Good Friday – The Raynville Rambler

Come and see the King of Love

Watching Jesus die. Original source unknown

The Good Friday song choice from Sing Praise is Graham Kendrick’s “Come and see the King of Love”. After writing this blog post I discovered that the Scargill Movement had also chosen it as the first song for their Good Friday service, which you can now view here: https://youtu.be/NC_1kQnSTh8

The King, of course, is Jesus, and the love is that shown on the cross. The invitation to “come and see” is at the heart of Good Friday worship, traditionally a time to imagine oneself stood by the crosses at Calvary and watching Jesus die. Thus the song starts with this invitation: “Come and see the king of love, see the purple robe and crown of thorns he wears” (these being the mocking symbols put on him by Roman soldiers). “Lone and friendless now he climbs towards the hill” – not literally alone, as there was a crowd around him, but inwardly so, knowing that no-one could truly share or even understand his unique suffering.

The second verse invites us then to “Come and weep, come and mourn” – for what? “for the sin that pierced him there, so much deeper than the wounds of thorn and spear”. The Christian understanding of Jesus’ suffering is that although unspeakably awful in terms of physical pain, it was the spiritual torment of bearing the guilt of all humanity’s evil acts through time that was far worse – “all our pride, greed, fallenness and shame; the Lord has laid the punishment on him”.

The last verse addresses Jesus directly, seeking his pardon and looking towards Easter day: “Man of heaven, born to earth to restore us to your heaven, here we bow in awe beneath your searching eyes; from your tears comes our joy, from your death our life shall spring, by your resurrection power we shall rise”.

The chorus, though, it perhaps the best part of this hymn and what has made it popular. It sums up Jesus’ act of redemption and our rightful attitude to it in these few memorable lines: “We worship at your feet, where wrath and mercy meet, and a guilty world is washed by love’s pure stream. For us he was made sin, O help me take it in, deep wounds of love cry out “Father, forgive!”. I worship, I worship, the Lamb who was slain”.

When you prayed beneath the trees

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “When you prayed beneath the trees” by Christopher Idle. This 20^th century hymn comes with its own tune, but John played it to an older hymn tune by Orlando Gibbons that better fits the sombre mood.

The feel of the words is much like the better known American spiritual “Where you there when they crucified by Lord?”. They expand on the idea that Jesus suffered, not only in his own body, but for our sake and in our place. The repeated refrain of “it was for me, O Lord” emphasises this. The four verses refer to the agony in the garden of Gethsemane; his trial; the ascent of the hill under the cross (‘via dolorosa’); and finally the crucifixion itself.

This last, though, sees Jesus not as victim but as victor, another common understanding of what happened of Good Friday: “When you spoke with kingly power it was for me, O Lord, in that dread and destined hour you made me free, O Lord; earth and heaven heard you shout, death and hell were put to rout, for the grave could not hold out; you are for me, O Lord”.

This is your coronation

“The Saviour with the Crown of Thorns” Vasili Nesterenko

The last in this block of specifically Good Friday hymns is another modern one, “This is your coronation” by Sylvia Dunstan. The suggested tune, however, is Bach’s Passion Chorale (actually an older tune than Bach, but his use of it in his passion oratorios ensured its lasting fame and association with Good Friday).

The theme of the Crucifixion is the same as yesterday’s, and some of the same ideas are there: the cross of wood, Jesus’ physical suffering, the blood on his face, his death as a sacrifice, the pardon for our sins that he achieved. But the tone is so different: the tune is sorrowful rather than triumphant, Jesus is presented less as bearing the Father’s wrath towards humanity, and more the willing actor in this cosmic drama.

The three verses each look at one of the traditional images of Jesus Christ: King (verse 1, “this is your coronation”), Judge (verse 2, “Eternal judge on trial”) and High Priest (verse 3). The cross is portrayed as the king’s “throne of timber” (a lovely image), the judge who is condemned by humanity still acts with love to pardon us, and the priest offers himself as the final sacrifice. These three images mirror to some extent those of the gifts of the Magi at Epiphany: gold for a king, incense for a priest and myrrh for a sacrifice.

Altogether this seems a more satisfactory hymn to sing on Good Friday than Townend’s offering yesterday.

O to see the dawn of the darkest day

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.

As Royal banners are unfurled

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another Good Friday one, and a twentieth century translation of a much older sixth century Christian text, ‘Vexilla Regis’ (‘the King’s banner’). In the hymn book it’s set to a version of the traditional monastic chant, but John has played it to a better known English hymn tune ‘Gonfalon Royal’ that also allows for the Amen at the end.

