Occasionally, an ancient writer hits you with a jaw-droppingly fresh insight. The first theologian to discover the power of the idea of Jesus as God’s “New Song” was Clement of Alexandria in the early 200’s: “I have called Him a New Song.”

This is the promise He (Jesus) made to the Father: “I will declare your name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I sing praises to You” (Heb 2:12).

Clement then asks Christ:

… to sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father. Your story will save, Your song will instruct me.

Clement ministered in a city that had been founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great as the portal for bringing Greek “reason” and “culture” to the “unenlightened” and “uncultured” East. In addition, Alexandria had long been home to a large number of Jews in permanent exile. Alexandria was the place where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Alexandria was also the center of an intellectual approach to Judaism that had come close to reducing Israel’s story of redemption to a mere philosophy of moral improvement.

The genius of Clement lies in his ability to take an Old Testament motif of a New Song (see Isa 42:10; Ps 33:3) that is fulfilled in the New Testament (Rev 5:9; 14:3) and apply it creatively and redemptively in a non-Christian world that already had its own thoughts about music.

Magic of Music

Ancient Greece was fascinated with music, imagining the cosmos itself to reverberate to various musical modes. Personifying the magic of music was the Greek hero Orpheus. His music was supposed to have tamed beasts and moved inanimate objects. In classical Greece, great contests of song — of Olympian proportion — honored Orpheus’s memory. By the time of the emergence of Christianity, however, buffoons like Nero (who rigged musical contests to make himself the winner) made a mockery of this memory. Still, the games went on — an unending run of American Idol, despite a talent drain.

Everlasting New Song

There is a “harmony” to the universe, grants Clement in his extended tract Exhortation to the Greeks. But that “harmony” has nothing to do with speculation about musical modes, and everything to do with the “symphony” of being that has constituted the Trinity from eternity.

With the fatherly purpose of God … and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He (the Word of God) makes music to God.

This eternal “harmony” and “symphony” between Father, Word, and Spirit became concrete when the Word became a human being. Christ came to make us like himself and to draw us into the eternal relationship — the eternal “harmony” and “symphony” — that has always existed within the godhead.

Jesus the New Song

Thus, Clement proclaims: “Because the Word lately took a name — the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a New Song.” And while ancient Greeks mythologize and fantasize about a revered hero of the past taming beasts through song, Christians know a more powerful Singer:

He is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts — human beings. For he tamed birds, that is, people who are flighty; reptiles, that is, those who are crafty; lions, that is, the passionate; swine, that is, those who are pleasure-loving; wolves, that is, the rapacious. … All these most savage beasts, … the heavenly song of itself transformed into gentle people. …

See how mighty is the New Song! It has made … humans out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they heard the song.

Those who awake to God’s song of redemption

will dance with angels around the unbegotten and only imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining us in our hymn of praise.

What an amazing thought! Clement compellingly contextualized biblical imagery to speak to a culture of disbelief at the beginning of the 3rd century. May we at the beginning of the 3rd millennium be as faithfully creative. Because the story Jesus tells still saves, and the song He sings still instructs.

He who hung the earth is hanging.
He who fixed the heavens in place has been fixed in place.
He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree.
The master has been profaned.
God has been murdered…

But He rose up from the dead
and mounted up to the heights of heaven.
When the Lord hath clothed Himself with humanity,
and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,
and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,
and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,
and had been buried for the sake of the one who had been buried,
He rose up from the dead,
and cried with a loud voice,
“Who is it that contends with me?
Let him stand in opposition to me.
I set the condemned man free;
I gave the dead man life;
I raised up one who had been entombed.
Who is my opponent?
I am the Christ
I am the one who destroyed death,
and triumphed over the enemy,
and trampled Hades underfoot,
and bound the strong one,
and carried off humanity
to the heights of heaven.”
“It is I,” says the Christ.

This Easter finds me at the happy convergence of three memorable texts (my life’s story could pretty much be told in terms of what I read). The first is this one, Melito of Sardis’ (ca. A.D. 195) remarkable Easter sermon (I’ve extracted lines from near the end of the sermon) — a text that Bob Webber often extolled for its so-called “Christus Victor” theme.

