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Desert Island Hymns Faith which sings with heart and mind Southleigh Publications 1996 ISBN 0 9520644 6 4
I wrote this book during a sabbatical when I was Chair of the Cornwall Methodist District. My aim was to write an introduction to the Christian Faith which took academic scholarship seriously, which was accessible to ordinary church members, and which could be given to anyone who was interested in finding out what Christianity is about. I decided to write it around eight hymns which, while not quite my eight favourite hymns, are not far off. The result was a book that I was and still am, very pleased with. Not every hymn is well-known, however, particularly to people who aren't Methodists, and not even these days to the more modern kind of Methodists who prefer worship songs to proper hymns. That's a drawback, I recognise, but maybe the book will also introduce a few readers to some classic hymns. So there's a hymn about Jesus, and one each on his birth, his death and his resurrection. There's two on what living as a Christian means, one on worship, and one on 'God'.
1 With thanks to Roy Plomley and Charles Wesley I have obviously borrowed the title of this book from the classic Radio Four programme, Desert Island Discs, in which celebrities of one sort or another share their life with the listeners and play eight records which are special to them. However, any similarity between that excellent programme and this book is limited to the borrowed title and the fact that Desert Island Hymns contains the eight hymns which I would choose to take with me if ever I had the chance to be marooned on a desert island. Apart from that this book is not in any way an autobiography of the writer who is not a celebrity of any kind whatsoever! Neither are the eight hymns that I have chosen for Desert Island Hymns my eight favourite hymns. They are those eight of my favourite hymns which best sum up for me what it means to be a Christian and which I think best take us to the heart of the Christian Faith. For that is what this book is really all about. It is about the Christian Faith. It is about the good news of God's love that we have seen and heard in Jesus Christ. But why would I choose hymns to take with me to my desert island at all? And why choose hymns to illustrate the Christian Faith? One answer might just be, Why not? Another might be that hymns have been an important feature of Christian worship and spirituality from the earliest days of the Church, a feature taken over from the Temple in Jerusalem where hymns, psalms, had been sung for centuries. Another might be that hymns are still important for many Christians today, and even for many non-churchgoers if the continuing popularity of Songs of Praise is anything to go by. A more personal answer would be that for me as a Methodist, and for many others in my branch of the Church, hymns have a special place in our spirituality. If I could put it very personally indeed, when I reflect on what sustains me in my Christian pilgrimage I think I would have no problem if I was debarred tomorrow from sharing in the Eucharist for the rest of my life. If I was forbidden to preach then I think I could adjust to that. But if I could never sing again, then I fear that my spiritual life would be put in jeopardy. That is the importance of hymns and hymn-singing in my personal spirituality. The particular importance of hymns in the Methodist tradition was illustrated by a speaker at our youth fellowship years ago. She said that you could always tell where people were going to worship on a Sunday by what they carried as they walked to church. The Anglicans carried their prayer books, and the Roman Catholics the same. Anybody with a Bible under their arm was off to the Baptists. The Methodists were instantly recognisable because they carried their hymn-books. There was no URC church in our town! Those days have gone of course, and our new hymn-book which came out in 1984 is far too big to carry anyway: but it is still true that the book most likely to be given as a Confirmation gift in many a Methodist church is a hymn-book. It is fashionable in some circles to dismiss the traditional Methodist Sunday Service as a "hymn-sandwich", but that is actually quite a good title for what can be, when it is designed properly, an excellent menu for a certain sort of service of worship; and traditional Methodists can usually tell whether or not the menu has been thought out and if the meal has been carefully prepared or merely thrown together. However, appreciating hymns is not a Methodist prerogative. All the churches use hymns in worship and most Christians have favourite hymns which help them in their spiritual lives. In addition to the traditional hymns and old favourites there can be few churches and few Christians who have not been caught up in one way or another in the wave of new hymns and worship songs which has swept through all the churches in the last thirty years. Hymns belong to all of us. Not only is singing them one of the main ways in which members of a congregation participate in the worship that is being offered to God but they stay with us wherever we are. But what are these hymns and how do they work? Some people say that hymns, worship songs, choruses and psalms are different things, but I will simply use the word "hymn" to cover them all. As far as this book is concerned a "hymn" is religious poetry set to music. Obviously hymns come in all shapes, sizes and styles, and any hymn-book in use today will contain hymns from as early as Old Testament times right up to the day before yesterday. This blending of poetry and music creates a powerful dynamic which works on us in all kinds of ways, and that is one of the great blessings of good hymns and one of the real dangers of bad ones. They get inside us. They affect us. We become what we sing. And often it is the music, the tune, which is crucial. We all know how disconcerting it is to hear an organist in another church strike up a different tune from the one we are expecting, and of course the proper tune is always the one we sing in our particular church. Or again, no amount of beautiful words in a hymn can make up for an unsingable tune. Singing a hymn is a total experience. As we sing we offer
as it says in the hymn. I know that in the hymn the "hands" are those of the sculptor and craftsman, but surely we can think of them as the hands of the organist or musician as well? Hymns are music and words, and it is important that we recognise what sort of words the words are. There is nothing wrong with stating the obvious now and again, so I'll do it now as near to the beginning of this book as I can. All the hymns in this book, if not all hymns everywhere, are poetry. Whether they are good poetry, bad poetry or indifferent poetry I'll leave experts in poetry to decide, but the fact is that they are poetry. The point that I would make here as strongly as I can is that, as I see it, poetry is one of the only two ways in which we can really do theology. Or to put it another way, in my view there are only two ways in which we can talk about God, and poetry is one. The other is by story. I say that for all kinds of reasons, but not least because the Bible is almost all story or poetry! Poetry and story use words richly and imaginatively. They are full of images and metaphors. They recognise the limitations of our language and our words. The poet and the story-teller know that you cannot describe God or define him, and they shun the dead letter of prose when they write or talk about faith in God. And that is surely why Jesus taught in "parables". When it comes to responding to God in prayer and worship, then there too we are reduced either to what St Paul calls "groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26 GNB), to silence (Psalm 46:10) or to poetry because plain words fail us. This is put beautifully in a hymn translated by John Wesley,
In their poetry hymns invite us to sing about things too high and too deep for us, truths beyond definition and description and realities for which all our ordinary words fall short and fail us. Thus hymns and hymn-books are more than inspiring devotional literature or multi-purpose worship material. They are theology. A hymn-book is a theology textbook. John Wesley described the hymn-book he edited for the Methodist societies in 1779 as "a little body of experimental and practical divinity". We could translate his phrase as "a summary of Christian belief and practice", which is another word for theology. When we are singing hymns we are doing theology. As we sing we express what we believe about God and about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And we all do it. Theology is not only something done by academic scholars in their studies, it is done by ordinary Christians every time they sing a hymn. And that is the fundamental reason why I have chosen to use hymns to talk about what it means to be a Christian and to describe the Christian Faith. Hymns belong to all of us, and if we can sing our faith in this way then we have a faith to reflect on and to share. Choosing the eight was not easy. This is my list:
Some of these are well known, one or two less so. Only three are by Methodists, and no doubt someone will take me to task because there is only one of the eight by Charles Wesley. Others grumble that only one of these hymns is “modern” and that even that one is written in a very traditional style. So I’m afraid that it is not a very politically correct list. One thing I do see looking at this list is that five of the eight hymns refer directly to Jesus. That’s because I believe him to be, as I’ve written elsewhere and said in the pulpit often enough, the clue to the meaning of life, the universe and everything; and that following him is what the Christian Faith is about.
2 “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds”
This classic hymn, published in 1779, features in most hymn-books and is the work of John Newton (1725-1807). He became the curate of the Parish Church at Olney in Buckinghamshire in 1764 and moved to St Mary Woolnoth, next to the Mansion House in London, as Rector in 1779. Before that he had led a very different sort of life – deserting from the Navy, working for a slave dealer in Sierra Leone, captaining a slave ship for four years and then being employed as a tide surveyor at Liverpool. It was there that he was influenced by the preaching of George Whitfield and John Wesley, though it was during a storm at sea in 1748 that he had what he called his “great deliverance”. He sums up his life in the epitaph he wrote for himself,
***** My first choice of hymn might be too florid for some people’s taste, but it captures that devotion to Jesus which is a central feature of much Christian spirituality and which is very near to the heart of the Christian Faith. At the same time it points beyond him to God and recognises our human limitations. Before we look at this hymn, and as a background to it and the next four chapters, I need to say something more about Jesus. We can picture the Jesus Christ of the Church’s devotion and of traditional theology like this – He is the eternal Son of God, who was made flesh among us for a while and made known to us as Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, who lived, taught and died in Galilee and Judea in what we call the first century AD. He was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and is now restored to his former power and glory as God’s only Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. This picture is a bit like a collage. It is made up of sketches of Jesus painted in the New Testament and definitions about him from the Creeds, and it took over four hundred years for this collage to emerge. His friends and neighbours in Nazareth or Capernaum wouldn’t recognise the Jesus they knew in the collage. For them he was a great rabbi, a gifted healer and a “prophet” (Matthew 21:11), but they would be mystified by the rest. His disciples and other followers came to believe that he was more than that. For them he was their “Lord”, the Messiah and even the Son of God, but they too would be mystified by the Trinity and suchlike. When the Church Fathers wrote that Jesus is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father”, to quote the Nicene Creed, they were being very careful to define things as precisely as they could, for much was at stake. But many, including me, are equally mystified by these definitions, and have a strong suspicion that they have outlived their usefulness. What we will find in the five hymns I have chosen which focus on Jesus are all kinds of New Testament pictures about him, together with a wealth of metaphor and imagery in their poetry. We will not find many definitions or formulas as in the Creeds. It is difficult if not impossible to get back behind the pictures of Jesus painted in the New Testament to Jesus of Nazareth as he actually was, to the man his neighbours knew in Galilee. We would love to have some photographs of that man, but we have none. What we do have in the New Testament is a collection of paintings instead, all painted by committed artists. Here let me repeat something I have written elsewhere (pages 42-44 of Glimpses in Faith), that all the New Testament artists agree on this one thing at least. They agree that the answer to the question about the meaning of life, the universe and everything is glimpsed in Jesus of Nazareth. It is there in what he said, what he did and what he was, especially in his death and what happened after it. In telling their stories or painting their pictures about him they invite us to believe and to live by it. They invite us to join them in seeing what they have seen, and after listening to their story to make it ours so that we can sing in the words of another hymn, though not a favourite of mine, “This is my story…” In the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the New Testament begins with four different pictures of Jesus, or four different versions of the same story if you want to put it that way. The first three of these gospels are broadly similar in outlook but have all kinds of differences when it comes down to detail, while the Fourth Gospel is noticeably different from the first three no matter how you look at it. What they have in common is that they all believe that Jesus is good news for the whole world, and they tell their stories about him and paint their pictures of him to make that point. We see this clearest of all when John tells us why he has written what he has written in his gospel, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you might have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31) The rest of the New Testament, much of it written before the gospels were finished, shares the same faith and has the same intention, and its pictures of Jesus and its metaphors have just as much rich variety. All these pictures are of a real person, and his life-story can be told like this – Once upon a time there was a rabbi. He came from a small village in the hills of Galilee, and wandered round the towns and villages, as some rabbis did, teaching a bit here, giving advice there, performing the occasional healing here and there. He was, in some ways, nothing special. North Galilee had a habit of producing wandering teachers and healers, and this one wasn’t the first nor the last. Some were famous enough to have their names remembered and some of their best sayings passed on: others were quickly forgotten. But this one made more of an impression than most: his teaching was particularly lively and vivid – but his message was quite traditional, the age-old Jewish teaching about the love of God and the need for people to love God in return and to love their neighbour. He drew the crowds, as many of these rabbis did. He also offended people. He was obviously a very holy man, but he had a reputation for enjoying parties with prostitutes, which was bad enough, but even worse with tax-collectors, the sworn enemies of true Galileans because they collected the taxes for the hated Roman rulers. That did for him in the end. He offended too many powerful people and they did to him what has been done to many prophets of many different religions in many different places over the centuries. They killed him. Telling the story of Jesus like that is the way that Jewish scholars and secular historians also tell it. Put like that it is a true story, factual and accurate about a real rabbi. What happened next is disputed. Some of this rabbi’s followers claimed that after they had seen him crucified on a Friday afternoon, he actually met them three days later on the Sunday, and on and off for a few weeks after that. They didn’t say they had seen a vision of him, but that they had met him. Their stories didn’t tally, and they all had all sorts of questions about it all, but they obviously weren’t rogues who tried to doctor their stories to make a neat fit. One thing is certain, that within a few years of this rabbi’s death his Jewish followers were calling him their Messiah and even their Lord. They didn’t quite say that he was God, but they came very near to it, which is amazing given their unique Jewish faith in only one immortal and invisible God. So when it come to details of Jesus’ life there are all sorts of historical questions we cannot answer, many gaps that we cannot fill. There is no doubt at all that some of his doings in the gospels have been exaggerated. We also do not know how many of the things that the gospels tell us he said he actually did say. But though the details are patchy and the presentation is coloured by the beliefs and interests of each particular writer, the overall picture is clear. Each gospel writer gives his testimony to Jesus in the hope that we will want to become his followers as well. Thus the gospels are like sermons, reflecting the faith of the preacher and inviting us to believe. They invite us to believe that Jesus Christ is the clue to the meaning of life and that he is the one who can make us all really alive. The rest of the New Testament shares the same conviction and makes the same invitation. ***** In “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds” we can see that John Newton has accepted the New Testament’s invitation and found it to be true. He has come to share its conviction about Jesus. In his hymn he expresses his faith in this Jesus and invites us to believe too and sing of our faith. The hymn has little interest in Jesus’ life or in doctrines about him, instead in deeply devotional poetry the writer pours out his love for Jesus using a wide range of metaphors and images.
