Stuart Townend – The Raynville Rambler

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “How deep the Father’s love for us”. This is a contemporary hymn from 1995 with both words and music by Stuart Townend, but both words and music seem to hark back to an earlier age. In fact, to my ears the melody bears a close resemblance to yesterday’s 19^th century hymn, “Here is love, vast as the ocean”. I would not be surprised if Townend had that one in mind when he wrote this.

Some of the images are shared by the two hymns: the vastness of God’s love in the title (‘vast’ is not a common word nowadays), the futility of worldly power when measured against God’s love, and Christ as our ransom. But the emphasis is different. Here it is less the extent of God’s grace and love that are praised (though they are) but the great pains Christ went through in order to deliver them.

The words here also look behind or above the cross (spatial words are of course meaningless in respect of God, but necessary for us as that’s the way we think) to the suffering of God the Father. He is no remote creator here, but a very present spirit with feelings for his now all-too-human Son. “The Father turns his face away, as wounds which mar the chosen one bring many souls to glory”.

My own part in Christ’s suffering has to be acknowledged here, too. “Ashamed I hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers” and “It was my sin that held him there, until it was accomplished”. But at the end the singer of this hymn, as with yesterday’s, can declare “This I know with all my heart: his wounds have paid my ransom”.

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.