God is crucified so that humanity can rise, Melito practically sings. This death of God and resurrection of man is the means by which “the One who sits on the throne’ says, ‘I make all things new’” (Revelation 21:5). This “all things” is, well, “all things.” Praise be. Art is new. Science is new. As are gardening, cooking, playing, singing.

It was with Melito’s sermon dancing around in my brain that I serendipitously came upon this thought from sociologist Werner Stark:

The truths of religion can be much more easily and much less inadequately expressed in artistic than in linguistic terms — or better, in the language of art than in the language of science. St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even his best arguments. … Max Weber coined a more remarkable phrase than he knew when he called himself on one occasion “religiously deaf.” But those who can hear will find, for instance, in Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum a statement of faith, which is not only supremely moving but also experientially satisfying and convincing. The rationalistic demotion of art to something ‘merely sentimental’ is not the least disservice which the discursive intellect has done to religion, and, indeed, to all humanity. The fact is and remains that the rationalist as such has no ear for the divine call (Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, Vol IV [ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], p. 72).

The third text is complement to the second: R.R. Reno’s commendation in First Things (Mar. 27, 2009) of David Hart’s new book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) — a book that is an attempt to get the “religiously deaf” to listen to their own folly. From Reno’s remarks I extract but this thought:

“The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels,” Hart writes, “are those that first convert the minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow tyrannies within the soul.” Christianity caused such a revolution, and it did so, Hart claims, with its fundamental claim about Christ: In him each one of us can join our humble humanity to the glory and holiness of God.

Honor, laud, and glory to our crucified and risen Christus Victor.

And fivefold thanks.

Thanks, first, for the utter graciousness by which Jesus came.

Thanks, second, for the loving faithfulness that brought Jesus back from death to life.

Thanks, third, for the Spirit’s kiss by which I find myself astonishingly not “religiously deaf.”

Thanks, fourth, for the host of gifted saints and fellow-travelers (from all times and all places) who have given us such stunning musical and artistic expressions of the glory of Holy Week’s story.

Thanks, fifth, for the fact that ours is a faith that satisfies the itch to compose hymns and that prompts us to make our best arguments as well.

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate

In John’s gospel Nicodemus also takes up a Dylanesque watchtower song. Liberal commentators treat Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees … a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1) as a figment of the gospel writer’s imagination. Conservatives dismiss him as a dull blade (as if any of us would have been a fig more astute ourselves in theological dialogue with Jesus).

As to the former commentators: If the sun is still shining 2,000 years from now and my life receives brief mention in but one source, I hope, first, that the mention is true, second, that the mention likewise presents me as a platform for my Master Teacher’s voice, and third, that the mention is allowed its say. As to the latter commentators: true, Nicodemus slinks in at night; true, he shows himself no match for theological repartee with Jesus. But his glory lies in these facts: one, he shows up, and two, he knows enough to shut up. I hope I’m that wise.

My Alter Ego

Of all the characters Jesus comes across in John’s gospel, it’s Nicodemus with whom I think I most identify. He is the sum of some of my deepest fears: an Ausländer educated beyond his capacity to understand, and promoted to a prominence where his ignorance becomes painfully evident.

A Pharisee on the Sadducee-dominated Sanhedrin, Nicodemus is a minoritarian. His name is Greek, not Jewish (“Nicodemus” means “Victory of the People”), though we’re never told whether he was of pagan origin himself or simply bore the Seleucid oppressors’ version of the Hebrew name Naqdimon. Perhaps his name “Victory of the People” has a special bite. Not only does his party oppose its adveraries theologically (Pharisees affirm resurrection, Sadducces deny it), but Pharisees are non-aristocratic teachers “of the people,” while Sadducees are the aristocratic power-elite. If you will, his is a lonely Democratic voice in an assembly run by Republicans.

Nonetheless, Nicodemus has become, by means not disclosed to us, an “insider.” Jesus refers to him, in fact, as The preeminent Teacher of Israel (despite the translations, in the Greek there’s an emphatic definite article in front of the title “Teacher” in v. 10). One wonders if it is because of his undeniable strength as “The Teacher” that Sadducees have grudgingly made room for him on the Council. The fact that he comes to Jesus at night suggests he does not feel his “insider” status is secure.