The hymn begins with a statement of what Jesus means to a believer. Neither his name nor his life will mean much to anyone else. At the most they will only see his life as that of a good man from long ago, at the worst they will only use his name as another swearword. But it is different for Christians. They are the ones who believe in Jesus. They are those who see him differently. They are the ones who see meaning in that obscure life. They are the ones who think that the name of Jesus is precious. This is what Christianity is about, having one's eyes opened to see meaning in his life and one's ears unstopped to hear music in his name. In the second line John Newton reminds us that the Christian religion is about believing, that is about faith, commitment, discipleship and following. It is about learning about Jesus and then deciding to take him seriously. It is about trusting that things are the way he showed them to be, and living life as if that is the case. It is not about knowing things for certain, but about stepping out in faith. In the first line he reminds us that such faith is no dry and joyless duty, on the contrary it is sweet. The whole hymn sings that the Christian Faith is life-sustaining, refreshing and comforting. It sings of the joy and delight of believing; of its gladness, joy and warmth. But this is a very honest hymn throughout, and these first two verses make no attempt to disguise or minimise the difficulties that believers face. Life for everyone, Christians included and at times Christians especially, has its problems. So in these verses John Newton talks and we admit when we sing that we have sorrows, wounds and fears, that our spirits feel wounded and our breasts are troubled and that we get weary and hungry. Here is none of the "prosperity theology" that some would have us believe, none of the "Come to Jesus and life will be all right ever after" appeal of cheap evangelism, nor bed-of-roses escapism. The hymn lives in the real world where "human beings are born to trouble, just as sparks fly upward" as this sad fact of life is so memorably put in the Book of Job (Job 5:7). It is in the middle of this trouble and grief that the name of Jesus sustains us. This name is celebrated in verses 1, 3 and 6, and in verse 4 we see something of what Jesus meant for John Newton. In these two verses we see how helpful to him and to others the name of Jesus has been. He writes, out of his own experience and that of others, that it soothes, heals and drives away fear, that it makes whole and calms, and that it is manna and rest. The name of Jesus is manna to the hungry soul, not just "food" (that wouldn't fit the metre of the poem, though I suppose "dinner" would) but manna. Remember the manna in the story of Moses leading the Israelites through the desert. They had no food and no way of getting any, so God gave them a daily issue of this delicious and sustaining stuff at breakfast. But it wouldn't keep, except on Friday for the Sabbath on Saturday. You got your "daily" bread, but no more! That says something important about faith. At the mention of the name, Jesus, different things will come into different people's minds. There might be flashes from the New Testament, such as incidents in his life or bits of his teaching, scenes of the cross or the resurrection, titles given to him like "Lord" or "Lamb of God"; there might be snatches of hymns about him, images from stained glass windows or paintings like "Jesus turned and looked on Peter"; there might be phrases from prayers, words from worship and the Eucharist like "This is my Body", or pictures from Godspell or films like Jesus of Nazareth. In addition there will be memories and associations with people, places and events which have made up our life story so far. For those who have come to believe in Jesus, to see him as the clue to the meaning of their lives, to join with others in worship and the life of the Church, the name Jesus will conjure up all kinds of different things. Mention of it will affect our hearts as well as our minds and involve our emotions as well as our ideas, and it will help and sustain, inspire and encourage in life's inevitable upsets. We could say that in this hymn Jesus and the name of Jesus are presented as icons. Icon is an interesting old word that has just been given a new lease of life. In its old sense an icon is a religious painting. In the Orthodox churches in particular these paintings are very important. They are painted in a highly stylised way and in a sort of code, and in meditating on them you are taken through the icon itself and into the life of God. In modern computer jargon an icon is a little picture on a computer screen. When you move your cursor to an icon and click your mouse (and they have the cheek to say that religious language is hard to understand!) this lets you through to a new screen or lets you start to do a new task. If you click on a paintbrush icon, for example, a new world of colours, paints and possibilities opens up to you. Both sorts of icons are pictures which open up new worlds, but the religious icon also changes the way we look at the world we live in. After seeing into God's hidden world, we look differently at the things around us here and now. Another new way in which the term icon is used today is to describe pop-stars, fashion idols, media personalities or other public figures. These modern heroes become gurus to follow and models to copy, and in so doing play a significant part in shaping the values, attitudes and lifestyles of groups and generations. And that, without the hype, is part of what this hymn is saying about Jesus and the name of Jesus, that for John Newton and for Christians Jesus is hero, guru, model, idol, icon.
Rocks, shields and hiding are metaphors frequently found in Victorian hymns and negro spirituals, and for obvious reasons. In the midst of suffering and insecurity they talk of the hope we need. But this hymn is not using those metaphors in quite that way. Jesus (dear name) is a rock on which something is built, not one to shelter behind. Shields and hiding places might suggest flight and fear: but a shield is a weapon of war and a hiding place is a temporary place of safety from which we emerge when danger is past to get on with the job. The second half of the verse is emphatically positive and makes the point using a picture not found in the Bible at all. Jesus is our treasury. The picture is that of an investment bank whose trading position is totally secure (never-failing) and whose reserves are limitless (boundless stores). Its currency is grace. Grace is one of the key words of the Bible and one of its most reassuring themes. In the Old Testament God is pictured as a gracious God, one who is amazingly kind, generous and loving, as in Exodus 34:6-7,
This picture was so important to the people who wrote the Old Testament that reflections of it are found in nearly all the different strands of the Old Testament and from some of the earliest to the latest of its books. The New Testament is convinced that Jesus expressed this grace of God in a unique way, that he actually embodied it,
Jesus taught that because God was gracious and merciful, those who worship him should be too,
And he practised what he preached. All through the gospels we find examples of the way in which kindness, love and generous care for others was the hallmark of Jesus' life and work. It was also, the New Testament insists, the hallmark of his own death, where we see the generosity of love, which is what we mean by grace, at its clearest. All our hymn books are full of hymns about God's love. Many of the newer ones include John Newton's "Amazing Grace", the title of which speaks for itself. The one by F W Faber puts it simply,
But we must not get too sentimental about this idea. Not only is this grace amazing, it is also demanding and dangerous. How dangerous we can see in what happened to Jesus. The good, religious people of his day were deeply offended by much that he did because he took this idea of the love of God seriously, and we know the price he paid for giving such offence! How demanding we can see in what Jesus expected of his followers!
Incidentally, Newton wrote "Husband" and not "Brother", but most hymn books change it. In this verse, titles of Jesus are heaped one on top of the other to convey something of what Jesus means to the writer and express however inadequately something of the writer's gratitude for what he has received from God. If you like, this verse gives us just a sample of what John Newton feels he has been given from those boundless stores of grace. In response to having all of this "good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, poured into his lap" (Luke 6:38) he wants to praise Jesus, his icon of grace. It is tempting to go through this verse word by word and say something about each of these titles used about Jesus, but I won't because the real effect of the verse is cumulative. In the poetry of devotion and with the use of rich imagery the verse gives expression to that which is way beyond any prose to describe or any doctrine to define.
Verse 5 is an honest recognition of our shortcomings. No matter what our best intentions may be, we are what we are. "We have this treasure in clay jars", as Paul put it (2 Corinthians 6:8). Jesus recognised that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41). When we see God as he is, then we will be able to praise him as we should. These words remind me of two promises in the New Testament which readily accept our inevitable limitations in the here and now. In 1 John 3:2 the writer puts it like this,
Paul says much the same thing,
In the meantime, it is reassuring to know that God understands our limitations and our shortcomings. The last verse says two things about this meantime in which we are living. The last word in the hymn is death, and this last verse reminds us that the meantime in which we live is temporary, that our lives are transient and that we shall die. But the hymn does not allow death itself to have the last word, for it ends with a prayer that the music of Jesus' name will refresh us in death. Our lives may be fleeting but the heavenly music is not. I will say more about the "sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life" in chapter 5. Finally, to the second point which the last verse makes about life in the meantime. The first two verses of the hymn make general statements about Jesus and the believer, but from verse 3 onwards the hymn uses the first person singular "I" and the personal pronoun "my". John Newton expresses his own faith in these verses and invites those who sing the hymn to sing of their own faith too. The last thing he asserts before the prayer in the last two lines is that he will proclaim with every fleeting breath the love that he has seen and known in Jesus. We have been told often enough that we ought to "share our faith" and "go forth and tell". But many good and faithful Christians do not find it easy to talk about "Jesus and his love". Many find it easier to express their faith through good deeds in daily living and in service in the church or the community, remembering the words of Jesus about "by their fruits you will know them". This is where hymns can be so helpful, and why this hymn is the first of my desert island choices. In it John Newton gives me words and means to proclaim the love of Jesus, whereas left to myself I can do little more than stutter and lisp. Not only does singing this hymn of devotion to Jesus renew and refresh my faith in him, it also gives me joy in the good times and strength and encouragement in times of trouble. It helps me to accept my shortcomings by reminding me that it is not my grasp of God that matters but his mighty grasp of me. Above all it is a hymn in which God can "unloose our stammering tongues, to tell his love, immense, unsearchable".
This is a favourite Methodist carol and is the work of a Methodist minister, George Stringer Rowe (1830-1913). It was written for the children's magazine At Home and Abroad and then published in the Methodist Sunday-school Hymnbook of 1879. * * * * * I love this carol for many reasons, but I have chosen it as one of my desert island hymns for three particular ones. First, because of the powerful climax of the last verse, Praise to God, the Christ has come! which for me sounds the right note not only for Christmas but for every day. Second, because it is firmly based on one of the two different Christmas stories in the New Testament, the one told in Luke's gospel. Third, because it talks about the coming of Christ into our lives today, not simply about his coming a long time ago in a place far away. If we ask, What are the hard facts about Christmas? then the answer is very brief. All that we know for certain is that Jesus was born, and that his mother's name was Mary. We cannot put a date on his birth to a year, let alone to a day. Neither can we be sure where he was born nor about the circumstances surrounding his birth. But asking that question about anything in the Bible never gets you very far, and though some people want to keep on asking it, it is not a very important question. A much more important question to ask about the Bible is, What do these stories mean? Another important question is, Why did they tell such stories in the first place? If you ask those sort of questions about the Christmas stories you really can get somewhere. So what about the Christmas stories we tell each year in nativity plays and carol services, in cribs and on Christmas cards? In these stories we are celebrating the heart of our faith. In them we are saying, Praise to God, the Christ has come! In story, drama, poetry and music we are thanking God for his gift of Jesus. In the great festival of Christmas we are using old stories and sometimes new ones to say what Jesus means to us. In celebrating him in this way we are not just talking about what happened when he was born, but about something much more important. We are saying what his birth among us meant and means! Which is exactly what Matthew and Luke were doing when they told their different Christmas stories at the beginning of their gospels. We are all familiar with the Christmas Story as it is told in church and chapel in crib and nativity play and pictured on Christmas cards. There is the baby lying in a manger. Mary and Joseph look on, sharing the stable with ox and ass. Shepherds kneel to worship. Three kings or wise men offer their gifts. Over all is the star which guided them, and angels too. Most of that picture, though not all of it, comes from the two stories in Matthew and Luke. Other carols let their imagination fly free and in addition to talking about oxen and asses, which are one of the features which don't appear anywhere in the Bible stories at all, also sing about the kings sailing into Bethlehem in three ships, sometime past three-o-clock, amidst the winter's snow, to see a baby who never cries, while all the bells in heaven are ringing in joy at the event. These carols are doing just what Matthew and Luke did, they are trying to show what the birth of Jesus means! So letting imaginations run riot, they encourage us to join the celebration, for those who have discovered the joy of Christmas have so much to celebrate because, Praise to God, the Christ has come! One of the things that we don't do at Christmas, and it's a pity, is to look carefully at what Matthew or Luke say in their own stories, and to look at what is said in other parts of the New Testament about the birth of Jesus. When you do this and look carefully at what the Bible says about Christmas you see that the full-scale nativity play, for instance, is not there. In that play parts of the Christmas story from Matthew are used together with parts from Luke: but other bits of both are left out, because that's the only way that two different and at times conflicting stories can be harmonised. So before we get to the carol let us have a quick look at what the New Testament says about Christmas. The earliest gospel of the four is Mark, and it doesn't mention the birth of Jesus at all. The earliest Christmas reference in the New Testament is St Paul's statement, "when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born..." (Galatians 4:4). Another early one is in the hymn he quotes in Philippians 2:6-8, that Jesus Christ, "though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself..." Both of these make the same point as the later reference in 1 John 4:2 that you can tell true spirits from false because the true ones "confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh". These are important glimpses of the Christmas faith of the early Christians because they are all asides. In these passages the writers are really discussing something else and mention the birth of Jesus only as an illustration to make a different point. But each of them stress that Jesus was born and that he was a real human being. In stressing that, they all counter a very real threat that was coming into the early church from a group of people who did not believe that God or God's spirit could possibly become human. Spirit was spirit, and spirit was good; flesh was flesh, and flesh was bad. These folk believed that in human beings spirit, or soul, was imprisoned in a human body, and that was bad enough: but God's spirit could never be contaminated like that. At the most some talked about the man, Jesus of Nazareth, in whom God's spirit came to dwell at his baptism and departed at the crucifixion. This was too much for others who would not believe that Jesus was a real person at all. The New Testament will have none of that. It insists that the Lord of the Church was a real human being who ate and drank, laughed and cried, got angry and weary, was born and died. Three of the four gospels begin with Christmas theology: Matthew and Luke give us their belief about Jesus by painting pictures and John gives his by straight teaching. John begins his gospel with a paragraph which would have been easy for all his first readers to understand. Yet for us his "In the beginning was the Word", which we hear every Christmas, goes right over our heads. When he wrote, "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was..." all his first readers would have simply nodded their heads and wondered when he was going to get to the point. Greek readers would have known that the Logos (we can translate the term as word, speech, reason, idea, rationality, reason and a number of other things besides) was the principle which held everything together, the idea behind all life, the meaning and ground of it all; and so these readers would simply nod agreement to what John had written. The world was no accident, there was intelligence, meaning and purpose behind it. Jewish readers would have immediately thought of Genesis 1 and all the ways in which "God spoke and all things came to be". They too would have understood what John was saying and agreed with it. It was God's idea that was behind creation, and his powerful word that called it into being. The first four verses of John 1 would have been almost stating the obvious to those first readers, whereas for us translating Logos as "Word" makes no sense at all. But both of those groups of early readers would have been jerked upright by verse 14, "The Logos became flesh". That would have shocked and amazed them all, and for John that is where the good news of Jesus begins. Unfortunately, by the time we get to verse 14 the congregation has switched off, which is a pity because look at what it says about Jesus, that "the divine idea behind the universe - the meaning and energy of life itself - has become flesh, and Jesus is his name". Matthew's gospel begins with a genealogy which is meaningless to us but crucial to Matthew's point and, he would have hoped, convincing to his fellow Jews. It traces the lineage of Abraham, the father of all the Jewish people, down to great King David and then down to Jesus. It is done to prove that Jesus "who is called the Messiah" (1:16) is in fact "the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (1:1). It is done to show that Jesus is the "long-expected" one, "born to set his people free", as an Advent hymn puts it. Then Matthew tells his story about how this Jesus the Messiah was born. The story is set in the time when Herod is King of Judea (he died in 4BC). An angel appears to Joseph to tell him that his fiancée is pregnant and that this pregnancy is the work of God. Joseph still married her and the baby was born at home in Bethlehem. Wise men followed a star and brought gifts but asked Herod the way. He looked for the baby for different reasons and when he couldn't find him killed all the young boys in the area. Meanwhile Joseph and Mary had fled with the baby to Egypt as refugees. They stayed there until Herod died and then they tried to go home to Bethlehem. Finding a son of Herod on the throne they decided to go to Galilee, a separate country, and settled in the village of Nazareth instead. All through this story Matthew quotes Old Testament texts to show that in all of this God is at work to save his people, but it is a painfully sad story. The Messiah is born but "he came to his own people, and his own people did not accept him". That is how John puts it in a plain sentence in John 1:11 but Matthew puts it in a story form. Jesus is worshipped by foreign wise men, priests of an eastern religion, but rejected by Herod and the wise men and priests of Jerusalem. The story of Jesus' life will unfold in the same way, and Matthew will end his gospel with Jesus telling his disciples to "go out into all the world" (28:19). Luke's birth story is very different. It starts with the birth of Jesus' relative, John the Baptist, to very aged parents. God is at work in such births, remember the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah? The angel Gabriel appears to Mary who lives in Nazareth, announces her own imminent pregnancy and tells her about Elizabeth's. She visits her. Mary and Joseph become engaged, and they have to journey to Bethlehem for a census. There the baby is born in a stable because there is no room in the inn. Shepherds visit. After eight days the baby is circumcised and four weeks later they take him to the Temple in Jerusalem where they offer the proper thanksgiving. After all that they go home to Nazareth. All through this story there are songs of praise to God for what he is doing in all of this. This child is the "Son of the Most High" (1:32), the "Son of David and King of the Jews" (1:33), "Saviour, Messiah and Lord" (2:11). All the people involved in Luke's story are ordinary, none are rich, powerful or important. That is the way Jesus' life will unfold. In Luke he will live among such people and care especially for the despised and the outcast. Luke also has a genealogy but doesn't give it until chapter 3; and in it he traces Jesus back past David and Abraham to Adam. He makes the same point there. Jesus is for all humanity. John begins his gospel with theology - after all John 1:1-18 is hard to understand so it must be theology - and Matthew and Luke do the same! In their stories they are expressing their faith in Jesus, and that faith is every bit as rich in theology as John's. Their birth stories do not actually tell us any more of the facts of Jesus' birth than John's opening statements, but in all kinds of ways they illustrate who Jesus is. In a sense their stories are much more like obituaries which sum up the meaning of a person's life than birth certificates which contain the facts of a baby's birth. George Stringer Rowe recognises that, and what he does in his beautiful carol is, beginning with Luke's story, to go on to point out the significance of Jesus for us today, so that there may be a Christmas in our hearts. * * * * *
Meanly picks up one of the key themes in Luke's gospel. In his birth stories Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, Simeon and Anna are all "little" people, nobodies from nowhere in particular. The baby is born in a stable, wrapped in poor "swaddling cloths" and put in a manger. Life goes on its way and his birth is unnoticed by the world at large. And that is the way, according to Luke, that Jesus grew up and lived. He made his friends among ordinary people and he cared for life's nobodies, like the poor, women, lepers and outcasts even though some of those outcasts were rich ones like Zachaeus the tax-collector. The first people to thank God for Jesus were shepherds, rough, somewhat despised, not very religious, certainly very ordinary people. The story of the shepherds in Luke 2:8-20 is a brilliant piece of story-telling. Imagine yourself on that hillside. An angel appears with a message, a message that gets more wonderful with each word. After the shock the words begin to sink in - for you... good news... great joy... today... in David's city... a Saviour... Christ... the Lord. By this time you are agog with excitement. The crescendo rises to its climax, This will be your sign... Then in verse 12 the anti-climax which is the key to Luke's whole gospel story of Jesus, and it doesn't need much imagination to feel the disappointment and the let-down - a baby, swaddling cloths, a manger. Some saviour! Some Lord! Some hope! You must be joking! But they decide to give it a try, and they find that indeed in that stable is their true happiness. Happy is the other key word of this verse and it is carried over into the next. It is a quiet and simple happiness, unsought-for, found in an unexpected place.
