Sermon: We sing the praise of him who died ... upon the cross

 

2 Chronicles 35:1-6,10-16; Luke 22:1-13

Durham Cathedral Matins. 5^th Sunday in Lent. 21^st March 2010

 

What language shall I borrow

To praise thee, heavenly friend?

For this, thy dying sorrow,

Thy pity without end?

 

The church has had different answers to that question over the centuries. As our readings reminded us, the death of Christ is the fulfilment of the Old Testament of the Old Testament sacrificial system, Christ is our Passover Lamb. But there are different ways of understanding this and if we had lived in the early centuries we would have borrowed the language of the Roman Empire and sung of the cross on which Jesus died as a sign of victory - a royal banner carried in triumphal procession like the royal standard of the Roman Emperor, it was a throne from which Christ reigned and the people gathered round were watching a victory parade not just a cruel death. They sang

 

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle,

Sing the last, the dread affray;

O'er the cross, the victor's trophy,

Sound the high triumphal lay,

How, the pains of death enduring,

Earth's Redeemer won the day.

 

The royal banners forward go,

The cross shines forth in mystic glow,

 

O Cross, our one reliance, hail!

So may thy power with us prevail

To give new virtue to the saint,

And pardon to the penitent.

 

By the Middle Ages, feudal society defined the problem between God and humans in terms of the unpayable debt that a feudal peasant owed his lord for transgressions against the social order. The lord could not simply forget the debt because his honour was not thereby satisfied, and so Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, borrowed the language of feudal society to tell us that Christ paid that debt for us. That idea is embedded in our collective consciousness by Mrs Alexander's nineteenth century hymn,

 

There was no other good enough

to pay the price of sin;

he only could unlock the gate

of heaven, and let us in.

 

This was a time of suffering for many people. The old political order and stability had broken down, nations were often at war, the fourteenth century saw the disease and famine in the Black Death and cold wet summers that ruined a succession of harvests. The idea that Christ suffered on the cross and therefore understands our suffering was very appealing. This was the time when crucifixes showed a gaunt and badly wounded Jesus, his rib cage showing.

 

O sacred head! sore wounded,

with grief and shame bowed down,

now scornfully surrounded

with thorns, thy only crown!

How pale art thou with anguish,

with sore abuse and scorn!

How does that visage languish,

which once was bright as morn!

 

And so we have Peter Aberlard's meditation later turned into a hymn,

 

Alone thou goest forth, O Lord,

in sacrifice to die;

is this thy sorrow nought to us

who pass unheeding by?

His engagement with this scene leads him to pray to suffer with Christ:

Grant us with thee to suffer pain

that as we share this hour,

thy cross may bring us to thy joy

and resurrection hour.  

 

In the Reformation, which was strong on the place of law, we would have borrowed the language of the law courts to express the idea that the cross Christ not only paid the unpayable debt of honour but satisfied the demands of the law. Now it was the law, rather than God, that had to be satisfied, and so Jesus stands in the courtroom facing the charge that should be laid against us and bears the punishment. Listen to the legal language of the courtroom in this Reformation hymn and the idea that not only was it was my guilt that led Jesus there, but I was also part of the prosecution and active in carrying out the sentence:

 

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,

That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?

 

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.

'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:

I crucified thee.

 

In this thinking, the cross becomes the place of punishment and not just the place where a debt was satisfied.

It is at this point that Isaac Watts, whose words we will borrow later in the service, comes in to the story. He moved hymnody into a new affective and devotional sphere whilst retaining the theological insights. In an age when visual images had been removed from churches because the emphasis was now on the word proclaimed not the image seen, he paints a picture with words and invites us not just to glance at but to survey the cross, to give it time, and describes what he could see,

 

When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of Glory died...

 

See from his head, his hands, his feet,

Sorrow and love flow mingled down...

 

His dying crimson, like a robe

Spreads o'er his body on the tree...

 

And, having surveyed the cross, we are moved to action not just emotion by what we see,

 

My richest gain I count as loss,

and pour contempt on all my pride.

 

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast

save in the cross of Christ my God;

the very things that charm me most-

I sacrifice them to his blood.

 

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

that were an offering far too small;

love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all!  

 

Later hymn writers continued in the path Watts set, with varying skill - some of the passion hymns are sentimental nonsense and mercifully are not sung today. Earlier we sang another great hymn of the passion written which explores the power of the cross. Recall lines like,

 

 

The Cross! It takes our guilt away;

It holds the fainting spirit up.