Why do I relate to Nicodemus? Easy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, my mother and my father were the first in their respective families to go to college. My mother is from the Mississippi delta and her parents were sharecroppers. My dad’s parents were small farmers in East Tennessee. I sit around a faculty table at a theological seminary and go: “Who let me in? And when will they figure out what a hick I am?”

Nicodemus Shows Up

Something has happened in Jesus’s early “signs” to trigger Nicodemus’s sense that he doesn’t have everything figured out. What I love is that Nicodemus knows to whom to bring his ignorance. John surely expects us to assume that the “signs” that Nicodemus has come to ask about include the Turning of Water into Wine (John 2:1-11 = “the first sign”) and the Temple Cleansing (John 2:13-25 … “What sign do you show?”, Jesus is asked). Nicodemus isn’t a clever enough reader of Scripture to see in the Cana miracle the promise of God’s having saved his best wine for the age of the Spirit that is about to dawn (see Ezk 36:25-27). That is, until Jesus starts talking about being “born again/from above” (the Greek word anothen at John 3:3,7 is a double entendre). I’m not smart enough to figure that out either. Which, of course, is the point — otherwise we wouldn’t need the rebirth.

Nor does it look like Nicodemus is astute enough to see the hidden lesson in the Temple Cleansing. Jesus’s temporary interruption of daily sacrifice promises the coming “end of sin” (not to mention of Sadducean hegemony), when He offers the Temple’s Final Sacrifice (see Dan 9:25-27). Nicodemus, it follows, could hardly understand that Jesus’s act also signals his intent to inaugurate a building project: the raising up of a new Temple based on his own Body, once he’s given it for the sin of the world. Thus, Jesus’s discourse on the lifted serpent — another figure for his own Body. Not that any of us could have seen the pattern of prediction until the Fulfiller himself showed up. Which, of course, is again the point: he did show up. The little hand reached out from Mary’s womb, and the renewal of all things began.

But from the “signs” Nicodemus does know enough to know that something is afoot.  Jesus’s mystifying rejoinders to Nicodemus’s questions reveal to him that he does not understand a whit about things that (at least in Jesus’s estimation) should be obvious from the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures: there’s a death about us that requires a rebirth from above (3:3-8), a sickness about us that calls for the lifting up of a curse-bearer (3:10-14).

Nicodemus Shuts Up

But I love something even more than the fact that Nicodemus knows to whom to come. After his initial “but, … but’s …,” he shuts up and listens. Apparently, he realizes he is in the presence of the True Teacher of Israel.

It’s interesting the way the narrative in John 3 subtly shifts in verse 16. Either John reassumes his own explanatory voice, or he continues Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus in a way that leaves the confines of the conversation behind. Either way, John’s or Jesus’s “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” thrusts Nicodemus’s nighttime foray into the bright daylight of God’s mission to reclaim his lost world.

Nicodemus has to go back into the dark place of his Sanhedrin colleagues’ murderous machinations against the Lord of light. In the face of their ultimately devilish scheme we hear him offer — and get shouted down for — a plea for simple procedural justice (John 7:50-51). What his posture is during the final trial we are not told. Mark puts “the whole council” of the leadership in cahoots (Mark 15:1) — perhaps Mark is being hyperbolic; perhaps known friends of Jesus were excluded from the proceedings. Regardless, I can only imagine how crushingly frustrating it must have been for Nicodemus to watch it unfold.

When last we see him, Nicodemus “the Teacher” offers his most elegant discourse, wordlessly carrying 100 pounds of spices for his Teacher’s burial.

Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound’s weight (John 19:39).

Mute as his tongue is, here Nicodemus is his most eloquent: however rebirth comes to us it must pass through this tomb; the path to Jesus’s being lifted up as a sign of God’s love for the world and as the One in whom Israel’s (and the world’s) core sickness can be healed must call for this entombment; if an end is ever to come to unjust accusations and hearings, they must all be absorbed in this most heinous of injustices, the death of the one truly innocent human being who ever lived.

That grave could not hold Jesus. Praise be, the spices were not necessary.

God himself came as just such a “who.”

A “what” is something I can control.

A “who” — I can’t.

And so I think it’s more comfortable, sometimes, to relate to a concept (“redemption”) or a thing (“the cross”) than to the person who reaches out from Mary’s womb. I can mine the doctrine of redemption for what it is I think I need from it: freedom from guilt, purchase from evil, hope for resurrection. Same for the cross. But the Person who redeemed, freed, purchased, and promises resurrection will not be reduced to those benefits.

