Jennifer and I were confirmed into the Church of England when we were in our late thirties. We had both been brought up, in different bits of the United Kingdom, in a fringe sect whose members were convinced that they were right and that everyone else was wrong.
When we changed our allegiance, we lived in Southwell. Southwell Minster is the cathedral town of the Diocese that is more or less Nottinghamshire; and the Cathedral and Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin of Southwell was our parish church. We assumed that the robed cathedral choir, the pretty high standard of music, and the fact that the clergy wore the vestments we are used to here, constituted a tradition that the Church of England had kept continuously from its formation.
That assumption was wrong. The Church of England had been High Church around the reigns of the two Kings Charles; but things went wrong in the reign of James II. He upset the applecart by becoming a Roman Catholic and that created a tension between the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and the fact that England was becoming a democracy ruled by Parliament.
If I have understood correctly, James took himself off to France and the space left behind was filled his nearest relative, the protestant William of Orange. Clergy then had to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. They still do: and Peter, Ally, John and I took the same oath. In 1680ish, about 500 clergy and bishops decided they could not take an oath of allegiance to William, when they had already sworn allegiance to James who was still alive. As a result, they were deprived of their livings.
They took High Church Anglican worship with them; and they were joined by a lot of laypeople who thought that their stance was the right one. In consequence, the church was left with a rather tedious and Low Church attitude to liturgy and music.
It need not have been so. Had we, as a reformed church, followed the Lutherans, decent music from organs and singers would have been normal. In 1705, when music was already in a bad way in the Church of England, Bach walked the 200 hundred miles from Arnstadt to the Lubeck in North Germany where Buxtehude was organist at the Marienkirke – the church of St Mary the Virgin. Bach wanted to hear him play and to learn his technique. Sadly, that organ was destroyed by allied bombing during the second War. The church is now a place of reconciliation. The bombs also set fire to the timbers that held the bells, and the bells came crashing down and half buried themselves in the floor. They are still there, with the words Donna nobis pacem [grant us peace] on the rim of one of them; and there is a cross of nails from Coventry on a wall nearby.
Two movements in the early 1800s made a difference in England. One was an evangelical revival. The evangelicals took up the enthusiastic hymn singing of those who had left the Church of England to become Methodists or whatever. The other was the so-called Oxford Movement: the revival of formal worship with music led by robed choirs and accompanied by an organ; the use by the clergy of the kinds of vestments that had been worn in the early days of the Christian Church. You can see some of the results here in Godmanchester . Some of the work – like the magnificent reredos behind the high altar - was organised by Charles Gray, Vicar from 1829 until his death in 1855. There is a memorial plaque to him by the Aumbry and his grave is by the gate into the Vicarage garden.
Before that change in direction, most parishes were in a pretty dire state. In many, the congregation did not sing and the music was provided by a group of singers and instrumentalists who were not very good at it and got most of their practice in the pub. We here are blessed with a superb instrumental group with both professionals and amateurs playing with wonderful skill. The difference between now and the 18th and early 19th centuries was in attitudes of mind. They seem not to have thought that decent standards of worship actually mattered; and we do.
Organs, too, are a surprisingly recent innovation. Our organ was built in 1859, a few years after Charles Gray’s death: and I don’t know the extent to which he may have been involved in preparing for it. Our present organist’s impression is that, before 1859, we had a barrel organ. Barrel organs were, in effect, hand cranked, wind blown musical boxes and often had a very limited repertoire. That meant that numerous hymns might be sung to a small selection of tunes. That had at least two unfortunate effects.
One was that people did not associate the words of a hymn with a particular tune; but we do now. You would be surprised how often that, when we go to see a family about a funeral, they ask for the hymn Crimond. They mean the metrical setting of Psalm 23: “The Lord’s my shepherd” but the name of the tune is how they remember it. As, last week, we were congratulating Felicity White on her musical accomplishments, you will be interested to know that the tune Crimond was written by a young Victorian woman of about her age.