This verse links the manger and our contemporary world. It begins with the happiness of Christmas shared by all who enjoy the Festive Season, and especially by those who not only know the Christmas Story but also respond to it. The hymn says that there is nothing wrong with this sort of happiness, or with festivity and fun. It goes further. It says that the more you centre your celebrations on Jesus, "the reason for the season" as the car sticker puts it, the happier you will be. There is a change in the second half of the verse and from then on the carol draws our attention away from the shepherds and their manger to us and ours. The significance of Christmas can only be known when there is a Christmas in our hearts. As the significance of Jesus was only discovered by people in Galilee and Jerusalem when they listened to him, took him seriously, believed him and committed themselves to him, so for us Christmas only becomes significant when it ceases to be a celebration of a dim and distant event long ago and becomes something that speaks to us of the love of God and the life of God present in our lives, our communities and our world today. From here the hymn is a prayer to Christ to stoop again and abide within my breast. Note the titles used for Christ in this hymn: Blessed Saviour, Christ most holy and Son of Man. "Son of Man" is used very often in the gospels and rarely in the rest of the New Testament. Jesus calls himself, "The Son of Man" in what is probably no more than the Aramaic equivalent of the posher English, "one" instead of "I". The hymn uses it as a title in both verse 1 and verse 3, and in both places it speaks of the humility of Jesus. As he was put in a manger as a baby, so now he is willing to to come into our equally grubby hearts. In verses 2 and 3 our Lord is called Christ most holy. Though we tend to use "Christ" as if it was Jesus' surname it began life as a title. It was the Greek word for the Hebrew term, "Messiah", the title of God's anointed kings of old and the title for the one they hoped God would soon send to make Israel great again. The New Testament believes that Jesus was that long-awaited Messiah, though his new kingdom turned out to be very different from the one that was expected. In the hymn the word is still used as a proper title, Christ most holy. The angels also were called holy in verse 1. In the Bible to say that God is holy is to acknowledge his power and majesty, his love and his awesome purity. It is put perfectly in the hymn by Reginald Heber,
So when the hymn talks about Christ most holy in the same breath as it talks about him in Bethlehem's manger or the manger of our hearts, it expresses something of the amazing mystery which is at the heart of the Christian Faith. That, somehow, Jesus is "God with us". This is put poetically, for how else can it be put, nowhere better than in Charles Wesley's usually unsung Christmas hymn, "Glory be to God on high",
That was the hymn I nearly chose for my Christmas desert island hymn selection, but as I'm always getting into trouble for choosing carols nobody knows I thought better of it. The third title, Blessed Saviour, I will leave to the chapter after next.
Verse 2 hinted that Christ's coming into our hearts involves stooping even lower than the manger, and verse 3 begins by recognising the nasty side of human life. There are evil things deep within us, alive, fed and nurtured by our wrongdoing and badness. The hymn recognises that but doesn't go on about it. There is a tendency for the church to go overboard when it comes to "sin" and to paint a very gloomy picture of human beings as conceived and born in sin, totally unable to do anything good and to be on the road to eternal death simply as a result of being born that way. Traditional evangelism works on the assumption that if a person is to be "saved" they must first of all recognise their sin and repent of it. In the same way very near the beginning of most services of worship come the prayers of confession. Now no one can dispute that human beings can and do foul up their own lives and the lives of others, nor that the life of our planet is seriously spoiled and marred by the attitudes and actions of its human inhabitants. There is plenty of evidence all around us that humanity is selfish and that its selfishness is deadly, and when we compare ourselves with either the holiness of God or with what we ourselves could be, then we have to admit that we look pretty shabby. This hymn recognises that but doesn't go on about it. It invites Christ to enter into our shabbiness, just as he entered into the shabbiness of the manger in the story. It also recognises that such love coming into our lives will transform them
The hymn ends with a commission. There are those who have winter but no Christmas and the hymn ends on a note of concern for them. It wants them to hear the joyful tidings of the Christmas anthem so that the deadness of winter without the joy of the festivity in the middle of it, is replaced by heaven. There are, of course, people who are perfectly happy to have winter but no Christmas and Christians should be careful about assuming that theirs is not a happy lot. It is not necessarily the case that life without faith is dry, dreary and empty, or that life with faith is bright, happy and fulfilling. But the hymn ends on the positive note that the message about the love of God told in the Christmas story is a message worth telling and worth hearing. Words and tune (it must be St Winifred) combine for the climax of the last two lines. We celebrate and sing that there is joy for those who listen to the angels and do what the shepherds did. It insists that there is a Christmas anthem whose words and music are earthed in the historical fact that a baby was born to Mary and in the fact that the Christ who came to us at Bethlehem comes to us now, whoever we are, as we are and where we are. Its title expresses its theme, Praise to God, the Christ has come!
This must be one of the most famous Good Friday hymns of all, written by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), the father of English hymn-singing and hymn-writing. He published it in 1707 in his hymnbook Hymns and Spiritual Songs and intended it to be used as a Communion hymn. He gave it a title, "Crucifixion to the world by the Cross of Christ" and a text from the words of Paul in Galatians 6:14,
That Jesus died on a cross is a historical fact. No follower of Jesus would have invented this story. No new religious movement starting out to win converts and influence people would have picked a cross as its symbol. No Jew setting out to create a hero would have had him die by crucifixion. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate in either 30 or 33AD. Fact. The New Testament does not hide the fact. Rather it makes the crucifixion of Jesus a central part of the message of the Christian Faith. The cross might be "foolishness to Gentiles" and it undoubtedly was "a stumbling block to Jews" (1 Corinthians 1:23) but for the New Testament writers it was very near the heart of things, as we see in the those words of Paul which Isaac Watts used as his text. The question of why Jesus died can probably be answered in historical terms quite simply by saying that he was the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. A controversial Galilean prophet creating a disturbance in the tense atmosphere of the Jerusalem Temple during the Feast of Passover, when nationalist feeling was at its highest and the Romans at their most touchy was asking for trouble. He got it. That is the most likely explanation for Jesus' death which would be given by a historian looking to explain the undoubted fact that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The New Testament does not explain the crucifixion in this way. The nearest it comes to this sort of explanation is to blame the Jews. A clear example of this is in the sermon to the people of Jerusalem which Luke puts on the lips of Peter where he says, "This man ... you crucified ... " (Acts 2:23). The tragic legacy of this explanation is the dreadful anti-semitism which has marred the history of Europe for centuries, and the cost of it has been borne by millions of Jewish victims, not least in our own time. Mostly, however, when the New Testament looks for reasons for the crucifixion of Jesus, it offers explanations that it was part of the will and purpose of God. This is seen clearly in the clause I missed out from Peter's speech in the last paragraph. Between the words I quoted Peter says, "... handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God... ". This crucifixion, the New Testament insists, was not an accident of political circumstance, nor the result of opposition and persecution. It was part of a wider purpose, God's purpose, and it was for our benefit. This is the reason why the Nicene Creed says, "For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate". If we ask, how have we benefitted from his death? then the New Testament gives a considerable variety of answers. I think we can put them into at least five groups: 1 There are those texts which say that we have benefitted from the death of Jesus because his crucifixion shows us just how much he loves us. It shows us the integrity of Jesus and confirms the reality of his selfless love. It shows that he practised what he preached. Though he was despised and rejected, even as the very nails were going in he still prayed for his persecutors, just as he had taught his disciples to do. Loving us, he loved us to the end. 2 The second group of ideas points to the cross as the supreme example of Jesus' obedience to God and then to the resurrection to show that his obedience was vindicated by God. They present Jesus as a model for our discipleship, encouraging us to be faithful to the end in the confidence that as our Lord's death was followed by the victory of his resurrection, so too will our sufferings be blessed by God's reward. 3 A third picture is that the cross represents the defeat of the powers of evil. The cross, contrary to all appearances, is a victory and not a defeat. We benefit from it because we can share in its victory of life over death, good over evil, light over darkness. We are now free from the powers of evil. 4
The fourth set of metaphors talk of the death of Jesus as a
sacrifice for sin, and all sorts of different images develop this theme.
We read of the Last Supper and the first Communion services and
think of the Passover.
Jesus is pictured as "the Lamb of God".
There are all the references to his blood being shed, and
pictures from the old sacrifices in the 5 Another idea is that the cross is humanity's rejection of Jesus but God's demonstration that he is approved and vindicated. It is as if Christ is unveiled on the cross and we see him and worship him as he really is, enthroned as King of Kings. Some of these pictures are more helpful today than others, and there are other occasional pictures too which can't be fitted into these ones, but the overall collage is impressive. The New Testament celebrates the crucifixion of Jesus as God's gift. It looks the most unlikely and unpromising gift, and no amount of devotion should blind us to its horror, but the New Testament thanks God for it because it is the way we see who and what Jesus is, and what the generous love of God means. Somehow the cross focuses the whole life of Jesus. We can see therefore that the New Testament uses a variety of metaphors to explore the meanings of the crucifixion, but we also see that in the New Testament we do not find any single "doctrine of the Atonement". Certainly no prominence is given there to what is becoming the standard presentation of the death of Jesus in some preaching, that Jesus had to die to pay the price for our sins and died as a substitute for us to satisfy the demands of God's justice, a pernicious doctrine which I think is in many ways at odds with the Bible. For me Isaac Watts' great hymn captures so much of the New Testament teaching about the cross while avoiding the pitfall of hardening metaphors into doctrine. * * * * *
Familiarity should not blind us to the shocking topsiturviness of this verse and the whole hymn. The first two lines join words together which have no right to be joined together at all. How can a cross be wondrous? How can it be that the prince of glory has died? The words do not fit. They contradict each other. They do not make sense. Or do they? Can Isaac Watts put them together because he has seen what Paul had seen, that although a wondrous cross is indeed foolishness or nonsense to most people, to Christians it is nothing else than the key to the meaning of life? For him it makes perfect sense to put these words together, even though it is a sense that turns all our usual understandings and values upside-down. Topsy-turvy is the word. This first verse expresses the devotion that has been evoked by the crucifixion of Christ and attached to the cross in Christian tradition almost from the earliest preaching. Sadly the cross can be glamorised as it is when crosses are worn as jewellery or ear-rings, or its meaning can be lost in superstition as it is when sportsmen and sportswomen make the sign of the cross before they compete in their events. But Watts cannot look at the cross and be unmoved by what he sees. So he invites us to see it as a wondrous Cross. There is no denying its barbarity, but who it is who hangs and suffers there transforms its horror and as we look on we are invited to add that it was for us that the Prince of Glory died, just as we say in the Creed that he was "crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate". Such suffering for us calls for a response. Watts originally wrote a slightly different second line, “Where the young prince of glory died”. This cross is wondrous because of who dies on it. There have been thousands of crosses throughout history on which the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty have alike suffered and died. The events of Good Friday are not at all unusual. They are significant for Christians because they concern the death of Jesus, that it was he who hung and suffered there. Watts calls him the prince of glory, or in his original version, the young prince of glory. If we were writing a new hymn book in modern English I suppose we would rephrase this title and simply call Jesus the "glorious prince". Either way it is an interesting title for Jesus. If we say that something is "glorious" we mean that it is splendid and wonderful; so a "glorious day" means either a specially warm and sunny one or a day on which something quite special has happened. It is a word often associated with great events of state, and the Queen is sometimes referred to as "Her Glorious Majesty". We use the word about God, and the "glory of God" means his power and splendour. We also know there is a true glory and a false one, a glory which fades and one which lasts. Watts calls Jesus both a prince in this verse and my God in the next, and next to both of these titles he reminds us of the stark fact of his death. In doing this he invites us to reflect that the splendour of God's power, his glory, is not seen in a king exalted on a royal throne but in a man dying on a cross. In his death, as throughout his life, Jesus the Messiah, the King of the Jews and the Son of God - all royal titles from the Old Testament - has demonstrated a different glory, and that demonstration reaches its climax on the cross. Here is a prince and a glorious one, but calling a crucified man those two things leads to a radical redefinition of the terms. Here is that topsiturviness again. When we survey that cross and that death we see deep into the heart of God. What we see turns all our values upside down. It makes our richest gain count as loss and the things we are proud of count for nothing. Here we see what greatness really is, and just what a sham and a pretence our images of greatness are. They are worth nothing but contempt. Put beside the values we see at the cross - humility, self-sacrifice, self-giving - our values of self-fulfillment, self-assertion and self-satisfaction are exposed as contemptible. This is put beautifully in the words of a modern hymn by Elizabeth Cosnett, "Can we by searching find out God",
Both Isaac Watts in the early eighteenth century and Elizabeth Cosnett in the late twentieth take up Paul's theme that if we believe that God is glimpsed clearest of all in Jesus of Nazareth who dies on a cross, then all our values are turned upside down. If we make this Prince of Glory our king and accept the rule of his kingdom and live in its ways then our lives will be turned upside down, and that theme continues in the next verse.