I’m realizing I need to spend more time with Jesus, not just with truths (true as they are) about him. This Advent/Christmas season, I have been contemplating the Jesus whom John’s gospel portrays for us. Here is the Bible’s most exalted Christology: “… and the word was God.” Here is also the Bible’s earthiest: “… the word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

In this and a few posts to follow, I want to ponder the ways Jesus — God’s hand from Mary’s womb — takes hold of ours.

The word becomes flesh and grabs a seeker. When Jesus senses that Andrew and a friend are following him, he turns, and asks point-blank:

“What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).

What a profound question. What a probing question. Jesus wants to know our agenda, what aspirations we’re projecting onto him. Surely John the Baptist’s teaching about Jesus being “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” had prompted a myriad of questions for Andrew. So Jesus puts the question to the seeker, and the seeker has to decide whether it’s a “what” or a “who” that he is after.

Instead of pulling out a list, though, Andrew simply asks in return, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” In other words, “Well, I know I don’t know the answers to my questions. I know I need to know the One who does. So, I’m pretty much more interested in a relationship with you than in getting all the right answers.”

Time and again, I sense Jesus putting the same question to me: “Just what is it you are looking for in me?”, all the while waiting for me to set aside my “next topic for discussion.”

The word becomes flesh and grabs a non-seeker. Some of us are seekers. Some are not. Andrew is. Nathaniel is not — at least he’s not looking for anything from Jesus. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” is his retort to claims that Jesus might be the Messiah. (Jesus and Nathaniel were from different towns in Galilee — who knows, maybe they went to rival yeshivot?) Reluctantly, though, Nathaniel agrees to go with his brother Philip to check things out.

Jesus seizes the initiative. And what an initiative it is: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47). Nathaniel is surprised: “How do you know me?” Surely with the most generous laugh, Jesus responds: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you” (John 1:48). OK, that’s pretty enigmatic. It has to mean something like: “Look, I know you’ve simply been trying to be a faithful Israelite — learning your Torah, saying your prayers, going to synagogue, giving alms. All that time, I’ve had my eye on you. Truth be known, from eternity I’ve been shaping you for me. I’ve been anticipating the day we’d meet and become friends.”

It’s enough for Nathaniel. Whether it’s what Jesus says or how he says it — regardless, the lights come on. Here’s God’s Son, he realizes, Israel’s King. Quite a leap, but just because Nathaniel has been living in as much of the light as has been available to him, he “gets it.” And Jesus promises (I paraphrase): “You figured all that out on the basis of how little I showed I already know about you? Just wait” (see John 1:50-51).

I’m struck, first, by how “from out of nowhere” it is that Jesus shows up in Nathaniel’s life, second, by how affirming Jesus’ expressed purposes are, and third by how much Nathaniel’s future has been prepared for simply by his staying “under the fig tree.”

One of the most unexpectedly encouraging conversations I ever had was with the pastor of the not-especially-evangelical church of my upbringing. When I returned home from college for Christmas after trusting Christ my freshman fall, my parents were stunned and disturbed by my “born again” experience, and they wanted their minister to straighten me out. The minister wisely said: “As you start this new life, make sure to take along with you everything good from the old. The God who created you is the same God who is recreating you — he doesn’t waste anything.”

I could recall hearing nothing about the need for personal faith from this church. Still, I had to admit to myself, much of the basic biblical portrait of God had been instilled there. The Bible stories I had learned in Sunday school had given me an essential trust in the Bible and an inchoate sense of the biblical storyline.

When Jesus showed up to make me new, he had already, so it appeared, put in place at least some of the building material. I learned to be grateful for the “fig tree” under which I had lived … and, of course, even more grateful for the One who already knew me there.

Seeking … or not seeking … it doesn’t seem to matter much to Jesus. Life in him, after all is “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God” (John 1:13).

He just comes, grabs, and won’t let go.

When I became a Christian, God crashed through all that. He is. Truth matters. We’re broken, and he had to fix us. As John’s gospel maintains:

There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. … And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory (John 1:9,14).

Each Advent/Christmas season seems to bring its own “zinger,” a fresh reminder that the gospels tell more than a good story. They tell the One True Story.

