Keith Getty – The Raynville Rambler

**The holy rood at St. Andrew’s, Nuthurst, West Sussex**
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © nick macneill

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Keith & Kristyn Getty’s “Beneath the cross of Jesus”. As we approach Holy Week we focus more on the inevitable death of Jesus, and there are many hymns on this theme, which is why we’re starting well ahead of time.

I liked this one, because it gets a good balance between the individual or devotional approach to the Cross and a corporate one. Not only the words but also the music is quite different from “O to see the dawn” that I sang on 9 March, which was another Keith Getty composition but in partnership with Stuart Townend. Perhaps it’s that difference in partnership that brings a much softer approach both to the music (the tune is a pleasant, almost folk-style one, although set a bit low for my tenor voice) and also the words, where the message of Jesus suffering punishment for us is replaced with a meditation on how Jesus has brought grace to me, the church and the world.

The first verse is personal – “Beneath the cross of Jesus I find a place to stand, and wonder at the mercy that calls me as I am. For hands that should discard me hold wounds which tell me ‘Come’. Beneath the cross of Jesus my unworthy soul is won.” The second tells how by his death Jesus brought into being a new family of those saved by grace: “Beneath the cross of Jesus see the children called by God”. This is symbolised by the words (in the Bible, not in this hymn) that Jesus spoke from the cross telling his mother Mary and closest disciple John to treat each other as mother and son after his own death.

The third verse follows with what that family should do in response: “We follow in his footsteps where promised hope is found”. The last lines refer to the Church as the Bride (an image found in the book of Revelation) and finish with “Beneath the cross of Jesus we will gladly live our lives”.

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.