Our values are turned upside down because of who it is who suffers and dies on the cross. In the first verse Watts calls Jesus the Prince of Glory, in this one he goes several steps further and calls Christ, my God. The New Testament teaches quite clearly that Jesus is the Messiah or the Christ, that he is Lord and that he is the Son of God. Whether it ever says bluntly that Jesus is God is debatable. One place where it comes very close to it is when the risen Jesus appears to Thomas in John 20:28. Thomas the slow to believe falls at his feet and says, "My Lord and my God". He makes this confession after Good Friday and Easter, and no doubt John tells the story like that because the first Christians wanted to say that on the cross we see right into the heart of God. Charles Wesley puts it like this in a verse from his hymn, "God of unexampled grace",
Watts and Wesley look at the cross. They see its horror and its ordinariness. They see something more. They see that it is Jesus dying on the cross. They see the death of the one who in his life and ministry pointed to God, and in that moment of seeing him die they see something else. They recognise, as Thomas did, that here we see God. We live in an age when image is important and when people look for role-models. Image-making is a major industry and advertising depends heavily on it. Look at some of the images of a successful human being which have been created, and which are offered as role-models for us in the advertisements. There is, for example, the Happy Family. Mum and Dad are a loving, fulfilled and happy couple, living in a nice house, with lovely children and a dog. They drive slightly bigger than average cars, have good jobs and enough income and energy to enjoy their leisure. Then there are the Achievers. These are thrusting, get-ahead, executive types who know what they want and get it, who are alluring and seductive enough to attract partners and playmates for fun in exotic places. The image is of success measured by status, lifestyle, possessions, achievement, relationships and happiness, all summed up in the word "fulfilment". These are the same values, attitudes and lifestyles which are presented to us in those the image-makers have created as icons for our age. And as far as I can see Christians are seduced by these images and icons just as easily as everybody else. What this second verse does is to recognise that all of this is vain, and to pray that we might see its vanity for what it is. In it Watts holds up a totally contrary model and image. For the Christian the image is God on a cross; the role model is of a crucified God. That is radical, profound and challenging. Christianity, according to this verse, is an alternative lifestyle whose values are very different from the current values of success and fulfilment. Followers and worshippers of a crucified God ought to be marching to a different drum.
This verse puts two dimensions together. From the stories of the crucifixion it selects the physical - the crown of thorns, the nails in hands and feet, the pierced side. Into that picture it introduces the emotions of sorrow and love. Sorrow, not for himself but for us who in our blindness reject God and the things of God. Love, as he prayed for those who were knocking in the nails, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing". For Watts, love and sorrow meet above all in this place and in this man and in this way. Wesley said the same in the hymn I have just quoted,
For both of them Jesus was the supreme martyr whose love and sorrow is without parallel. Some might want to say that this is overstating the case and is not fair to other martyrs, for other causes in other places. Be that as it may, this verse certainly fits with the New Testament's picture that Jesus, from beginning to end, gave his life away out of love for us. As such the cross is not the ignominious end of a wasted life, but the crown of a useful one. They might have intended the cross to disgrace Jesus and they might have woven a crown of thorns to mock him: but Watts invites us to see the cross as a throne and the crown of thorns as a far richer crown than any gold one studded with jewels.
How shall we respond to this story of a life given away so amazingly in love to others and ended in the sacrifice of death on a cross? We can, such is the freedom God gives us, glance at the life or the death and pass by on the other side. We can even cross the road to look more closely, and then walk on. Or we can see in this life and love and death something nothing less than divine. We can say of it, This is of God! For those who are moved by what they see, who want to respond to the challenge of it and to take up its invitation to believe in a God like this and live accordingly, then this verse expresses like no other verse I know the commitment which is required.
A hymn from the Baptist tradition this time, written by Baptist minister Samuel Medley (1738-99). * * * * * Jesus was "crucified under Pontius Pilate". Fact. But what happened next? Here let me repeat something I said in chapter 2. What happened next is disputed. Some of this rabbi's followers claimed that after they had seen him crucified on a Friday afternoon, he actually met them three days later on the Sunday, and on and off for a few weeks after that. They didn't say they had seen a vision of him, but that they had met him. Their stories didn't tally, and they had all sorts of questions about it all, but they obviously weren't rogues who tried to doctor their stories to make a neat fit. One thing is certain, that within a few years of this rabbi's death his Jewish followers were calling him their Messiah and even their Lord. They didn't quite say that he was God, but they came very near to it, which is amazing given their unique Jewish faith in only one immortal and invisible God. Thus the second unquestionable fact in the history of Jesus and the Church is that within a relatively short period of Jesus' death, say twenty years or so, his followers were saying some pretty remarkable things about him, such as that he was the Messiah, the Lord, the Son of God, and that he is risen and ascended in power and glory and seated at God's right hand. This fact needs to be accounted for. A third fact is closely linked with it and similarly demands some explanation, the fact of a crucified rabbi having any followers at all twenty years on, let alone a rapidly growing number worldwide. The New Testament accounts for these two facts quite simply. It is all because of the resurrection. This is put clearest of all in the New Testament in Romans 1:3-4 where Paul is introducing himself and his letter. He is talking about the "gospel", the good news of Jesus which it is now his life's mission to tell. This gospel, good news, is
The earliest teaching in the New Testament about the resurrection also comes from Paul. Fifteen years or so before the first Gospel was penned he writes to the church in Corinth about the resurrection and all that it implies. He sees the resurrection as crucial. No resurrection, no Christianity! or as he puts it,
He knows, as we shall see, that the idea is impossible to grasp; but he is adamant,
For Paul, and for the New Testament as a whole, the resurrection is the historical event on which the Christian Faith is founded. Without the resurrection Jesus would be remembered, if he would be remembered at all, as nothing more than another rejected prophet. Without the resurrection the crucifixion would be remembered, if it would be remembered at all, as just another martyrdom. What makes Jesus remembered, what accounts for the titles given to him and what explains the remarkable growth of the Christian Faith in the first century is the resurrection. Christianity is Easter Faith. The first Christians were Easter People. The question, What actually happened? is almost impossible to answer. The New Testament does not answer this big question or many of the smaller ones surrounding it that we would like to ask. For example, if we want to know who discovered that the tomb was empty we cannot even find a simple answer to that. Each gospel tells the story of the tomb being found to be empty, but none agree on who did the finding. If we want to put the events of the first few weeks after Easter into order and make a diary of who saw Jesus, when and where, then that too proves to be impossible, for the stories do not tally. If we want to know what the risen body of Jesus was like, then we are faced with conflicting pictures. In some Jesus's body is as real as yours and mine: he tells the unbelieving Thomas to touch him and see that he is real (John 20:27), he says to them all that he is no ghost "for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39) and to prove the point he takes fish and eats it (Luke 24:43). But in other stories he comes and goes when doors and windows are locked (John 20:26) and two disciples walk with him to Emmaus without recognising him (Luke 24:13-27). If we want to know what happened in the tomb, there is no answer to that question given at all. There are many unanswered and unanswerable questions about the first Easter, but at the same time all the different stories agree that something did happen and say that the disciples met Jesus after they had seen him die. There are many people, inside the Church as well as outside, for whom this whole business of the resurrection presents huge difficulties. They cannot take the idea of a corpse raised from the dead, and it is not hard to see why not. Some offer explanations that all the resurrection stories are really about visions of Jesus which the first disciples had. Others make no attempt to explain what actually happened at all and offer a different explanation for the resurrection stories. They say that what those stories are doing is pointing up the importance and significance of Jesus in the lives of the first Christians. They say that the first Christians told those stories as their way of saying that they had seen in Jesus the clue or the key to the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and that his death had not destroyed what he stood for. Though he had been despised, rejected and crucified he really was the one given to us by God. These stories tell that the truth as it is in Jesus is stronger and the love which he embodied is more real than the forces of evil and untruth which took him to the cross. They could say this because despite his death Jesus was present with them when they prayed and as they worshipped. His body might be dead, but his spirit was with them. I am afraid that I find neither of these positions very convincing. It looks as if very early on there were those who tried to explain the appearances of Jesus to his disciples as "visions", so early that both John and Luke are at pains to point out in their resurrection stories that these appearances were more than visions, that they were real meetings with a risen Jesus who was real, as we saw. With regard to the second explanation, then it seems to me if that was what the first Christians wanted to say about Jesus, and it clearly was, then they could say all of that without any sort of "bodily resurrection" pictures at all. All they needed to have said to have made that point was that Jesus had been raised by God, taken into heaven and installed in power and glory at God's right hand. They need not have confused the issue by talking about Jesus being raised to human life again in one form or another and appearing in human form to his disciples. That would have been a perfectly acceptable way of making their point about the tremendous significance of Jesus, and it would have had credibility. But they do not do it that way. Instead they tell stories about a "bodily resurrection" in which the appearances of Jesus are real appearances. The earliest teaching about the resurrection of Jesus and what it means for Christians is found in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul begins this chapter by reminding the Corinthians about what he had taught them when he was with them, and that that teaching was not in fact his own but was what he had himself been taught. So here is a very old tradition indeed. Not only is it old, it is "of first importance" (verse 3). That teaching was that "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the (Old Testament) scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the (Old Testament) scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve. Then... " (1 Corinthians 15:3-6) We can see that the stress is on the appearances of the risen Christ because in the next two verses Paul gives a list of those to whom Jesus appeared after he had appeared to Peter and the twelve: to more than five hundred of the Christians at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and "last of all, as to one untimely born", to Paul himself. Notice that Paul is careful to show that the appearance to him was somehow different from those to the others. When we look at the resurrection stories in the Gospels we see that they are all appearance stories too. We have to admit that there are all kinds of questions about these appearances that the New Testament does not answer. Nonetheless, the picture is consistently painted that following his death and for a short period of time Jesus appeared to his disciples, and that it was the Jesus who was crucified who appeared. These stories do not shirk the problems, and almost every one of them has some sort of reference in it to the confusion or doubt of the disciples at the time. Even though they could not explain what had happened the New Testament writers were at pains to point out that they were not talking about either ghosts or visions but meetings. So despite all the real questions and obvious problems I find myself believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I have to say that if somebody discovered the bones of Jesus in a tomb somewhere around Jerusalem next week, then I would have to hand in my dog collar, because I would then have to say then that the whole Christian Faith had been founded on a misunderstanding at best and at worst a hoax. The stories portray the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event and his appearances to his disciples as real meetings. In the light of that I find myself having to say that for me the bottom line is that there was real continuity between the corpse of the crucified Jesus and the body in which the risen Jesus met his disciples. If that brands me in the eyes of some people as an impossibly old fashioned conservative when it comes to the resurrection then so be it. In "I know that my Redeemer lives" Samuel Medley begins from the resurrection of Jesus and, much as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15, opens out some of the implications of that momentous event. * * * * *
In this hymn Jesus is given two titles - my Redeemer in verses 1 and 4 and my Saviour in verse 4. Originally these titles expressed faith in Jesus as the one who redeemed and saved us from sin, but in the hymn there seems to be little or nothing of those original and somewhat narrow meanings left. Instead the hymn vibrates with a fuller and richer sense of liberation and freedom. As Jesus lives, the verb is repeated fifteen times in only sixteen lines, so exuberant life opens up for us. Our Redeemer and Saviour has indeed set us free and opened up all sorts of new horizons and possibilities for us. Note in each case the little pronoun my. One of the best features of traditional evangelical Christianity is its stress on personal faith and personal religion. It might get sentimental at times and perhaps Charles Wesley is guilty of this in his hymn,
but this verse does illustrate what personal faith means. George Herbert writes from a different background but he also insists on an I and a my in his better known hymn,
So I can't help feeling that without this sort of my somebody is missing out on something somewhere. After all isn't it one thing to call Jesus "Lord and Saviour", or whatever other titles you want to give him, and something else to be able to call him "my Lord and Saviour"? I don't like the hymn "Blessed Assurance" very much at all, but I do feel that its chorus says something which I want every Christian to be able to sing, and for myself I feel that I would be lacking something real and good if I could not make its chorus my own and sing with conviction,
Take this together with the I know of the first and last lines of the hymn and we arrive at the writer's joyful sense of assurance in his faith. This is exuberantly expressed in the second and second-last lines of the hymn, notice the exclamation mark, “What joy the blest assurance gives!” What sort of assurance is this? There are Christians around who talk as if they know everything there is to know about God, and who say that their faith gives them absolute certainties. I do not believe in that sort of assurance or that Christianity offers those kinds of absolute certainties. I do not believe that we have all the answers and I am very wary of those Christians who claim that they do have such answers. I take Paul very seriously when he says that "now we see through a glass darkly" and that "our knowledge now is partial" (1 Corinthians 13: 12). Reading that, I do not believe that the Christian Faith offers the absolute certainties that some people seek, whether in questions of faith or of morals, and which some militant tendencies in modern Christianity, especially Fundamentalism in its many forms, claim to give. I do believe, however, that we can be absolutely certain of the love of God for us and for all, and here again it is Paul who speaks so powerfully when he writes,
This certainty and assurance is of a very different kind from the one which claims to have all the answers to all the questions, and it is this kind of assurance about which this hymn sings with such joy. Samuel Medley knows "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord", that fact is abundantly clear in verses 2 and 3. In this joyful assurance he is prepared to "walk by faith not yet by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7), and he can do so because he knows that Jesus lives. For him the resurrection is not so much that "Christ was raised" as that "Christ is risen" and "Christ is alive". For him the resurrection is not simply a celebration of something that happened to the corpse of Jesus a long time ago and a long way away though it does begin there, it is a present experience of the reality of Jesus and his love. It is of course true that being a Christian is a serious business, and that faith is a serious call which makes serious demands on us. But serious does not mean dull or solid, and the seriousness of life on the Christian way does not hamper its joyfulness. In this simple and unpretentious hymn, matched to the tune Torquay, we have a joyful hymn. The hymn is well aware of the shadow side of life, as we shall see in the next two verses, and that we live in a sad and in many ways a frightening world where though there is plenty of pain-killing frivolity around joy is in short supply. In that real world it sings of the deep, moving, significant, life-affirming and enabling joy which the resurrection makes possible. In this and every verse the tune repeats the last line, here repeating for emphasis that Jesus lives as the Christian's (there's that my again) everlasting Head. I was nearly tempted to say that Medley only uses this title for Jesus because it rhymes with "dead", but I don't think that's quite fair. Where does this metaphor come from and why is it emphasised here? In the New Testament this title is used for Christ only occasionally. If we set on one side the idea of discovering and living according to the mind of Christ (which is what the next chapter is all about) we are left with Colossians 1:18 and 2:19. Christ is,
In the first of these verses we see the risen Christ as the one who has "first place in everything" which points to him as the first to be raised from the dead, the leader of the Church and the one who believers follow and serve as king or Lord. In the second we see Christ as the source of life for his body, the Church, the head from which the whole body grows, taking both direction and nourishment. This might not be very good biology but we can see the point. The first verse ends, then, on notes of dependence and gratitude.