My first Christmas as a Christian, the zinger was Handel’s Messiah. The music wasn’t unfamiliar, but the notion that the Bible was a coherent whole was new. And to hear this One True Story sung — well, it resonated with something deep in my soul. I wept through the performance.

This year’s zinger was the rebroadcast of an episode of House, titled “Fetal Position” (from Season 3). For the TV-averse, Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurey) is an über-competent, but über-über-narcissistic surgeon. House is as always right about medicine as he is unfailingly wrong about, well, everything else, from relationships to ethics.

In this episode, House has to weigh the health of a pregnant woman against that of the baby in her womb. It’s not a huge conflict for House, actually, because what’s in her is just a “thing” as far as he is concerned. Studiously and forcefully, he denies the humanity of the unborn, and airily prescribes abortion when the “fetus’s” illness threatens the pregnant woman’s life.

The aspiring mother, Emma, however, would rather die than lose her baby. Against his better judgment, House winds up in the operating room, performing prenatal surgery.

No sooner does he open an incision in Emma’s uterus than the baby reaches out an arm and grabs House’s index finger with a tiny hand. House’s quip, “I just remembered I forgot to TiVo Alien,” fails to mask the revelation that’s just taken place. His eyes tell the tale, as does his thumb as it caresses the tiny hand.

After the (successful) surgery, House visits Emma. She’s amazed, she remarks, that she’s going to be OK.

“What’s amazing is how blonde your baby’s hair is.”

“My baby?”

“Yeah, that thing in your belly that tried to kill you.”

“You’ve never called him a baby before.”

The banter goes on, but House’s eyes betray him again.

Before a final lovely scene of Emma hugging her newborn months later, the penultimate scene has House at home sitting in front of the TV, popping pain-killers. In the background Lucinda Williams’ haunting voice sings “Are You Alright”:

Are you sleeping through the night?
Do you have someone to hold you tight?
Do you have someone to hang out with?
Do you have someone to hug and kiss you,
Hug and kiss you, hug and kiss you?
Are you alright?

As the lyrics unfold, House’s eyes transition from retro-TV images of dinosaurs to his own fingers. He watches his thumb caressing the place where Emma’s boy had reached out of her womb to take hold of his finger.

Out of the womb of Mary, I am reminded, God’s tiny little hand grabs mine.

I can’t not respond. I can’t not return the caress. I can’t call God a myth, a nice idea or a projection of our best hopes for ourselves. I can’t not be grateful that Someone is there, holding tight, hanging out, hugging and kissing.

More to follow …

Occasionally, someone (thanks, Mom) asks where to find it. So, here it is …

BACH, BUBBA, AND THE BLUES BROTHERS: THE SINGING SAVIOR’S MANY VOICES

Spend a few years leading music in a church or seminary setting, and you will eventually hear all of the following. I have.

“We’re going to do happening music in the 8:30 service, and if the geriatrics don’t like it, they can go to the 11:00 service.”

“To put it bluntly: Bach is simply better music, and if people can’t handle a superior aesthetic in worship, well, there are plenty of other churches in town.”

“I’m so glad this church doesn’t do all that boring music from the past. We’re singing ‘a new song.’ As for the old stuff, Jesus said: ‘Let the dead bury their own dead.’ End of discussion.”

“No way will we use so-called contemporary worship music in my church. Its roots are in rock ‘n roll, so it’s inevitably associated with the wrong kind of people. Using that music in church would suggest we approve of immoral lifestyles.”

“I guess I can stomach my church’s worship OK, but it’s really too tame for me. The ‘worldly’ music I listen to on the radio at least has intensity. It gets to your gut and fires your imagination. What we do in my church — you know — the hymns and stuff, is just too safe musically. It puts my spirit to sleep.”

“Well, everybody knows that music with the beat on 2 and 4 comes from Africa, which, unfortunately, is still steeped in primitive tribalism — the music carries overtones of Satan-worship and the occult. So, Christians have no business going near that stuff.”

“Thanks for the suggestion, Reg, but sorry, that song sounds too much like the 70s, and we’re a new millennium kind of church. Know what I mean?”

