The hymn I've chosen to round off this Lent series is one of my absolute favourites. It's a hymn I shall have at my funeral and that sums up for me, personally, rather better than endless tomes of theology, the mystery of the depth of God's love for us, seen in the person of Jesus. But more of that in a while.
My first encounter with the hymn was in my second year of training for ordination at Durham. Each term ended with a big service for the College in the Cathedral, and this hymn was chosen by the Chaplain for the Passiontide service that year. When I first looked at the words, I thought, 'what on earth is it about?' - autumn leaves, swallows, starlit skies - what have they got to do with Passiontide? But as I sang the hymn, it became clearer where it was going and as we sang the final verses I was deeply moved by the profundity of the words.
But the key words of the hymn are in fact at the end of verse 2: 'love's endeavour, love's expense'. The hymn first appeared in 1977 as an appendix to a book of that same title: 'Love's endeavour, love's expense' - a book which I first read just a few months after having first sung the hymn. The book very quickly became something of a classic. It's author, W H Vanstone ended his ministry as a Canon of Chester and had a particular gift for leading retreats and spiritual direction, which later occupied him in retirement. But the greater part of his ministry was exercised throughout the 1950s and 1960s in a housing estate parish on the outskirts of Manchester. The book is a reflection on his experiences of ministry in this place and of his growing conviction, as he puts it, that 'the love of God must be infinitely more costly, more precarious and more exposed than it is commonly thought to be.'
Vanstone was working in a community in which everything was new: a newly-created housing estate built in 1950s Britain with all the confidence of those post-war years. And so, in the book, he muses upon the risk that lies at the heart of creating something new: that creation always involves a risk. We will never know how people or things might turn out. The experience of God is that, in the midst of the joy that exists because of the created world, there is a hidden agony: the agony that springs from the love God has for all he has made.
I was brought up, as many of you know, not in the C of E but as a Methodist, and when I first encountered Anglicanism, it was through one particular branch of the Church of England. This particular part of the C of E set a lot of store by the doctrine of the cross: or rather, should I say, of a particular interpretation of the doctrine of the cross. And that was that the cross was God's way of punishing human sin - the punishment that we, as sinners, rightly deserved, and which Jesus took in our place. It's a very neat scheme - the theologians call it the substitutionary theory of the atonement - but does it hold water? Is this really the sort of God we believe in? The sort of God who has to exact revenge rather than offer forgiveness?
As the years went by and as I began to train for ordination, I became increasingly convinced that this view of the Cross didn't work - or should I say, it didn't work for me any more. It was all too clinical and all too neat - and sat rather uneasily with the world as we know it (which is a big mess) and God as we know him (who is love). And as my studies progressed, I examined other theories of the cross. But it was not until I sang this hymn that the penny properly dropped, and things fell into place.
The hymn puts across three critical truths about the death of Jesus.
1. First is a truth that St Paul tries to express in several places in his writings: that God's strength is made perfect in human weakness, and that, in the death of Jesus - God empties himself. As we heard in the NT lesson: He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and was born in human likeness. [Phil 2]
In verses 3 and 4, we sing:
Love that gives, gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
ventures all, its all expends.
Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.
Paradoxically it is the Christ whose arms of love are 'aching' and 'spent' (verse 6) which sustain the world - which bear and absorb its pain
In verse 5, we sing:
Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree; [verse 5]
It is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith that Jesus' moment of greatest glory is the moment of his greatest weakness: that in hanging 'helpless upon the tree' as Vanstone puts it, he does battle with darkness and overcomes it.
2. But who exactly is Jesus? He is, Vanstone reminds us, the one who 'shows us God'. And we talk about this in terms of his being both divine and human. The weakness of Jesus hanging on the cross is the human weakness of the man who has been beaten, nailed and left to die. But if he really is the one who 'shows us God' then it is God himself who suffers on the cross.
This is further reinforced by the strength of the words at the opening of verse 6:
Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
God doesn't stand outside the system - taking it easy in his castle - as we might expect a king to be, but is fully involved in it. It's not that we believe simply in a crucified human Jesus - but in a crucified God (to use a phrase first used by Martin Luther).
The theory of the cross I grew up with did not allow that God suffered in the crucifixion. I now find that impossible to accept. To the extent that if God does not suffer on the cross then Christianity is not a faith worth having. It's no good having just another human being sharing human suffering: it has to be God who enters into the human condition, who enters into the place of darkness, if our salvation is to have any meaning at all.
3. And thirdly, although the death of Jesus happened in time almost 2000 years ago, it is still real now.
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.
Notice that the word is 'sustain' in the present tense. It is my firm belief that although the battle with darkness was fought by Jesus on the cross all those years ago, and then vindicated by his resurrection, Jesus is still with us in our suffering today: God still suffers when his creation suffers. He still sustains us now as then. The cross is not just a past event: it's also a present reality.
The hymn takes us deep into the mysteries and paradoxes of the cross, never losing sight of what the cross (when all's said and done, is actually about). It is about the incomparable, infinite love of God whose love for his creation is 'more costly than anything we can ever imagine.'
Well so much for the words of the hymn. But what of the music? The depth of Vanstone's poetry is perfectly matched by the pure simplicity of the tune to which the hymn is always sung. Orlando Gibbons' Song 13 is one of a number of tunes he wrote as part of his prodigious output. Like most so-called 'hymn tunes' of the period, it was in fact written as a tune for a Metrical Psalm. And as the title suggests ('Song 13') - it was written for a metrical version of for Psalm 13.
The melody is very uncomplicated, apart from a little ornament in the final line [demonstrate] and does nothing outlandish. It has 7 notes for each of the four 7-syllable lines. The mood is one of serenity. But there is a characteristic feature in the harmony which marks it out as a great tune, as opposed to simply a good tune. In the 3rd line, the presence of [excuse me being technical] a flattened 7th in the bass gives a harmonic twist that suggests that in the midst of the serenity there is something else: pain, imperfection, deviance? I'm not quite sure what - but it is something which picks up superbly the thrust of Vanstone's argument in the hymn.
Let me play it to you. [Demonstrate]. The result is bitter-sweet. It's not an unusual device: it occurs in a good many English pieces of the period - but it is what marks the tune out as special. Of course, Gibbons could have had absolutely no idea that Vanstone would choose to set his words to this tune some 250 or so years later, but the match of words and tune is perfect.
For me, Love's endeavour, love's expense is the 20th century's finest contribution to the rich treasury of hymns on the Passion. As such it ranks alongside My song is love unknown from the 17th century and When I survey the wondrous cross from the 18th. It takes us deeper into God's heart than we will probably ever really comprehend, in that it unfolds what lies at the heart of everything that is: the which 'ventures all - its all expends.'
Amen.