I looked up the original on Wikipedia where several English translations are offered. The Latin original is said to have been written to celebrate the arrival of a large relic of the True Cross which had been sent to Queen Radegunda. The ‘banner’ may therefore be intended as meaning the cross itself as a sign and symbol of our salvation, although another interpretation would be Pilate’s sign above the Cross, “Iesus Nazarei Rex Judaeorum” (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).

The hymn celebrates the same paradox of ‘sadness and gladness’ that I explored yesterday but goes into more detail of how the scandal of the cross is for Christians a sign of hope. The optional verse 6 sums it up concisely: “The saviour, victim, sacrifice, is through his dying glorified; his life is overcome by death and leaps up, sweeping death aside”.

The ‘veneration of the cross’ is of course a Catholic practice which is not part of the Christian tradition I come from. As the Catholic News Agency website explains, “Adoration or veneration of an image or representation of Christ’s cross does not mean that we actually adore the material image, but rather what it represents. In kneeling before the crucifix and kissing it we are paying the highest honour to our Lord’s cross as the instrument of our salvation. Because the Cross is inseparable from His sacrifice, in reverencing His Cross we, in effect, adore Christ.” But why not ‘cut out the middleman’ and worship Christ himself rather than the inanimate wood on which he hung?

A time to watch, a time to pray

Calvary shrine in the grounds of the church of Our Lady and St Peter, Laisterdyke, Bradford

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is, unusually for this book, a Victorian one rather than a modern one: J M Neale’s “A time to watch, a time to pray”. Like the other hymns for this weekend it is intended for Good Friday and helps us look forward to that commemoration of Jesus’ death at the end of Lent.

In a few verses it tries to capture the paradox of the day that is reflected in its name. If you do a web search for “why Good Friday?” you will find articles not only from religious websites and Wikipedia, but secular newspapers and other sites too. What is good about a ‘blameless’ (if controversial) prophet and healer dying in agony after an unfair trial on false charges?

There are two traditional explanations for the name: as a corruption of “God’s Friday” because Jesus is regarded by his followers as a manifestation of God; or because we also believe that the suffering and death of Jesus was ‘good’ because it was actually part of God’s plan for him and achieved the goal of taking away the effect of human sin by bearing the penalty of separation from God on our behalf.

Hence the second part of verse 1, “the saddest, yet the gladdest [day] too, that earth or heaven ever knew”. Verse 2 explores the sadness in the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, and verse 3 the gladness in our sin being borne away. The last verse praises him as saviour – “Yours is the glory, ours the shame; by all the pain your love endured, let all our many sins be cured”.

Going back to the opening line, “A time to watch, a time to pray”. Even those churches that normally try to ensure their main Sunday service lasts no more than an hour will invite people to pend several hours on Good Friday in a programme of hymns, Bible readings, maybe following a solemn procession around the church (the “stations of the cross”) or around their local community, and taking time for personal reflection. Good Friday (and Easter day – the two are inseparable as neither makes sense without the other) are the true centre of the Christian year, not the more popular celebration of Christmas, and deserve that “time to watch and pray”.

A purple robe, a crown of thorns

A Good Friday procession to the Church of the Assumption, Beeston, Nottingham

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Timothy Dudley-Smith’s “A purple robe, a crown of thorns”. In one way this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves as it’s clearly a hymn about the Crucifixion, so would better be set for Holy Week, but the hymn book has so many hymns for Holy Week that I have to start getting them in early so that I’m not still singing songs about the Passion after Easter!

The copyright information doesn’t say when the lyrics or melody were written, but it was probably still quite new when I first came across it. It was as a newly committed and confirmed Christian, so probably around 1981/82. Up to that point I only knew the mainly traditional hymns that were sung at school assemblies, so to discover that there was a whole world of different styles of music in worship was rather exciting. The church I attended as a student sang many contemporary ‘choruses’, which sound rather dated forty years on, as well as some older hymns.

This one fits nicely between the two. It’s not a typical 1980s chorus but nor is it a traditional hymn (i.e. several verses sung to the same tune). I’m not even sure whether to describe it as a ‘hymn’ or a ‘song’. It’s a ‘hymn’ in so far as it has five verses with a regular metrical pattern of words and the words are mostly making factual statements about Christ’s death. On the other hand the words are in the first person – “I see my Saviour stand … I see my Saviour go … I see my Saviour bear [the cross and all our sins] … I see my Saviour die … I sing my Saviour’s name” which is more the style of a worship song.