Call me Rodney King, but I continually ask myself, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In the Spring 1998 Reformed Quarterly, RTS/Orlando Professor Mike Glodo wrote eloquently of the beauty of the Singing Savior of Psalm 22, of the fact that Jesus sang once and for all Israel’s lament of abandonment (the first half of Psalm 22), so we could sing the victory chant of redemption (the second half of Psalm 22).

I, too, am captivated by the vision of Christ now leading worship in the church, fulfilling the promise of Psalm 22:22: “I will declare Your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing a hymn to you” (see Hebrews 2:12). Maybe it is simply because I know how hard it is for certain kinds of people to consider singing alongside certain other kinds of people, but I am especially taken with the fact that it is specifically “in the assembly” that the psalmist locates the Savior’s singing.

For the rest of the article, please click:

WHOSE SONG SHOULD WE SING?

What stands out about the exaltation of the Singing Savior in the second half of Psalm 22 is the description of the “great assembly” (v. 25) in which the Former Sufferer sings His hymn to the God who answers His cry for help. Having once been surrounded in His agony by a band of evildoers, now the Singer is surrounded by both Jew (v. 23) and Gentile (v. 27), by both poor (v. 26) and rich (v. 29a), and by both generations past (v. 29b) and generations to come (vv. 30-31). In place of God’s abandonment is His renewed gaze and listening ear (v. 24), and in place of the scoffers and torturers is a vast and variegated assembly.

Isn’t it remarkable that this is the answer to Messiah’s loneliness on the cross? The promise of the Singing Savior’s reveling in the company of a naturally disparate but now gathered people is a large part of “the joy set before Him” and which enabled Him to endure the shame of the cross (Hebrews 12:2). “Descendants of Jacob glorify Him … All the families of the earth worship you” (Psalm 22:23b, 27b). “The afflicted poor eat and are satisfied…The rich ones of the earth will eat and worship” (vv. 26a, 29a). Because His death and resurrection, as William Billings penned, “burst the bonds of death,” Jesus’ community does not recognize the boundary of death itself. Jesus leads even the dead and the unborn in their worship of the Father:

All those who go down to the dust bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep his soul alive.
A seed will serve Him;
It will be told to a coming generation.
They will come and declare His righteousness
To a people who will be born, that He has done this (vv. 29b-31).

The presence of so many different kinds of worshipers in the Singing Savior’s great assembly cannot help but raise pressing questions about what — or better, whose — aesthetic governs their worship.

When the descendants of Jacob/Israel join the Savior’s song and “glorify” God and express their “awe” of Him (v. 23), what musical language do they use? When “all the ends of the earth” and “all the families of the earth” hear in the Savior’s song a remembrance of the image they were made to bear (v. 27), and thus turn to the Lord, with what musical tongue do they worship?

When the poor who seek the Lord eat alongside the rich at the Lord’s table (vv. 26,29), with whose tongue do they offer their common praise and worship? And when those who have already gone to the dust bow before the One whose death has secured their resurrection (v. 29), do they sing the same song in the same way as the people who are yet to be born but who will nonetheless themselves hear of the accomplishment of the same righteousness for them (vv. 30-31)?

Let me suggest that every group brings its own voice, but no group brings the official voice. One Voice sings above them all, and this Voice sings in all their voices, excluding none. His singular voice is distributed among a plurality of people. Just because there are so many dimensions to His own being, the multiplicity of their voices amplifies His song.

WHAT SONGS DOES JESUS SING?

Jesus sings the Hebrew songs of covenant faithfulness, giving “the Israel of God” the right, at long last, to name the name latent in the old covenant’s psalms of anticipation. Jesus is the True Vine — that is to say, He is True Israel. It is His death for sin that Israel’s and Judah’s exiles had pictured.

It is His resurrection and ascension that their homecomings had forecast. The theme “from shame to glory” is not just the story of Psalm 22. It is the story of the Psalter itself, moving as it does from Book 1’s plaintive songs of David in the wilderness (Psalms 1-41) to Book 5’s songs celebrating in advance an ultimate and final Davidic rule, that of Messiah (Psalms 107-150). “From shame to glory” is Israel’s and Judah’s career because it is Jesus’ career.

That is why on a number of occasions New Testament writers can summarize the whole of the Old Testament story as a foreshadowing of the sufferings and resurrection of Messiah (Luke 24:27,44-47; Acts 26:22-23; 1 Peter 1:10-12). In the church, Jesus sings the sweet song of salvation, the song of God’s faithfulness to His promises to bring His people home by way of His own suffering for them.

