Exult, creation, round God’s throne

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Christopher Idle’s “Exult, creation, round God’s throne”.  It’s a contemporary setting of an ancient hymn that is still sung in Latin plainchant in some churches during the Easter Vigil.   Here, it is in three metrical verses; John used in his morning prayer video an original fourth verse that is omitted in the book, and used the more common tune Gonfalon Royal.

The three verses in the hymn book call on all creation to exult (that is, rejoice) in the resurrection of Christ, which as I noted yesterday is a cosmic event, not just one for the people and time of Jesus.  The hymn addresses firstly the angels of heaven (who, let us remember, are created beings themselves); then the earth in general, as the Lord has won his victory over the powers of darkness here; and thirdly Christians in particular, both living now and gone before us (“exult, all Christians, one in praise with our Jerusalem above!).  

The fourth verse is a doxology with water imagery, calling us to exult in God (the father) who is the “well of truth”, Christ (the son) the “fountain-head of grace” and the Holy Spirit, “flowing stream of life”.  This water imagery perhaps alludes to the heavenly city in the book of Revelation (and Ezekiel’s earlier vision) where streams of living water flow out of it, as well as some of Jesus’ own sayings about being himself the living water. I affirm a comment I saw on social media this weekend that to believe in the resurrection can never be just a matter of interpretation of historical facts, or a hope for some distant future event, but has to be allowing God to work within in us here and now to become part of his constant changing and reshaping of our world for good – to let his living water flow into and through us.