In this verse which begins to fill out the blest assurance of verse 1 Medley invites us to celebrate the blessings we receive from the risen Christ in the here and now, much as John Newton did in "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds". It shares the same honest recognition that all of us will live through times of need in which we need all the help we can get both human and divine. Line two which features the risen Christ pleading for us above combines several different New Testament metaphors: that Christ is seated at the right hand of God, that he intercedes for us and that he is our mediator, advocate and High Priest. Sometimes this looks as if Christ is trying to stop God giving us what we deserve, and that is indeed what some Christians taught and teach. I cannot see it that way. I prefer to see these metaphors as saying that as Christ loved us when he was among us, so he continues to love us now. As prayers of intercession express our love for and concern about others so, this line suggests, Christ expresses his continuing love and concern about us by praying for us. So I shall leave on one side questions about who Christ prays to and why because I think such questions are taking a metaphor too literally. I shall do the same with all the hard questions about prayers of intercession and how they work because I don't know the answers. All I do know is what the repeated last line of this verse emphasises, that God only wishes us good.
In this verse which continues to fill out the blest assurance of verse 1 Medley invites us to celebrate the blessings we will receive from the risen Christ in the hereafter. I believe in life after death. I agree with whoever it was who said that we do not know the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell, but I believe in life after death and in heaven and hell. I believe that heaven is real. One of the things that I believe it is important to say at the funeral of a Christian is that we get it the wrong way round if we think that the person who has died has passed from life into death. It is the other way about. At such a funeral we are marking the passing of someone from death into life, from this world of passing shadows to the real world. We are saying that heaven is real whereas in this life, even in its most glorious and precious moments we have only briefly glimpsed reality. These brightest and most beautiful of our experiences are "intimations of immortality", and precious though they are to us they are only partial, to use Paul's word again, and only glimpses of what really is. This is put beautifully in C S Lewis's book The Great Divorce. It tells the story of a bus trip from Hell to Heaven. Hell is like Manchester on a wet Thursday afternoon in November - grey, dismal and dreary. The bus goes every week. The trip is free to anyone who wants to go. When you get there you are free to stay if you want. First of all you see the people getting off the bus and covering their eyes to protect them from the brightness of the light. The coach park is only on the very edge of heaven and the great city is over the hill, but still the light which comes from it is too dazzling for their eyes. They are not used to real light. Then you see them covering their ears because they are not used to real noise, even though all that they are hearing is the trickling of a little brook beside the road. Then you see them staggering around trying to carry something. They are trying to pick up heaven's pebbles which are, of course, diamonds; but even these tiny precious stones are so heavy that the best they can do is stagger along bent double with their weight. You can read the rest for yourself. The point that Lewis is making is that heaven is real and that even the best of us, the most mature, kind, whole and loving of us are but shadows or pale reflections of the reality that God wishes to make us. Here and now we are nowhere near the people we could be or the persons we will be in God's future for us. But then and there in the life beyond death in ways that we cannot begin to imagine our little lives will find their ultimate fulfilment in the purposes of God's love. There are, of course, all sorts of questions here that we want to ask but for which there are no answers. If we ask what this life after death is like then the only answer that I can give is the word "fulfilment", which is what I was trying to say in the last paragraph. When the Corinthians asked Paul for more details he was quite rude (1 Corinthians 15:35-36). It is beyond our imagination, he said. If you hold a seed of corn in one hand and look at it, what do you see? Something tiny, hard and grey-brown. If you hold a stalk and ear of corn in the other what do you see? Something tall, hairy, soft in parts and green-golden. If you didn't know you would never guess that the one is the fulfilment of the other. That is the nearest that Paul is prepared to go in trying to say what life after death is like. But there is more to heaven than our personal fulfilment as truly human beings. This is why the Bible ends with pictures of a "new heaven and a new earth" where "there is no more sea" (Revelation 21:1). In that picture the sea represents death, evil, chaos and disorder, and those things will be ended when God's kingdom comes. Then "mourning and crying and pain will be no more" (verse 4). In other pictures this new kingdom is one in which there will be a peace and harmony which includes all of creation, where "the wolf will live with the lamb" (Isaiah 11:6). There is more to the fulfilment which is heaven than the human and personal: more, but not less! So in verse 3 the hymn focuses on the human and the personal. As it is God's life-giving love which sustains us each day (line 1), so it is that love which will enable us to conquer death (line 2). The last two lines take up the New Testament picture of heaven as a "place of many mansions" to which Jesus will lead us (John 14:2-3), and behind the last line we can also see the picture of God leading us safely like a Shepherd through the valley of the shadow of death from Psalm 23. As we sing this verse we repeat that last line, and it resounds with the same assurance with which we commit the body of a Christian to the ground or for cremation in the funeral service, "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ". The verse ends on the joyful note that heaven is real and certain and sure.
I have just spent the last two pages saying what I believe about life after death and heaven. What about hell? I believe in hell but I do not believe in eternal punishment, the very idea of it is completely at odds with the idea of an eternal, loving God. I do not believe in that fiery sort of hell where God punishes for eternity those who have not believed in him in this short life. I could not worship such a God. But I still believe in hell. If heaven is fulfilment then hell is oblivion. I have to believe in hell because I also believe that God takes us seriously and gives us the freedom to make our own lives. We obviously have that freedom, and God respects it even when we use it as badly as we seem to do. There is a picture in the New Testament of God standing outside the door of our life and knocking on it. He will come in if invited but will not barge in uninvited (Revelation 3:20). I take this to mean that those who wish to keep the door closed against him will have their freedom to do so respected. The result is that they miss out on the fulfilment of life with God which is heaven. This, as I see it, is the starkness of the choice that lies before us which the Bible is putting before us when it talks about heaven and hell. Oblivion or fulfilment are the choices that face us; "Hell" is our name for the one and "Heaven" for the other. But does anyone ever "go to hell"? It is possible for people to keep themselves so closed to God that his love cannot get through to them, but does it ever happen? Traditionally much Christianity has taught that we have to respond to God here and now for there are no second chances after death. I can't believe that either. Look at the second line of this last verse,
If we put that text beside the one which says that in his life Jesus "came to seek and save the lost" (Luke 19:10) we have a picture of Jesus as eternally the Friend of Sinners, the Saviour who will always and for ever welcome all those who come to him, the one who is forever seeking to save the lost. Then put that beside the picture of God as the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son who runs to welcome his erring son home and then kills the prize calf for a celebration feast. Put that beside the saying of Jesus that
and we see the possibilities of second, third and umpteenth "chances" for people to respond to this infinite and generous love. And that is surely why the Funeral Service gives us alternative words of committal to use for those for whom it is not appropriate to use the words I quoted above. In these cases we commit the body to the ground or for cremation "trusting the infinite mercy of God in Jesus Christ our Lord". There is no proof for any of this, neither for the resurrection of Jesus nor for life after death. I believe in life after death and heaven and hell for many reasons, as no doubt did Paul and Samuel Medley, but none of us can say for certain that this is the proper way to look at things. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and as for Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and for Samuel Medley in this hymn that belief gives me a blest assurance about many things, though neither Paul nor I would claim any absolute certainty. It is all a matter of faith and trust. This hymn is a celebration of the faith that He lives, and that point is made no less than fifteen times. These two words point us to the heart of the Christian Faith, the Christian way of seeing things and of living out what we see. They insist that Jesus, the man from Nazareth about whom the first Christians told the stories we read in the gospels, is not a dead hero to venerate but a living Saviour, Redeemer and Head. It is a hymn of praise which invites us to give glory to His name for all that he means to us, and it spells much of that out. It is a hymn of joy and assurance which invites us to celebrate our Easter faith.
This hymn by Kate Barclay Wilkinson (1859-1928), about whom very little seems to be known, appeared in the Children's Service Mission hymnal Golden Bells in 1925 but is thought to have been written before 1913. * * * * * The four hymns we have looked at so far sing about Jesus - about who he was and is, about his birth, about his death and about his resurrection. In each of them we are invited to sing about what this all means for Christians today. In this chapter and the next two we focus on very practical questions of what is expected from a Christian, from someone who follows this rabbi and names him as Lord and Saviour. This hymn begins with the prayer that the mind of Christ our Saviour might live in us from day to day and ends by reminding us that the Christian pilgrimage is about looking unto Jesus as we onward go. It is a hymn about attitude. Attitude is another word that has been given a new twist in modern use. Someone "with attitude", as they say, knows what they want and is going to get it. You can't mess about with people "with attitude" for they are powerful and forceful characters, certainly assertive and often aggressive. Such people are held up as good examples, "role-models" in today's hype, to the rest of us. This "attitude", so we are led to believe, is worth getting. Those without it are wimps, wets, sad losers. This hymn, the Bible and Jesus Christ say otherwise and offer us a different picture of "attitude". I want to discuss this alternative attitude under three headings: the mind of Christ (verse 1), triumph and victory (verses 2 and 4) and the peace of God (verses 3 and 5).
In this verse the different attitude is called the mind of Christ. This phrase is only found once in the New Testament. It is used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:16 where he makes the bald and arrogant-sounding claim that "We have the mind of Christ" as against "unspiritual" people who don't. He doesn't spell out what he means, and I suspect that this is another case of the New Testament honestly repeating the kind of self-justification that comes all too easily to all of us, the "I'm right, you're wrong, so there!" sort of attitude. Paul might have been an apostle but he was not without his faults and this verse catches him on a bad day. We see him on a better day in Romans 12:2 when he tells the Christians in Rome, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect". Christians must let their minds be transformed, they must live by a new set of values and attitudes. If we want to see what these new values and attitudes might be we can turn to what Paul says in Philippians 2:5-8 where he quotes a hymn about Jesus to show that Christians should have the same attitude that Jesus had. He introduces his quotation from the hymn by saying, "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus..." as the New Revised Standard Version has it, or in the words of the Good News Bible, "The attitude you should have is the one that Christ Jesus had..." So for Paul in these letters and for Kate Wilkinson in this hymn having the mind of Christ is not about knowing Jesus's opinion on any given subject but about having his attitude. But what was that? The hymn that Paul quotes puts it in one word and that word is "humility". The hymn talks about Jesus,
Both Old Testament and New Testament regard humility as an important virtue, though the ancient Greeks thought it was a sign of weakness and called it a vice. For the Bible, humility is like a triangle: one side refers to God, another to ourselves and the other to other people. Humble people acknowledge that they depend on God and are willing to subject themselves to him. They have a realistic assessment of their own importance and are aware of the dangers of pride and ambition. They have a real regard for other people and are willing to give their lives in the service of others. For Christians, Jesus is the great example of humility. Not only did he teach and preach this virtue but he lived it out. We have seen that for Paul, Jesus' humility can be seen in the way that he did not exploit his equality with God but emptied himself. In the gospels Jesus is pictured, as we have seen in previous chapters, as a king born in lowly circumstances who then spent his life among ordinary people and died in a humiliating way. This is the picture, as the modern hymn puts it, of the "Servant King". In the teaching of Jesus as presented in the gospels those who would serve such a king are introduced to a very different sort of kingdom from any they have known elsewhere. It offers a new set of values and requires new attitudes. The first verse of our hymn is a prayer that we might live in that new kingdom. It is a prayer that our attitudes might be Christ's and that our minds might be transformed so that our living and being will be different, that the mind of Christ might control what we do or say. Let me select three areas from the life and teaching of our Servant King to illustrate where the mind of Christ should make our living different. First, there is Jesus' radical views of power and leadership. There is no clearer picture of this, or of Jesus's humility in general or of Jesus the Servant than the one painted in John's gospel where Jesus washes his disciples' feet at the Last Supper (John 13:1-20). For John's gospel this is an example of Jesus's humility which the disciples and the Church which follows them are to copy. Luke doesn't mention any feet-washing but in his Last Supper story he has the disciples arguing about who was to be regarded as the greatest among them. Jesus simply tells them, "This is not how it is with you", for had not he himself been "among you as one who serves" (Luke 22:24-27)? Mark says that Jesus said that he had not "come to be served but to serve" (Mark 10:45). The disciples needed to get the message that they were an alternative community, and that ideas of leadership, power, status, authority and position which were taken for granted elsewhere did not apply among them. For Christians "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first", a saying that Jesus used more than once. Second, there is Jesus' radical views of what constitutes happiness and success. All of the teaching of Jesus in the Beatitudes is about this (Matthew 5:3-12) but here let me simply draw attention to Matthew 5:3 and 5:5,
The first of these Beatitudes commends those who know their need and acknowledge their dependence on God. Those who are truly happy are those who know how empty they are, not those who are full. The second of these Beatitudes is a promise which illustrates the revolutionary nature of the Kingdom of God, (more of "The first shall be last and the last first" revolution). It is not the aggressive, self-confident and self-assertive who find real success: but those who do not push themselves forward, the gentle, the humble and those of no account. This same point is made in another saying which Jesus seems to have used more than once, "All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted". Third, there is Jesus' radical views about Christian behaviour. In the teaching of Jesus there is much that seems hard to take, especially his commandments about "loving our enemy" (Matthew 5:44) and "turning the other cheek" (Matthew 5:39). Disciples are forbidden to retaliate when wronged (Matthew 5:39) and they are to give way to the claims or demands of others (Matthew 5:40-42). This is hard, unrealistic, un-natural and surely it is impossible? Yes and no. Yes to "pharisees" - No to "publicans". Let a parable speak for itself,
The disciples of Jesus can live this way and respond to others in this way because this is the way God has treated them. God has dealt generously with them, and not as they deserved, and hence they are freed to deal so with others. God's generosity frees us to behave generously towards others. Paul says the same thing
Here then are three examples of new ways of living, speaking, acting, thinking, being and doing. They are examples of the alternative values and attitudes which are not only possible but which are expected from those who follow Christ. This first verse gives us words to pray, that the mind of Christ may so renew our minds that our attitude and our living will no longer conform to the standards of this world but be transformed into the new ways of God's kingdom.
