or it could just be a soloist) and the congregation take the part of the disciples. In the hymn book the tune for both is the same, though I note that John wrote a new setting for morning prayer with the two parts having different tunes.

The first two verses could be seen as being specifically about the Last Supper, referred to here as the ‘feast’ (possibly the Passover itself, although some scholars think the last supper, apparently celebrated without women or children, was some other form of fellowship meal). Jesus asks his disciples to prepare a room to celebrate the feast; they respond by doing as he says and awaiting his presence. 

The remainder of the hymn refers, rather, to the commemoration or re-enactment of the Last Supper (depending on your theological stance) in the sacrament of Holy Communion.  Jesus promises that he will be present, though unseen, where two or three of his disciples meet to share the meal in his memory; the disciples  respond that we “seek the food your grace alone can give”. Jesus promises in return that our hunger will be fed as he offers himself as the Living Bread. Finally we praise him that “through this loaf and cup you share your love that has no end”.

The whole does probably work better when sung as intended, i.e. as a responsorial hymn with several people singing as “the disciples”, than when used in personal prayer.

The Bible in a Year – 28 October

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

28 October. Matthew chapters 10-12

In these chapters, we see Jesus offering an intensive training course in evangelism to his disciples; then comparing himself with John the Baptist and with other figures in scripture such as the prophet Jonah (whose three days in a sea monster are seen as a prophecy of Jesus’ three nights in the tomb after Good Friday) and the “suffering servant” of the prophet Isaiah.

Given how much Jesus did and taught, and the relatively short length of each of the Gospels (restricted presumably by the length of the scrolls they were written on), the writers had to be economical with the material available.  So we rarely read of Jesus saying the same thing twice, though no doubt he did – any teaching is learnt best by being repeated several times.  But there is one phrase that occurs both in yesterday’s reading from chapter 9 when Jesus is criticised for eating in the house of a tax collector, and in 12:7 when he is criticised for letting his disciples pluck grain in a field on the Sabbath (and therefore “working” on the day when work was forbidden): “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”.   This is what seems to have angered him most: people who were more concerned with the detailed religious rules that had been developed over the generations, than with the broad sweeping principles on which they were based, of which God’s mercy is the greatest.   St James uses a similar phrase: “mercy triumphs over judgement”.

Just as in yesterday’s reading, we saw that Jesus brought hope to the hopeless as much as healing to the sick, so today the overall message is one of God’s mercy being behind his whole ministry of gathering and sending his disciples.   That may be another reason why he mentioned Jonah, who was angry with God when God was merciful to the people of Nineveh: Jonah would have preferred judgement over mercy, but “something greater than Jonah is here!” (12:41) – it was time for mercy to take its rightful place.