The second unfortunate effect that struck me was this. If you have only a very limited set of hymn tunes, they will often not suit the words. There was an extra-ordinary early 19th century example where a tune had its first two lines corresponding to four syllables each, and its third line corresponding to six. In the first two lines, the congregation found itself singing: Stir up our stu, stir up our stu. That was resolved in the third line which went: Stir up our stupid hearts.
Such things happen. When Jenny and I were still members of the fringe sect I mentioned, we spent some years at a “meeting” where the singing was often quite good as members all owned their own hymnbooks complete with music and did their best to sing parts. On one occasion, the president announced we would sing a particular hymn – say hymn 100 in their book – but to the tune of hymn, say, 110. Not being very musical, he had not spotted that each verse we would sing had two fewer lines than the tune he had asked for. Equally, he had sprung the change on the organist without giving her time to check. For the first few verses, it did not matter: we could simply leave the last two lines off. But disaster loomed as we approached the last verse, when we should have to stop singing in the middle of a sentence.
One of the great contributions of the Victorian hymn writers, and of the editors of Hymns Ancient and Modern, was to ensure that the marriage of words and music was felicitous. The hymn we are to think about tonight is John Ellerton’s “Throned upon the awful tree”. Just in case we have snooty ideas about Christian professionals, it is worth remembering that Ellerton, a prolific hymn writer, was an ironmonger. The tune to which that is set in Ancient and Modern is not particularly well known and so I wanted to choose another. The metrical index in the hymnbook shows that there are several tunes with the right number of syllables in the right number of lines. But they would not all be appropriate. In theory, you could use the tune to which we sing “As with gladness men of old” – but it would not do. It wouldn’t do because it is too cheerful; it would conflict with the sentiments of the hymn.
Instead we sang it to Richard Redhead’s tune Petra. I don’t know what else he did, but he was organist at two London churches. Unlike Ellerton, we might think of him as a professional, and he was just as prolific in his writing. He wrote the tune Petra for the hymn “Rock of ages, cleft for me” and it fits out hymn tonight both in structure and in mood. Petra or petros, of course, mean rock and gives us the name Peter, as you’ll remember in the case of the Apostle. Now let’s look at some possible theology of the hymn. Here’s verse 3:
Hark that cry that peals aloud
Upward through the whelming cloud!
Thou, the Father’s only Son
Thou, his own anointed one,
Thou doest ask him – can it be -
“Why hast thou forsaken me?” Christians used to explain the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to appease a wrathful God. That seems to me to be at variance with the character of God as Jesus experienced him. Others saw it – still see it – as a kind of legal transaction in which Jesus acted as the whipping boy, bearing the punishment due to us. That seems to me to be unsatisfactory because it takes insufficient account of the uniquely Christian concept of God: that God is Trinity: one and three. And I think it takes insufficient account of the uniquely Christian doctrine that God was incarnate – made human – in Jesus.
I try to explain that to myself like this. Jesus, with his human way of knowing, did not know what it was to be God; while God, with his divine way of knowing, knew exactly what it was to be Jesus, and knew it by experience.
Jesus, with his human way of knowing, did not know what it was to be God. That implies that when the synoptic Gospels talk of Jesus announcing that he will die and, on the third day, be raised from the dead, we are, I think, hearing the theological understanding of the evangelists rather than being given an insight into the mind of the historical human Jesus. When, in John’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself by the Old Testament name of God [that isn’t obvious in English translations but is obvious in the Greek in which John wrote], I think that represents how John understood Jesus rather than what Jesus really went around telling people.
Jesus, with his human way of knowing, did not know what it was to be God; while God, with his divine way of knowing, knew exactly what it was to be Jesus, and knew it by experience.
We don’t think enough about God’s experience of the world. That needs a bit more explanation, because God knows us from the inside and, to a very limited extent, we can mediate the love of God to other people; but we don’t claim to be God incarnate. Folk might claim that the idea that Jesus was God incarnate makes no sense in the modern world.