These two verses talk about the alternative attitude expected of the followers of Jesus in terms of triumph and victory. Although these words sound old-fashioned the idea behind them is very high on our modern agenda. Wherever we look we can see people who believe that they have the right to be fulfilled, who search in all sorts of places for ways in which they can actualise their full potential and which will lead to the complete life-satisfaction which they believe is their due. We have been told through the past twenty years or more that each of us has the right to be personally fulfilled in every way, and through those years there has been no shortage of people making a good profit out of providing ways in which they tell us we can find it. It is said that the 1980's produced the "Me" generation, convinced that it was their right to be fulfilled in every department of life. The 1990's don't seem very different, although it may be beginning to dawn on a few more people that this self-centredness is both an impossible and a dangerous dream. Inevitably some of this has crept into the Church. There have always been evangelists who have suggested that once you "give your life to Jesus" then all your problems will be solved for ever, but on top of this, recent years have seen "prosperity theology" imported from the USA which teaches that all kinds of economic and financial blessings will be added to this new life to make it more wonderful still. Other churches have gone in for make-you-feel-good worship. Neither has there been any shortage of different groups within the churches demanding their "rights". This kind of triumphalism and "victorious living" is a far cry from the triumph and victory which this hymn seeks. I think I can best illustrate the contrast by quoting the plot of the Victorian hymn, "O the bitter shame and sorrow". In the first verse of this prayer of dedication Theodore Monod looks back ashamed of the time when his life was "All of self, and none of Thee". In the next two verses he thanks God for the way in which that attitude is slowly being changed through "Some of self, and some of Thee" to "Less of self, and more of Thee" to the point where in the last verse he prays that it may be "None of self, and all of Thee". This is the triumph and victory he seeks and this is the triumph and victory which these two verses of our hymn pray for. The contrast between this sort of fulfilment and the other is enormous. This is a triumph and victory in which self is abased but not in an empty, dry or negative abasement (there has been too much of that bad kind of religion in some Christianity over the years) but in a full, warm and positive one because the focus of life is somewhere else, on the love of Jesus. This new and unselfish attitude is achieved by letting the word of God dwell richly in our hearts from hour to hour. I think we can see what this means by noting that word begins with a small letter. If it had begun with a capital 'W' it would have meant our Lord Jesus or the Bible, but with the small 'w' it means both of these and more. It means letting everything God has ever "said", through the Bible, in Jesus and in all sorts of other ways, become such a real part of us that it shapes all our thinking in Christian ways. It is achieved by letting the love of Jesus fill us. I take this to mean letting our lives soak up the love of Jesus, a love we read about in the Bible, celebrate in Church and experience in the love and care of others as well as in the privacy of our prayers that our very being is filled with a new spirit.
These verses talk about the alternative attitude expected of the followers of Jesus in terms of peace and athletics. "Peace" is one of the great themes of the Old Testament. You could almost say that the Old Testament itself is a long vision of peace from beginning to end, though being what we are it is often a story of how we spoil peace and get in its way. In the Old Testament one of the great visions of peace is when every man and woman can sit under their own vine and fig tree with no one to make them afraid. Peace is when everyone can live to a ripe old age and die full of years, surrounded by their family's love. Peace is where children are born and reared in security and hope. Peace is where the vulnerable ones like orphans and widows are cared for. Peace is when the strong help the weak and the rich help the poor. Peace is when justice for all and kindness reign, where there is harmony and happiness for all. The great word "Shalom" sums it up. Of course such peace was often far off, but they clung to that vision. One day the lion would lie down with the lamb, and even if that seemed impossible it was a vision worth living for. In the New Testament the angels sing a prayer for peace on earth when Christ is born, and in his ministry his words and deeds bring peace to suffering and disturbed people. Peace is hurt and broken people being made whole by God's love. Peace is being forgiven and given a new start. Peace is knowing the fatherly and motherly love of God. Peace is a love and unity discovered where before was separation or hostility. So as the Church grows and spreads, peace is different people coming together in unity. Peace is mutual support and encouragement in local congregations where Christians bear one another's burdens and share each other's joys. Peace is knowing that in the end light, life and love are triumphant over darkness, death and evil. Peace is "having the love of God shed abroad in our hearts" to use John Wesley's language. All of this is the peace we pray for when we say, “May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be amongst us and remain with us always”. This peace comes with knowing that we are loved by God, valued and cherished by him. This verse of the hymn recognises that that new awareness changes things for us and brings new thoughts and new ways to birth in us as this peace rules our life in everything. But it is not selfish. This peace is no cosy cocoon which hides us from the real world or which cuddles us in private comfort. This verse knows that, and recognises that this peace frees us to be useful. In particular the verse points to our duty to care for one another, especially those in need, and this peace gives a strong calmness to stand alongside such people in their need. This is an important pastoral task for every one of us, to be there, to be alongside those in need. Often enough there is little we can do to make anything better, and most of the time there is little that we say which is of much help: but just being there is important, not talking or explaining just supporting. We don't do that in our own strength, but in the peace which God gives. In the last verse we have the metaphor of the Christian life as an athletics competition, a picture painted in the New Testament. As one who enjoys watching athletics on the television but who couldn't run to catch a bus I view this picture with mixed feelings! This verse picks up the picture of Jesus not only as the prize at the end (and everyone who finishes wins this prize not just the first to the tape) but also as the one who is standing by the finishing line urging us on and encouraging us, just like a mum at Sports Day in primary school. This verse recognises that the Christian life is not easy, for there is a foe and we need strength and bravery to cope with it. Nevertheless the hymn ends on the note of confidence that if we pray that the mind of Christ might live in us, the word of God dwell in us, the peace of God our Father rule us and the love of Jesus fill us then in the strength of this we can to run the race and finish the course. So ends this hymn which is a prayer that God will help us and make it possible for us to live the new and alternative life which we see in Jesus Christ and to which he calls his disciples. Jesus is a new example. He is the pattern of a new lifestyle and of new sets of attitudes and values. He is the icon and role-model of a new way of life. As Horatius Bonar puts in his fine Victorian hymn, "Go, labour on; spend, and be spent",
I ended the last chapter with a couple of lines from another hymn by the writer of this one, Horatius Bonar. This one appeared first in the section headed "Life's Praise" in Hymns of Faith and Hope in 1867. Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) was a solicitor's son, born in Edinburgh, who became first a Church of Scotland minister then a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. In his early days as an assistant minister in Leith he found that the children in his church did not particularly enjoy the psalms and hymns which featured large in their worship so he did something about it. He chose some of the more lively tunes and wrote his own words to them, and the success of this experiment in Sunday School led him to compose other hymns. In 1848 he became Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy and for the next twenty-five years one of his hymns was printed in each issue of the magazine. * * * * * "Fill Thou my life" is the one of my Desert Island hymns I would choose to take with me if I could take only one of the eight. The Book I would choose, in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare which are already there, is the eight volumes of Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells bound together in one. The Luxury, if Margaret couldn't be counted as that, would be a train set. Now you know, and that's the last reference to the programme. So back to the hymn. In "When I survey" Isaac Watts asks what response can we make to the love with which God has loved us? He answers that there is nothing "out there" which we could give which would be enough, but neither is it enough to make a purely "inward" commitment. He says that the only fitting response is to offer "my soul, my life, my all". For me "Fill Thou my life" illustrates what that response of my soul, my life, my all looks like. The last few lines of "We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land" are sometimes used as a prayer at the Dedication of the Offering in church services, and they too capture the total commitment which Watts sees as the only fitting response to the generous love of God,
Full commitment means gifts plus hearts. Such a response is not one of rigorous obedience driven by a strong sense of duty, though a bit more of that in both our church and our society today might not go amiss, but it is rather a wholesome integrity in which wholehearted and total commitment is marked by thankfulness, celebration and joy. Such is the theme of "Fill Thou my life". One of the central features of Christianity which it inherits from its mother religion, Judaism, and which it shares with its sister faith, Islam, is the basic conviction that belief and behaviour go together. We see this very clearly in the Old Testament stories about Moses, the Mountain and the Commandments. In those stories God had called Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. After their escape they assembled at the foot of Mt Sinai, God's Holy Mountain, while God called Moses to go up the mountain to meet him and to make a covenant with him. In this covenant, God committed himself to the Israelites and they committed themselves to him in a new and unique way. There they became God's "Covenant People", and so God gave his people his "Law" or, better, his "Teaching" or "Guidance" so that they could live happily and safely in the new freedom into which he had brought them. The terms of the covenant are the Ten Commandments and the other rules and regulations which go with them, and the people gratefully committed themselves to keeping these laws and following this advice. In the story of the making of the Covenant on Mt Sinai in the Book of Exodus the giving of the Ten Commandments has a prominent place, but the number of the commandments does not end at ten. In the chapters that follow many others are found, and in the "Law of Moses" the Rabbis counted 613 commandments altogether. To us they seem a very odd mixture. Some are to do with how God is to be worshipped: what festivals are to be observed, when sacrifices are to be offered and how, or who are to be priests and what they have to do. Others are to do with crimes, not only with criminal acts like theft or murder, but with such things as slander or negligence. Others are rules to regulate such social practices as divorce, banking or slavery. Then there are all kinds of rules to do with diet and cooking, what sort of animals can be eaten, and how they are to be prepared. The purpose of some of these laws is obvious, any civilised society needs laws about murder, and any religion needs rules about worship: but the Old Testament makes no distinctions at all between criminal law, ritual rules, civil law or morals. God has given all the commandments, and they are all to be kept. God's covenant people are to be marked by the way they live and what they do, and what it is important to note here is that the Old Testament does not distinguish between religion and the rest of life. These commandments cover all of life, for God is the Lord of all life, and we are to love him in all of life. Belief and behaviour go together, and grateful faithfulness to God is to be seen as much in the kitchen as in the Temple. When we read the New Testament stories about Jesus we find that the same point is made. Jesus insists that the two great commandments of the Old Testament about loving God and loving our neighbour are essential, and then adds a "new commandment" specifically for Christians about loving their fellow-Christians (Mark 12:29-31, John 13:34-35). Here we see how loyal Jesus was to the faith which had nurtured him, and how much the teaching of the New Testament depends on that of the Old. Belief and behaviour go together. This comes out of the conviction that God is the Lord of all life and that he is to be honoured in every part of life. All of life belongs to God and is to be lived in ways that honour him. That is not to say, of course, that all Jews, all Christians and all Moslems actually live like that, and the Old Testament and Christian history are full of examples which clearly show that they don't. But there is no doubting that the Bible says that belief and behaviour should go together, for our own sake as well as for everyone else's, and that what God requires of all of us is a life in which they do. Therefore it warmly encourages us to pray
This hymn is a prayer, a prayer of dedication, and it assumes all the way through that commitment and dedication are essential marks of a faithful life. But I wonder why Horatius Bonar wrote his hymn as a prayer? Was it because he knew that it is one thing for us to want to make such a commitment to God, but it is another thing actually to do it? Was it because he knew that sometimes we actually can't commit ourselves to God, and that the most we can say is that we want to, or even that we want to want to? Was it because he knew that between our good intentions and our deeds is a big gap which we can only cross with God's help and encouragement? Surely it was, and so he gives us this hymn as a prayer in which we can dedicate our lives to God, so that our whole being is dedicated to him, not only our lips nor even our hearts but every part of our life. In the hymn we have words to make that commitment, to express our longings and desires that we might be able to make such a dedication and words to use to seek God's help so that we might "live more nearly as we pray". These first two verses seem to be a paraphrase of the last part of the old General Thanksgiving,
Notice how the hymn begins. It is a prayer of dedication but it does not begin,
Instead it is a prayer that every part of our life might be filled with praise to God, and praise is the key word of the hymn, occurring seven times altogether. "Commitment" and "dedication" can be heavy words but they needn't be. This prayer is one in which the singers ask God to help them join in a song (see v5), which shows that the commitment and dedication involved are not heavy or burdensome but a joy and a delight. So what does it mean to praise God? It means, first, simply to thank him for what he is and what he does. If you read the first four verses of the hymn and substitute the word "thanks" for praise then the hymn's theme of commitment and dedication to God arising out of sheer gratitude to him becomes clearer still. Secondly, to praise God means to acknowledge him. It is to declare publically who he is and what he has done, and to give him the credit that is due to him. The hymn insists that God is properly thanked and duly acknowledged by nothing less than a life dedicated and committed to him.
This life which acknowledges God and is lived out of gratitude to him is a very practical business. A life of praise is seen in the common things of life, its daily events big and small. It is lived in such a way that who we are as well as what we say and do (all our being) points to God and God's love, even though we don't always do it very well as the last line of these two verses says. What does a life look like in which all our being speaks of God and of his love? Let me use a sermon illustration. I have a brother whose birthday is three months before mine. When we lived at home Mum used to insist that we gave each other birthday presents, so we used to arrange it that on his birthday I would give him a Ten Shilling Note (that was in the days when ten shillings was money! It represented more than a week's pay for delivering papers). On my birthday he would give me a Ten Shilling Note. We used to do the same at Christmas. That way we did what was required of us and what Mum expected of us, but it didn't cost us anything. That is how most people live. We live reciprocally, we return to others the behaviour that we receive. If someone is nice to us we are nice to them and vice versa. If I am walking on the coast path and look up and smile at someone coming the other way I get a smile and a friendly greeting back. If I fix my eyes on the path three feet in front of me and walk past the people coming towards me, there will be no friendly greeting from them either. Supply your own examples, but what happens at Christmas when somebody sends you a card and you haven't sent them one? Either you feel obliged to send them one or you don't get a card from them next year. That is the way human life works, from the personal level up to the level of international treaties. Reciprocal. Tit for tat. By contrast Jesus cuts right through such attitudes and behaviour. He tells us to love enemies, pray for persecutors and turn the other cheek! He also practised what he preached. He spoke of a God whose sun shone and rain fell on good and bad alike, and whose love is freely given to all. He himself demonstrated that kind of generosity by welcoming not only outcasts but also some really bad people, and by not behaving towards others as they did towards him when he was despised and rejected. He tells us to "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36). His message and his example is that as God has loved us, so we are freed and enabled to behave towards others not as they behave towards us, but as God has behaved towards us. It's a different world. For me this is something of what it means to live a life in which all our being speaks of God and of his love. There is no doubt that we need to recognise our faults and failings and not ask or expect the impossible from ourselves: but despite that, poor though I be and weak, is disappointingly Victorian. It's not quite as bad as the "If so poor a worm as I" brand of hymnwriting but it is going that way. Much Christianity has focussed on our worse side, and no doubt there is a badness in humanity as we can see in example after example on the television news every day: but such wickedness does not tell the whole story about us, as the last two verses of the hymn point out.