Musically, it’s noted as “common metre” so that it could in theory be set to any number of traditional hymn tunes, but that would rob the hymn of its character. The music by David Wilson appears to have been written especially for these words, and the five verses have three melodies in a pattern of A-B-C-A-B which is found commonly in more recent worship songs. The melodies themselves however are in a minor key, as befits the solemnity and despair of Good Friday. The final verse sings of Jesus’ reign on high, so should probably be omitted if it’s actually sung in Holy Week when we try not to anticipate the ‘happy ending’ of the story.

So this is a hymn that although it has not achieved widespread popularity in churches, even on Good Friday itself, is a firm favourite of mine. It’s unique, and it reminds me of the early days of my own walk with God.

[N.B. for once I’m writing these notes the day before the post is published, so I don’t know what John might say about it on Friday].

The Apocrypha in Lent – 30 March (Good Friday)

If this is your first visit, please see my introduction to these Lenten readings.

30 March 2018. Daniel chapter 14

Like the story of Susannah on which I wrote earlier this week, this chapter, known as “Bel and the dragon”, is unrelated to the rest of the book of Daniel and is only included because Daniel features in the three short stories that it comprises, all of which share the theme of the defeat of idolatry. The chapter is omitted in Protestant Bibles as “apocryphal”.

In the first of the short stories, King Cyrus – mentioned elsewhere in the Bible and undoubtedly a historical person – is portrayed as worshiping the idol called Bel or Marduk which appears to eat a large amount of food (including sacrificed sheep). Daniel is no under illusion – he knows that the idol is only a bronze -covered clay statue, and tells the king that their must be trickery. Cyrus is at least willing to investigate the truth, but the priests of Bel are confident their secret trap door (by which they go in to eat the idol’s food at night) will not be discovered. Daniel uses a simple built of forensic investigation by scattering ashes on the floor to expose the footprints of the people who come in at night, and thus persuades the king to stop worshiping the idol.

In the second story, the king is now worshiping a living creature – a “dragon” (we cannot know what sort of animal this really was). He believes it to be immortal, but Daniel very simply chokes it to death with balls of hair, grease and pitch. In this way he persuades the king to drop the practice of idolatry. But that is not the end of the story – for the second time (if the stories in the book are in chronological order) Daniel is fed to the lions, yet survives by God’s miraculous intervention.

Is there any relevance to this story for Christians? Yes, very much so! Today is Good Friday, when Jesus was condemned to death by Pontius Pilate. Pilate found himself in the same position as Cyrus did – faced with a believer in God who had been upsetting the religious systems of their day, yet willing to be persuaded that the believer in question was not only harmless to society, but maybe even right in representing a different form of religion.

Yet in both cases, the priests of the established religion – the servants of Bel, or the priests of the Jerusalem temple who professed to worship the true God, the God of Abraham (and for that matter Daniel) – were so afraid of losing their influence and their income that they threatened to riot. Just as the priests of Bel “pressed [Cyrus] so hard that the king found himself forced to hand Daniel over to them to throw Daniel into the lion pit” (14:30-31), so Pilate was pressed so hard by the Jews to release Barabbas and crucify Jesus, that he did the same.

What can we learn from these stories – true or not? It seems impossible to modern people that an intelligent person such a Cyrus could believe in a statue actually being a god, but then it seems impossible for many people that an intelligent person can believe in an unseen god. The deity of Bel and the Dragon could be disproven; the existence of God can neither be disproven, nor proved by scientific experiment. Daniel, if these stories are true (and the Bible has many examples of people being miraculously preserved from death) could point to the evidence in his life of a saving power, and so can many people today. Belief in God requires faith, but a faith for which there is evidence.

It is not surprising that when Jesus hung on the cross, he was taunted to save himself and come down from the cross. He had healed people of all kinds of illness and disability, even raised people from the dead. But it appeared he could not save himself. Where was the God who rescued Daniel from the lions, Joseph from the pit in which his brothers had thrown him, or the three young men of chapter 3 from the furnace, when his own son was dying? The miracle of Good Friday is in fact in the fact that Jesus was not saved from physical death. For he had to undergo it in order to be raised to life, without which his saving work for all of humanity would not be complete. Daniel’s life was saved as a reward for defeating the power of idolatry and destroying the terrifying dragon, but Jesus on the cross faced down the greater enemy, the unseen power of the Devil. He paid the price for that with his life, but was rewarded with the everlasting life that he also offers to us.

