Today’s song from Sing Praise is ‘Nothing can ever come between us and the love of God’, another chant from the Taizé community.
The title is the first line of the chorus, the second line being ‘… revealed to us in Jesus Christ’. I’ve discovered this week that there is now a tradition of a ‘gender reveal party’ where a baby’s gender is disclosed, not only to friends but to the parents themselves who have not previously been given the information (you may well call me slow on the uptake here, as apparently the idea started in America ten years ago, but I don’t have children myself!) The point is that to reveal something is not only to share factual knowledge, but to make an event of it, to add drama to that passing on of information. So when the Bible says that God reveals himself to us (and a concordance tells me the word is used 81 times in the Bible) it is more than simply telling us that he exists, it is intended to make a sudden and dramatic change in our understanding, one that will change our lives radically in the same way that people’s lives are changed by having a baby.
The verses, or rather chants to be sung by a solo cantor, are verses from Psalm 56 and Romans chapter 8. They are all about trust in God, and God as the Father who have us his son who died, rose again and prays for us. As a result, to quote the last one, “neither death, nor life, nor things present or to come, nothing can ever keep us from God’s love”. That love once revealed never leaves us, like the love of a mother for her child.