There are three consequences of a life in which the believer's belief in God and his or her behaviour are in harmony. We find the first in the first two lines of verse 5. It is that God is truly honoured by such a believer's life. This is reminiscent of the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 5:16,
The second is found in the last two lines of that verse, and it is that such a believer discovers a better outlook on life and finds new dimensions of living which can only be described as singing a new song, an eternal one. The third is found in the last verse. It is that all of our living becomes sacred, marked by fellowship with God. "Sacred" people have sometimes given God a bad name. They can be holier-than-thou, they can be self-righteous, they can be narrow, pinched and grey: but Jesus was none of those things and he was about the most sacred person the Christian faith has ever known. He could be strange, even awe-inspiring and frightening, but his sacredness, his "holiness", was generous, open and welcoming. He was the sort of good person whose goodness was attractive, warm and real, and those are the qualities of goodness expected of us too. Fellowship is another old-fashioned sounding word which makes us think of cups of tea in chapel schoolrooms. It means something more than that, it means partnership in a common enterprise, and fellowship with God therefore means sharing with him in his work of blessing the world, and in turn knowing that he shares our life with us as part of that wider work. So it is that distinctions between God and the world, or between the sacred and the secular or between religion and life disappear. No longer are there two compartments labelled "Church" and "The Rest of my Life" with Sunday worship, prayers and Bible reading and collecting for NCH Action for Children going into the first and Monday, daily work and all the details of family life or community involvement going into the second. No. We discover, learning the lesson from Moses, that there are no compartments. So God can be found and honoured in everything we do. Here is something bigger and better than the narrow claims of religion, a call to be caught up in God's wider will and purpose which is to bless us and the whole creation with his fullness of life. Here we can receive all of life as a gift from God, and every part of it as a place where he can be found and his good purposes furthered.
The Methodist Church today has about 26 million members worldwide. If we ask why the Methodist movement survived its eighteenth century beginnings and then grew so strongly after it, when so many other religious groups which were also part of that century's Evangelical Revival and which were also led by excellent preachers and faithful leaders did not, then the historians give us two answers. The first answer is John Wesley's organising and administrative ability. He organised his converts into classes and societies and set up a way of taking care of them all. The second is Charles Wesley and his hymns. Charles Wesley (1707-1788) was converted on Whitsunday, May 21st, 1738, three days before his elder brother. He had written a few hymns before then, but after that he composed about 6500 more and wrote hymns on every subject and for all kinds of occasions. He it was who gave the early Methodists a faith to sing. This hymn is an early one, appearing in Hymns and Sacred Poems which was published in 1739. * * * * *
Please can I tell a true story before I get too serious? Methodist ministers go on "refresher courses" every ten years or so, and a few years back I was on one of these in Suffolk. On the Sunday afternoon we went into Cambridge and about twenty of us went to King's College chapel for Evensong. We disrupted the singing a bit by singing the hymns louder and faster than they were used to, but that's by the way. When it came to the Creed the minister began as usual with "I believe in God", but just before everyone else joined in with "the Father almighty" and so on, and just loud enough to be heard two pews away, the Methodist minister next to me responded with "So do I." I would simply add my own "Amen" to that. Being of beings. Nobody can prove or demonstrate the existence of God, and all arguments which try to do that get nowhere in the end. But in a way the existence of God is something that hardly needs to be proved or demonstrated anyway, at least if the opinion polls are anything to go by. Even after thirty years and more of secularism these opinion polls still report that 75% or so of the population of Britain say that they believe in God. The vast majority of these believers do not see any need to belong to a religious faith as a consequence of believing in God, and it looks as if it is a feature of our age that it is a time when many people believe but few choose to belong to a faith community of any sort; yet they insist that they believe in God. It all depends, I suppose, on what you mean by "believing in God" but one conclusion I would draw from all this is that the important questions to ask might not be about how the existence of God can be proved or demonstrated, but about how the Church can find ways of listening to these "believers" who choose not to be "belongers". Another question to ask is about what kind of God or gods people believe in. Wesley's opening title for God, Being of beings, sounds quite modern and is not a bad definition of what the word "God" might mean as it points to the life behind all life and the reality behind all reality. Christians can join with people of other faiths and with believers who belong to no particular faith in believing in God as Being of beings. Like many others, Christians do not believe that life, the universe and everything is an accident, but believe that behind it, underneath it, in it and through it there is an intelligence, a purpose, a reason and a personality which holds it all together. And the name we give to that deep purpose is "God". But what we believe about God is crucial, for there are many different gods on offer, inside as well as outside the Church. So what more can we say about this God we believe in? Wesley goes on to say more and to do so he uses a much warmer and user-friendly title, God of love, and this is where the Christian Faith is distinctive. When Christians sing this hymn and the one in the next chapter, they are affirming that they believe this Being of beings to be a God of love. We believe that the God who is the reality behind and in and through all reality has made himself known to us through the People of Israel and in Jesus Christ, and that he has made himself known as a God of love. This is the God Christians believe in and worship. There is much debate at the moment about Christianity and Other Faiths. Some Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the only way to God and that all other religions lead nowhere. Others believe that all sincere religious people of whatever Faith are actually brought to their real experience of God by Jesus even though they don't recognise him. Others, including me, say that God is accessible in all Faiths and that each Faith has a distinctive understanding to bring to our quest to know God and have communion with him. As I see it, this is what John says in a verse often quoted by those who take the Jesus-only line. In John 14:6 we read,
But notice that this does not say, "No one comes to God except by Jesus" which is the interpretation that the Jesus-only people put on this verse! It actually says, "No one comes to the Father except by Jesus", and so it is a statement of Jesus' distinctive contribution to our understanding of God as our Father and not a statement that he is the only way to God at all. Can we say even more about this Being of beings, God of love? Perhaps we can, but there are some serious Bible warnings to heed. First, the Bible warns that this God cannot be named. If we read the story of the call of Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt in Exodus 3 we see that Moses is making excuses, and who can blame him? But when he gets past the excuses stage he starts looking for a handle by which to control or manipulate God. He wants to know God's name. So God obliges with an answer that says he can't have an answer: "I AM WHO I AM," then "I AM," then the personal name which we don't know how to pronounce, changed from early days into the title, the LORD. God is the one who is - that's all that Moses is given. He is told about what God has done and will do, that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God who will lead the Israelites out of slavery: but his name is mystery, hidden. Second, the Bible warns that this God cannot be defined. Staying again in the Old Testament we have the "Shema", the statement of faith that is at the heart of the Jewish Faith, the one repeated by Jesus, "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). But that is only one of half a dozen possible ways of translating those mysterious four words, as a glance in the margin of any good translation will show. And Judaism has never defined their mini-creed any further. There are only four words in the Hebrew and two of them are the unpronouncable name, four central words: speaking of a mystery that defies the sort of definition that our Christian creeds attempt, and at which they so badly fail. Third, the Bible warns that this God cannot be pictured in any other sort of pictures than word-pictures. So the Ten Commandments forbid any sort of graven image. Icons, visual aids, statues are all out. Even in a modern synagogue the focus of worship is on a cupboard, the Ark, where the holy scrolls are kept. And even word-pictures fall short. The best example of this in the Old Testament is the vision that the prophet Ezekiel had. He saw the Lord enthroned on a mighty sort of chariot: but when he tried to talk about it, all that he could say was that he had seen "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD" [1:28]; not the "glory" of the Lord, nor even "what looked like the glory of the Lord", but "what appeared to be what looked like the glory of the Lord". I think we have lessons to learn from Ezekiel's reticence. But if we want to press the question further and ask what we can say about this indescribable God, then the two words the Bible insists we use are "grace" and "love". Grace is one of the key words of the Bible and one of its most reassuring themes. In the Old Testament God is seen as a gracious God, one who is amazingly kind, generous and loving. In the very old passage in Exodus 34:6-7 we read that he is
This idea was so important to the people who wrote the Old Testament that reflections of it are found in nearly all the different strands of the Old Testament and in the earliest to the latest of its books. The New Testament is convinced that Jesus expressed this grace of God in a unique way, that he actually embodied it,
Jesus taught a lot about the grace of God and its very practical consequences, insisting that if God is gracious and merciful then those who worship him should be so too,
And he practised what he preached. All through the gospels we find examples of the way in which kindness, love and generous care for others was the hallmark of his life and work. It was also the hallmark of his death, where we see the generosity of love, which is what we mean by grace, at its clearest. So we believe in a God who cannot be named, defined or pictured, the One who Is, the one "in whom we live and move and have our being"as Paul is happy to quote from a Greek philosopher (Acts 17:28), the "Source, Guide and Goal of all that is" as the New English Bible translates Romans 11:36. This is the God about whom Jesus taught. Later Christianity went further and said that Jesus not only taught about him, but that somehow this God was actually present in Jesus in a unique way. The first letter of John can say quite simply that "God is love" (1 John 4:8,16). It is this God, indescribable, beyond definition or description, but whose name and nature is love - as testified to throughout the Old Testament, as seen in Jesus, as witnessed to by the Apostles of the Church and as addressed by Wesley in this hymn as Being of being, God of love - who is the God in whom we believe and who we meet when we gather for worship.
This verse is typical of much in Charles Wesley's hymns. It contains a yearning for full fellowship with God, for a complete union with him which is typical of many of the classic mystics in the history of the Church. It expresses a devotion based on gratitude for what we have received from God, and its keynote is the burning desire to be at one with God. Early Methodism was a "holiness movement" which believed that it is possible to be so caught up in the love of God that we are purged from selfishness and all that flows from it; that we are so filled with love from God, to God and to others that our lives are transformed and even made perfect, and that in our inmost being we can receive that peace which passes understanding which assures us of our eternal home in God's love. This verse and the rest of the hymn illustrate the warmth and richness of that sort of spirituality.
Like others before and since, Charles Wesley sometimes pictures God as a lover, and uses images taken from the intimacy of human love and sexuality to express God's relationship with us. This is very clear in his hymn "Jesu, lover of my soul" but it is never very far away in any of those hymns which express longing for union with God, as this one does in general and in these two verses in particular. God is a lover who is totally generous in love, wanting only the best for us, and offering all his love to his loved one. There are no demands or conditions, except that we ask for more! So the hymn gives us words to express our response to our Lover, to embrace him and let him fill us with his love in all its fullness. This is powerful and emotional language, and it is a good reminder that Christian faith and life is not simply about "believing" or about "behaving" or about "doing", important though they are, but also about loving and being loved and all that involves.
I think I have got all the way through this book so far with hardly mentioning the doctrine of the Trinity. I had hoped to finish the book without mentioning it but the references to the Holy Ghost, Christ - the Saviour and God in this last verse make that impossible. Like many others I have got serious reservations about the Doctrine of the Trinity, and on my worst days have been heard to refer to it as a fourth century sermon illustration that has had its day. I think that on my better days as well sometimes. In this verse Charles Wesley is happy to refer to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as the New Testament is happy to use those titles: but what neither the New Testament nor Charles Wesley do is to weave these titles together into a theory. For the New Testament and for Wesley these titles are handy ways of talking about how we experience God, the Being of beings and God of love. We are human beings, conscious of our lives as a gift and aware that we are not part of a great accident but of a creation - so we speak of God as "Father" or "God the Father" or "Creator" or even "Mother" or the like. We are Christians who have seen in Jesus Christ the clue to the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and who have heard his message of love and felt something of his risen power - so we speak of him as the "Son of God" or "God the Son" or "Lord" or "Saviour" or the like. We are Believers and Worshippers who know the presence of God as we pray or when we worship, who feel the touch of God as he comes to us through others or as he moves us and energises us in the depths of our beings, who are renewed as he gives us Life and as we are caught up into God himself - so we speak of the "Holy Spirit" or the "Spirit of God" or the "Spirit of Christ" or "God the Holy Spirit" or the like. All of these are different ways of experiencing the presence of God with us, in us and among us: but at the same time it is the presence of the one Being of beings, the one God of love. In verse two Wesley has already said that we are made, and preserved, and saved by this God, and we can see in that phrase hints of these three different sort of experiences - made by God the Father, preserved by God the Holy Spirit and saved by God the Son - but yet it is all the one God we experience, the Being of beings and God of love. This is very near to a popular modern American way of talking about the Trinity which prefers to talk about God as "Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier" rather than as "Father, Son and Holy Spirit." So as far as I am concerned it is pointless to try to understand the doctrine of the Trinity as if it is a description of what God is like in himself. But if we think of it as talking about what it means to be a Christian, or as an invitation to us to recognise God who created us and loves us like a Father, who has come to us in Jesus Christ, and who comes to us to enable us to worship and to pray and to be renewed and transformed by the love of God, then that's different. And that is what the last verse of this hymn is about. So the hymn ends with a prayer that our lives might be energised by God (the Holy Spirit) that we may know and feel Christ's presence with us, his love shed abroad in our hearts, assuring us of our eternal home with Christ in God.