Let’s go back to the very beginning. About 5,000 million years ago, a tiny seed of reality sprang into existence. It was smaller than a grain of sand, smaller than any atom, but it included all of space and all of time; all that would become matter and energy; and everything that would become the forces that hold the universe together. It exploded outwards, and it is still expanding. It did not burst into existence from space because, at that stage, there was no space. It did not occur in a moment of time because, at that stage, there was no time.
So where did it emerge from? Science would answer that it emerged from nothing. On the face of it, that sounds crazy. We might think that nothing could come from nothing; but both theory and experiment suggests that it could. I think, however, that we are entitled to have a theological input. God is not within the purview of Science; he is not subject to scientific method. When Science looks at God, it sees nothing.
Maybe, therefore, it is legitimate to say that, when Science sees nothing, sometimes it is looking at God. Maybe, therefore, it is legitimate to say that, 15,000 million years ago, that tiny seed of reality burst into existence not from nothing but from within God; and that would mean that the universe is contained within God.
That’s a much better notion than the idea that the universe is outside God. If that were the case, it would be difficult to explain how we could experience him.
It’s a much better notion that the idea that God is either contained within, or is coterminous with, the universe. If that were the case, we should have to say that God had a beginning [because the universe had a beginning] and that God will have an end [because, one way or another, the universe will, one day, come to an end].
So the presumption is that the universe is contained within God; and that he perfuses everything in it: there can’t be a Jeremy shaped hole in God wherever I happen to be. We might say that the universe was conceived within the womb of God; and that might enable women to understand creation better than men. We shall notice that that restates the problem that you and I are certainly not incarnations of God in the way we perceive Jesus to have been.
Oddly enough, a solution to the problem comes from a medieval Jewish philosopher called Isaac Luria. He, clearly, was not addressing problems of Christian theology. He was struggling with the problem that there could be no region where God is not. His answer was that, at the moment of creation, God withdrew in order to make space within himself for creatures that were not identical with himself.
I don’t mean that he withdrew from his outside edges, as we might feel we are doing when we fall out, because God does not have outside edges. His withdrawal was from within.
That withdrawal cannot have been total, or we would be back with the problem of a region from which God is absent. The withdrawal must have been partial: sufficient only that he could be present to us, and we could be present to him, but we would not be him. We could know him but not in his fullness. He would know what it was to be us, and from within, but more [one might say] as a matter of observation rather than of experience.
Now suppose that, in Jesus, God’s withdrawal was less than in our own case. That is equivalent to saying the God was more present to Jesus than he is to us; and to saying that, in Jesus, God was more present to others than he is in us.
As a bonus, that view helps us with another problem. The human Jesus could exercise human free will. He could have rejected the call of God. He could have ignored the risk of the Cross. The incarnate God could have gone down the road proposed in silly bits of fiction [like the Da Vinci Code], married Mary Magdalene and started a family. Maybe Jesus did not make that choice was because God became more and more present to him as he became more and more responsive to God.
Ultimately it was in the Cross, that he and God were utterly at one, and it is there that we see most clearly what God is like: not a God who needs to be placated with sacrifice; not a legalistic God who demands justice over everything else.
Jesus, with his human way of knowing, did not know what it was to be God. But God, with his divine way of knowing, knew, in all its fullness, just what it was to be Jesus: knew it, not by sympathy or from observation, as he knows what it is to be us - but God knew it intimately and by experience.
Let’s go back to our hymn.
Hark that cry that peals aloud
Upward through the whelming cloud!
Thou, the Father’s only Son
Thou, his own anointed one,
Thou doest ask him (can it be?)
Why hast thou forsaken me?”
In the Cross we meet a God who entered our human life precisely because he is prepared to experience and to risk everything: we meet a God who is willing to experience even the utter horror of God being God-forsaken.
Why? He did it for love. He did it in the hope that we might understand at last what he is like, and want to love him in return.
Teach me, by that bitter cry
In the gloom to know thee nigh.