 

The balm of life, the cure of woe,

The measure and the pledge of love,

The sinner's refuge here below

The angels' theme in heaven above.

 

And it is all summed up, with some visual licence,

Inscribed upon the Cross we see

 

In shining letter, ‘God is love';

There is not time to go further with the history of the way hymnody treats the cross because I want to draw your attention to something most people don't think about when considering hymns of the passion.

Since the seventeenth century, when Isaac Watts single-handedly created the new genre of hymnody, hymns have been written in English - all the hymns before then come to us in translation, but now we have exactly what the author wrote. Hymns have a set metre and rhyming pattern, unlike worship songs. Why does that matter? Because people writing passion hymns have to find a word to rhyme with ‘cross' since that word often comes at the end of lines. And there is not much choice in English: both today‘s hymns use ‘loss', which is about the only usable option - toss, moss, boss and floss don't sit easily in hymns about the cross. The alternative is to put the word ‘cross' earlier in the line but there are times when it needs to be the climax of a line. And if you rhyme it with ‘loss' there is immediately a down-beat tone: ‘My richest gain I count but loss'', ‘For this we count the world but loss'. And it's no easier if you want to talk about the cross revealing the love of God, because ‘God' doesn't rhyme with anything love usable in a hymn and ‘love' is another difficult word to rhyme, most hymns that use ‘love' as a rhyming word end up saying something like ‘God's love comes from above and the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove'.

So, we English-speakers sing in muted ways about the cross and that, I suggest, consciously or unconsciously shapes our theological understanding of the cross. It is primarily a place of suffering and loss.

But other languages are different and other possibilities open up. I consulted our French choristers and they came up with the following rhymes for ‘croix': bois, fois, loi, choix, joie. Immediately there are new possibilities for singing about the cross - it evokes our faith or is a sign of God's faith, it is about the law or about rule - human or God's, it poses us with a choice, it gives us joy. Last weekend I was in the Netherlands leading a retreat for an international group and the French speakers there added the words for ‘what?' ‘why' ‘king', ‘me' and ‘belfry' - so in French we have six rhymes if we manage to write a hymn that says bells can ring out the joy of the cross where Christ reigns as king and we respond with faith because the law is satisfied.

Other people at last weekend's retreat told me that in Malayalam the word for ‘cross' rhymes with ‘people' or ‘humankind'  - the cross affects the human race. In Romanian the word rhymes with the first and third person of ‘to carry'- I can carry my sin to the cross, on it Christ carries our sin - and also with ‘sweet' and ‘light' so there is scope for a hymn writer to work with paradox of the cross as something sweet that brings light in the darkness. In Hungarian the rhyming words include ‘to let go' and (with a heard but not spelled rhyme) ‘to love', so the cross allows us to let go of our sin and guilt and is an expression of love as well as demanding that response from us. Apparently they also have an unusable rhyme, ‘to bulge' for which I can think of no immediate use in a hymn.

The Dutch speakers came up with several rhyming words: ‘purity' or ‘chastity' - we are made pure by the cross, it calls from us a life of purity - and also both ‘house' and ‘to be at home': so the cross, far from being a place where Christ or we experience loss becomes a place of shelter - a house -where we are at home, settled, secure. They had a discussion about the rhyme ‘lock', as in canals, and decided that the image of levelling out high and low water, allowing access and stability, enabling progress to be made on a journey, and getting the correct balance were all rich images to be explored in relation to the cross. I have been pondering them during the week - the cross gives us access to God, restores the balance between God and us, enables us in Christ to reach places otherwise unattainable because of the gulf in levels which are bridged by the cross.

Today is Passion Sunday when our gaze turns more intently on the passion of our Lord. Soon we will mark his death and resurrection. On Good Friday a large cross will be carried down the nave and will confront us with the many and varied meanings of that stark visual image: the suffering of Jesus that the medieval writers described, the love of God, the victory and triumph of the cross. Unlike our forebears, we have hymns from all previous eras and can sing all their truths. Maybe over the next two week you could use some of the hymns in your prayer, but as you do so, remember the influence of rhyme and explore in your prayer some of the rich insights that we can borrow from other languages.

We sing the praise of him who died,

Of him who died upon the Cross.