Happy Easter!

Here ends the book of Daniel, and with it my survey of the whole Bible (including the apocryphal bits) over the last 15 months.

The Bible in a Year – 25 December

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

25 December John chapters 19-21

I am sure it cannot be coincidence that the reading for Christmas Day is the last three chapters of John’s gospel, which cover the death and resurrection of Christ. The people who planned this year-long programme of Bible readings must have arranged it like that, and for a good reason.

Our priest at this morning’s Christmas communion service started his sermon by talking about the Yorkshire tradition of eating cheese with sweet foods – salty blue Stilton with mince pies, creamy Wensleydale with Christmas fruit cake. He linked this odd, but actually very tasty, combination of tastes to the fact that within the last week before Christmas, when the church is looking forward to the joy of the Nativity, and the world is celebrating in its own pleasure-seeking way, the church leaders and musicians have been planning the music for services in Lent and Holy Week.

It may seem strange reading about the death and resurrection of Christ, or planning solemn music for the season when we particularly remember those events, just when the focus should be on his birth. But there are good reasons for doing so.

We cannot understand the birth of Jesus into the world unless we think also of the crucifixion. Nor can we understand the crucifixion without believing in the resurrection. For that was the whole point of his birth. The way God rescues us from the consequences of our own sin is to take those sins upon himself and suffer the consequences – separation from God, mental agony, physical torture, and death. But that was not the end of the story – the resurrection proved that the sinless one was stronger than sin and death and would live for ever.

Even at the time Jesus was dedicated as a baby, it was prophesied about him that he would be the cause of the “falling and rising of many in Israel”, and of Mary his mother it was said “a sword will pierce your own heart also”. Throughout the last year or so of his life, Jesus had tried many times to explain to the disciples that his death – and subsequent resurrection – were absolutely part of God’s plan for him, and could not be avoided without wrecking the plan.

There is a line in a Christmas carol that says “man shall live for evermore because of Christmas Day”. It sounds good, but it is not good theology. It would be more accurate – if less poetic – to say “man shall live for evermore because of Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Day”. But we can make a concession – as the timeless God came into our world in the form of a time-bound human being, birth had to come before death. Without Christmas there could be no Easter. And without Mary’s willing acceptance of God’s will there could have been no Christmas. Therefore we say with her, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour”.

Merry Christmas to all readers.

The Bible in a Year – 14 April (Good Friday)

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

14 April. 1 Kings chapters 6-7

In these chapters, Solomon arranges the building of his great Temple, which takes seven years, and his even bigger palace, which takes thirteen. The furnishings of these, especially the Temple, are described in great detail.

The Temple in its three versions – this first one, the rebuilt one after the Exile, and finally Herod’s Temple that Jesus knew – would be the central focus of religious life in Israel/Judah for the best part of a thousand years. There is no longer a central Temple for either Jews or Christians. But its symbolism continues in Christianity – for example the plan of many Catholic and Anglican churches with narthex, nave, chancel and altar sanctuary deliberately echoes the plan of the temple, and some church fonts are made to resemble the “sea” or large basin of water in the nave of the temple.

Today (as I write this) is Good Friday 2017, the most solemn day of the Christian year when Jesus died for our sins. One of the ‘crimes’ for which he was condemned was the blasphemous claim that he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days. What he meant was that in his death, he would instantly put an end to the the purpose of the Temple (indeed its curtain that kept ordinary people away from the holiest part of the shrine was miraculously torn down at the moment of his death), and on the third day when he rose from the dead he himself would become the temple for us.

The Christian understanding is that Jesus replaced the temple, a central place of prayer by priests on behalf of the people, as the way to God, for he was God incarnate, and he “lives for all time to make intercession for us”. He replaced it as the location where God can be encountered, for we can know his presence at any time. He replaced the function of its altars for making sacrifice for sin, for he himself became the ultimate sacrifice.

This week, Jews have celebrated the Passover and Christians prepare to celebrate Easter – these are really two versions of the same story of God’s saving love. But one led, after over five hundred years, to a man-made temple in which God’s love for Israel could be remembered and kept sacred. The other instantly opened up God’s love to the whole world for ever.

May you have a blessed day and look forward to the celebration on Sunday.