Fred Pratt Green (1903-) Reproduced by permission of Stainer and Bell Ltd After his retirement as a Methodist minister, Fred Pratt Green discovered that he had a gift for hymnwriting, and this hymn is one of the twenty-seven of his hymns included in Hymns and Psalms, the Methodist hymn book published in 1983. According to The Companion to Hymns and Psalms it was written in 1978 when he was invited by a Methodist church in Texas to write a hymn for the closing service of a festival of worship, music and the arts. The service was to include the dedication of a new communion table, font, and reading desk. Although the hymn is especially appropriate for Church Anniversary services it is equally fitting as the opening hymn of any Sunday service. * * * * * This is a hymn for worship and about worship. It begins and ends with exclamations - God is here! and "We adore you! We believe! - which beautifully express what worship is about. According to the hymn worship is a shared experience (hence the We) of the presence of God which moves us in the depths of our being. It is something real, something serious, something powerful. I wonder how your last Sunday's service measures up to the description of worship presented in this hymn? There are many different ways of worshipping God and different ways appeal to different people, but there is perhaps no finer definition or better description of worship than that written over fifty years ago by Archbishop William Temple. He wrote,
This hymn treats worship with the same seriousness. In the next two paragraphs I want to repeat something from the chapter I wrote in Called to Preach, edited by Angela Davis, the Local Preachers' Secretary in the Cornwall District of the Methodist Church and published as part of our District Celebration of the Bicentenary in 1996 of Local Preaching in the Methodist Church. I am convinced that getting our worship right is one of the most important priorities for the churches today. Why do I say that? Because one of the things that is happening in the world outside the churches just now is that people are increasingly into "spirituality". They are looking for a "centre" for their lives, a core and a meaning. If you want evidence for that just look at the books on the New Age, the occult, meditation or spirituality on the shelves of a bookshop like W H Smith, or the frequency of the articles on those sort of things in so many of the women's magazines. We are in fact living in a very "religious" age, and despite economic recessions the Retreat and spirituality business is booming! The language of this modern quest for meaning is definitely not the traditional language of the Methodist Hymn Book, the Authorised Version or the Creeds, but the search is for the age-old realities of religion, and these have been the business of the Church since God created it and what worship has offered to people down the years. So now, perhaps more than ever, it is vital that we get what goes on in our churches on Sundays, am and pm, right. Getting our worship right is one of the two most important things we can do to serve the present age, love our neighbours and help to promote the spread of the good news of Jesus in this Decade of Evangelism. The second thing, but this isn't the place to elaborate it, is to make our churches centres of care. So I want to plead that our churches and chapels are places where something real happens at 11am on Sunday mornings or whatever time the service is, because people today are looking for what is real, a time and place and way to be still and know that God is God, and a time to explore what it all means. People outside the church are feeling a need to "worship", though they don't necessarily call it that. I have not seen this happening too much over the past twenty years but it is happening now. And inside the church people are looking for new ways to worship, sometimes the lively modern alternative ways, sometimes the quiet and sacramental ways, in addition to our more familiar and traditional ways. Christian churches are places of worship and so we must ask ourselves serious questions about the quality of the worship we offer in them. Then there are questions to be asked and answered about the styles of worship that we offer. Among Christian people there have been and there still are many different ways of worshipping God. These different ways appeal to different people, and in worship as well as in the rest of life and faith, "One man's meat is another man's poison," as the old proverb says. It saddens me that sometimes we so easily forget this. We think that because our way of thinking or worshipping is so important to us and right for us that it must be the right way, rather than a right way. And if it's the right way, then it must be the only way. By the time we've got there we are only half a step away from despising those who think differently or do things differently. Just because I like Hymns and Psalms doesn't mean that Mission Praise is rubbish, or vice versa, though that is the sort of thing that I hear said or at least hinted at much too often for my liking these days. At the heart of our faith is a God who is a God of variety and not uniformity, whose generous gift of life produces millions of uniquely different but equally special human beings. Our worship needs to recognise that wonderful diversity. * * * * *
God is here! What an amazing statement! "God is here?" In this large and nearly empty Victorian chapel? In this cold and dusty country church? In this too magnificent and too splendid Cathedral? In this little room hired for the day, or this front room with the chairs pushed back? In this plush hall with all the modern multi-media technology? "God is here?" Yes, says the hymn, he is. With these men in suits and women in big hats? With this crowd of youngsters in jeans and men in jumpers? With this handful of old people? With this choir singing that anthem? With this group singing those worship songs? With these people sitting there saying nothing? Yes, says the hymn, he is. God is here! The "Being of beings, God of love" who is beyond all description? Yes, says the hymn, he is. This is not as amazing as it looks. After all, most of the great world faiths believe that God is accessible. They might differ in what they understand God or the gods, to be but most agree that one way or another God is accessible to us. Each different faith may have different ways of worshipping, but each faith believes that we can and do meet God in worship. So even though Christians believe that God is deeply mysterious and way beyond definition or description, and even though we know full well that at some of the times when we need him most or search for him most fervently he seems unfindable and unavailable, yet we share the conviction that God wants to make himself known to us and to make his love real to us all. Worship is one of the ways in which this happens. It is one of God's key ways of doing it. In worship we find ourselves to be in touch with the divine, with that which is above and beyond ourselves. In that sense the statement that God is here is not as incredible as it looks at first sight. If God is who or what we believe he is, then it follows that he is with us always and everywhere. "Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet," as Tennyson said. But there's a problem here. It's a bit like what happens at Church Councils. If you decide at a Church Council that something needs to be done but don't appoint someone to do it because it's something we all will do, then the chances are that whatever it is won't get done at all. If something is everybody's job, then probably nobody will do it, because that's what life is like. So if God is everywhere the chances are that we will find him nowhere. Not because he's not there, but because that's what we are like. We believe that God is with us always and everywhere (even in those times when he seems absent) but the Bible talks about special times, special ways and special places in which we can know his presence. It sees these as God's gifts to us for our benefit, because often we are just too busy or too preoccupied to notice his presence. Special times like holy seasons and holy days, special ways like services of worship and special places like our churches and chapels. Take those away, and it gets easier and easier to miss his presence. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said,
We believe, of course, that he is still there if two or three Christians are just gathered together, but if they know that they are gathered in his name then they are in a better position to recognise his presence and be blessed by it. This point is nicely made if we repunctuate the first two lines of the hymn,
So it is that the very concrete word "here" reverberates through the hymn (count how many times it is used!). Worship, at this time and in this place and with these people, is where God can be met! Having begun with the amazing God is here! the next four lines are a prayer that as we gather together in worship we may find in fuller measure what it is in Christ we share. They remind us that worship is about coming together, meeting each other and God, not merely all being in the same place at the same time for our own individual benefit. In the hymns we have looked at already we have seen much of what it is in Christ we share. They have spoken of our "fellowship", belonging together in a common enterprise, and they have spoken of what we have received from Christ in terms of forgiveness, new lives, new hopes, new ways of thinking, new values and new outlooks. As we come together we pray that these may be enlarged, improved and deepened by God working within us and by what we receive from each other. In the second half of the verse we recognise that worship is about waiting on God, that our whole being waits for God to make us into the whole people he intends us to be. But being made whole begins with being open.
There are nine more here's in these two verses. It is almost as if a documentary camera is taking us on a tour of a church building during a service of worship, pausing to highlight a feature here and a scene there, now and again stopping to observe what is going on while the commentator explains the meaning of what we are seeing. But it isn't like that, because we are looking around at our church, at ourselves, and appreciating what all this means to us. The camera focuses on the four symbols at the front: table, font, pulpit and the cross in the centre. It is the empty cross which has central place, reminding us that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are central to everything we understand about God and the meaning of life, as I tried to say in chapters 3-5. There isn't a communion hymn in my eight Desert Island Hymns, and no doubt some of my friends and former students will have noticed that already and be muttering about why not. But in this hymn we pause at the communion table, and reflect that
Almost every branch of the Christian Church believes that in taking the bread and wine Christ is with us in a special and precious way. For some Scottish Presbyterians this service is so special that you only celebrate it very occasionally, and for some Anglicans so precious that you celebrate it every day. And we call it many different names. In the course of church history there have been bitter disputes about what the service means, and we still find it easy to fall out with one another about it, but these two lines of the hymn get to the heart of it. Here, as we gather together around this table, and as we take the bread and wine, Christ sustains, strengthens and feeds us as of old. Here we are reminded not just of the Last Supper Jesus shared with his disciples in the upper room on the night in which he was betrayed, but of all those other meals he used to have with unlikely people. Meals like picnics with five thousand or more people, private teas with senior tax collectors and parties in big houses with prostitutes among the guests. No wonder he so upset the good people of his day. But the gospels show very clearly the important part that sharing meals with people played in Jesus' life and work as a way of showing them the love of God. In the same way we are welcomed to the Lord's table, just as we are. Here too we are reminded of what happened after the Last Supper; the bread reminding us of a body given for us on the cross and the wine of blood shed and life given there for us. So we "eat and drink in remembrance that Christ died for us". But as we do so we are doing something more than just remembering, for when Paul tells the Corinthians that we do this because Jesus told his disciples to "Do this in remembrance of me," (1 Corinthians 11:24) he means that as we celebrate this anniversary meal Christ is really and truly present with us, giving himself for us and to us in love. For this special service is God's gift to us, for in it the real presence of Christ sustains us as we gather at the table to take the bread and wine. Incidentally, the account of the Lord's Supper in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (11:23-26) is the earliest we have, followed by Mark's version (14:22-25) and then those of Matthew (26:26-29) and Luke (22:14-20) from around the same time. Then the camera focuses on the font, and we hear the congregation singing,
which is clearly a reference to baptism. There has been quite a bit of controversy down through church history about baptism too, though nowadays we seem to have reached a fairly amicable conclusion that some churches will baptise babies and others will only baptise adult believers. I belong to a denomination that baptises babies, and infant baptism happens to be one of my favourite services: but I think it's fair to say that there is hardly a shred of evidence for the practice in the New Testament. The New Testament doesn't give any systematic teaching about baptism, but putting the pieces together we learn that baptism was the normal form of initiation into the Christian Faith. In the earliest days of the church those who had come to believe in Jesus were baptised with water, as a sign of dying to an old life and rising again to a new one and of having their sins washed away. Then they had hands laid on them in prayer that they would receive the Holy Spirit. So it was that these new believers became members of the church. Obviously little or nothing of those ideas apply when the people who are being baptised are babies or infants. Infant baptism came later, and I'm very glad that it did. Our Lord Jesus himself certainly welcomed children, even though at the time it may have been quite an unusual thing to do. Stories like that in Mark 10:13-16 of Jesus blessing little children belong to the bedrock facts of his life. But he said nothing about baptising them, though that is what the church was doing within a century or so. For me there is no more powerful picture of the generous love of God than that we see in infant baptism. Here we have a baby, one in umpteen million, who knows and understands nothing about what is happening. And we know nothing at all about what sort of a person this baby will grow into, good or bad, faithful or atheist. And what do we say? We say that God values this child, that she is precious and unique and that his arms of love are held out to welcome her and hold her. This is why baptism is such an important service: it reminds us of God's unconditional love for each of us. This is also why I think we must be careful about making too much of the promises made by parents or godparents - God welcomes the baby no matter how sincere or not her parents are! Of course the service also reminds them about how serious a business parenthood is, but that's a by-product. Of course baptism doesn't make the baby into a believing Christian either, that depends upon her coming to believe in Jesus Christ for herself. Infant baptism is a sign of God's amazing love and in the service we pray that the baby will eventually come to accept the love of God for herself, and then the journey of faith begun in baptism can be completed in confirmation. We shouldn't forget either that in the service of baptism we also commit ourselves to being the sort of church where this baby and all like her can grow into faith! Here are two warm and traditional pictures of Christ and the Church. In Baptism Jesus, the Good Shepherd, welcomes the children into his flock and fold. In Holy Communion he invites us to his table to eat and drink. These are important pictures, even in an age of mechanical farming, browsing and fast-foods. But we must note the importance of the key word, welcome, for something sad is happening in all the churches today. They are tending to become exclusive rather than inclusive. The flock and fold is no longer one where all are welcomed. We can see this most clearly in baptism, but it's also observable in weddings and even funerals. More and more churches are taking a harder and harder line on which children they will baptise, or on who they will or won't marry. Baptisms, weddings and funerals are points of contact with the community. That is a fact, and it is obvious. And in my opinion it is a fact we should be grateful for. Much time and effort can be devoted to creating such opportunities, but here are occasions when people come to us! Also they come to us at very significant times in their lives. And they still come to us in appreciable numbers. The question is, what sort of a welcome do they receive? Here we have opportunities for meeting, for caring and for welcoming - but also, of course, for exploiting (the minister has a captive audience at a funeral) or for offending (the person in the pew who mutters just loudly enough to be heard - "What a cheek! They are just using the church, they haven't been here since the last one was done"). Here are points where the threshold of the church is low enough for strangers to cross. These things are like litmus paper, for what we do about them shows very clearly who we think we are and what we think the church is about. They show whether we think of ourselves as a "Neighbourhood Community" or as a "Gathered Flock." These are two very different creatures, and deciding whether we can be one or the other or both is one of the main questions facing the church today. A church which is trying to be a Neighbourhood Community believes that it exists to serve the local community on the community's terms rather than its own, tends to take a "soft" line on baptisms and weddings and to be rather relaxed about evangelism. A church which is trying to be a Gathered Flock believes that it exists to evangelise the local community and win people for Christ, tends to take a "hard" line on baptisms and weddings and to stress the need for commitment and decision. There are good things in both sorts of churches and there are bad. At best a Neighbourhood Community is open and welcoming and works hard to improve life in its neighbourhood - at worst it is wishy-washy, introduces people to each other but not to Christ and is a happy club of do-gooders. At best a Gathered Flock is a rich fellowship of deeply committed people, whose love for Christ is real and who draw others into faith - at worst it is narrow, introduces people to a hard Christ and is a happy club of the equally-bigoted. Ten years ago I read Adrian Hastings' History of English Christianity 1920-1985, and was struck by what he called the "increasing sectarianism of the Church of England", though it was affecting the rest of us as well. By it he meant the tendency in the UK for all the churches to be moving towards the Gathered Flock model. His main example was the way in which the Parish Communion had become the normal Sunday Service in Anglican churches, and how at the heart of that service the sheep are separated from the goats. He saw this as a worrying trend. It seems to me that those who take or want their minister to take harder lines on weddings and baptisms are pushing us in the same direction. I haven't heard of anyone refusing to do a funeral yet, though I suspect that is the next step. It seems to me that this way is not a good one for God, his kingdom, the Church or the community. Our hymn uses the shepherd and the flock picture, but in the older way, without its modern and negative edge. In it the church is a place of welcome, and maybe that word is one which ought to have much more prominence than it does when we talk about the life and mission of the church? When it comes to pulpit and the phrase about honesty of preaching we see our writer's Methodist roots. Here too I want to repeat something else I said in Called to Preach. I have no doubt that preaching matters and that sermons are important. The Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church obviously believes the same thing, and it goes on to insist that "It is the duty of local preachers to lead worship and preach with knowledge, conviction and competence". But what is preaching? What is a sermon? A sermon is not an opportunity for preachers to harangue congregations, and preaching is not simply an opportunity for enthusiasts to air their favourite topics, though both of those things are easy to do in a pulpit. The easiest sermon to prepare and to preach is the one which finds fault with the congregation. Another easy one is the one which reminds everyone that we should be doing better! Most of us don't need telling that, we're all too aware of it anyway. Preaching is certainly more than rebuke. It is also more than exhortation, testimony, calls for conversion and teaching. There is no doubt a time and a place for all of those, but preaching and the sermon in Sunday services is about something much bigger and better. It is about confirming and strengthening people by reminding them of the love and generosity of God in which they stand. It is about telling the story of Jesus so that his followers today can live faithfully, joyfully and usefully in God's world. It is about making connections between the Faith we hold and the life we live, relating the great traditions of our Faith, especially the Bible, to the daily business of being disciples today. It is also about looking at the hard things of life and asking, Where is God? The old advice that preachers should "Preach about God, and preach about twenty minutes" is good advice, though perhaps a quarter of an hour does it better than twenty minutes for most of us. This hymn would almost be one of my "musts" for the phrase in honesty of preaching alone, but in the second half of verse 2 we sing that God the Spirit comes to us in worship in other ways as well. He comes to each in silence, as well as in speech, though how much chance we give him to come to us in silence in many of our services is a moot point. He comes too in newness and renewal. This is an interesting pair of words which frighten some and fascinate others. They fascinate some of those who have been caught up in the charismatic movement over the last thirty years, or more recently have been helped by the "Toronto blessing". They frighten some of those who have kept their distance from this sort of thing. There is no doubt that the charismatic movement has brought good things to many individuals and churches, and there is also no doubt that there has been a downside too. It would be a pity, however, if those who do not see things that way (like me) are frightened off seeking and finding God's newness and renewal because of the words or ways of some of those who claim to have found a particular form of it. In this, as in everything about religion, there is a simple test. Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them" (Matthew 7:16) and Paul listed the fruits which would be produced if it is God's Spirit which is working in our lives as "Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control" (Galatians 5:22). The last four lines of verse 3 remind us that one of the purposes of worship is the very practical one of coming to see
which is what we have looked at in chapters 6-7. Notice the allusion to the Last Supper in the first of these lines. Jesus, the Servant, washes his disciples’ feet and then instructs them that leadership in the church means service (John 13:1-15). There is a terrific lesson for the church to be learned here in these days when leadership in so many churches is equated with authority and power. By taking a towel and basin and washing his disciples' feet Jesus shows us another way. The last verse is a fitting prayer with which to end this little book,
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