Jesus also sings folk idioms from “all the families of the earth,” purging the idolatrous and focusing the yearning for redemption that shows up wherever the imago Dei bears the kiss of common grace. From the very start, Jesus’ ministry displayed an outwardboundness that was scandalous to His own kin. He had the nations in view from start to finish — that is who He is: God’s heart for all the families of the earth.

What I believe we have seen in twenty centuries of church music is Christ calling forth His song from every culture His gospel has touched. Even when believers attempt distinctly “Christian” music, their music invariably bears the marks of their social world, and indeed would be incomprehensible without those marks. Elizabeth I could mock “Geneva jigs” precisely because many of the psalm settings emanating from Calvin’s church sounded like the dance songs for which Continental European troubadours were famous. Jesus sings God’s covenantal faithfulness and the width of His mercy in as many musical dialects as there are peoples who embrace Him.

Jesus sings with the voice of the refined, the illuminati, the cultured — “the rich,” who tend to be the sponsors of any society’s “high art.” The very Logos of God and agent of creation, Jesus Himself vastly outstrips the most elegant, the most intellectually rigorous and challenging — and the most passionately romantic — aesthetic expressions of worship imaginable.

Jesus loves Bach’s music, of this I am certain. I am equally sure, however, that he finds Bach’s (and all his aesthetic kin’s) most elevated and demanding stuff to be but nursery tunes. I even suspect that he Himself prompts the children of Jubal (see Genesis 4:21), the mad geniuses outside the believing community — the Beethovens, the Wagners, the Mahlers, the Bernsteins — to push the musical frontiers further out so the church can follow and learn new textures, tone colors, rhythms, harmonic combinations, and melodic possibilities.

Jesus sings with all the grit and earthiness, with all the directness and rhythms of the “working poor” (this is how the Greek Old Testament translates Psalm 22:26). Though His lineage was royal, Jesus’ upbringing was anything but that. He grew up in Galilee, a region with, at least by the standards of the refined Jerusalem elite, an embarrassingly high “Bubba-factor.” He was raised in an artisan’s home, and His parables depicted God’s kingdom in terms that debtors, day laborers, fishermen, and prostitutes could follow. When His disciples became leaders of the Jerusalem church, they were treated as country bumpkins (Acts 4:13). Paul, though himself a man of some upbringing (Acts 21:39; 22:3,27,28), despised the social snobbery of the relatively affluent Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

The hints the New Testament gives us of early Christians’ worship are not pretentious or ostentatious, or even artistically demanding. Musical historians, such as John S. Andrews in an article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, suggest that early Christian music developed not from classical Greek music, but from more popular forms. It was poetic koine: “He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by the angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16).

Most Christians that I know would probably think of themselves as musical “Bubbas,” of neither rarified tastes nor extraordinary ability. Know what? Jesus sings the simple songs — some of His best music is functional rather than pretty. It is enjoyed more from the inside than the outside, that is, in being done rather than in being listened to. And it points to God’s transcendence via simplicity rather than via complexity.

Jesus sings among the saints who have gone before, “the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven … and the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). His community is not limited by death, and neither is His song. The book of Revelation tells us that heaven’s current worship uses the same dynamic that we now know on earth. On the one hand, the martyrs cry out “How long, O Lord?” (Revelation 6:9-11), and on the other, they already (in my understanding) participate in “the first resurrection,” and rule and serve as priests alongside Christ during the present era of gospel victory (Revelation 20:4-6).

Some liturgies preserve the ancient prayer, “And so we join our voices … with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn: Holy, holy, holy, God of power and might …” This expression of the living connection between the church in heaven and the church on earth is entirely correct. As G.K. Chesterton acutely observes, honoring tradition is how we give the dead their voice in our community. And that is important, because their voice is a part of Jesus’ voice.

Jesus sings among the yet-to-be born, those who will receive the word themselves, make it their own, give it their own voice, and then faithfully pass it to the generation following in their wake. In the 2nd century, an anonymous Roman Christian commended Jesus to a pagan friend named Diognetus. He told Diognetus that Jesus was “from of old,” but because He is alive now and is born in our hearts, He is also “forever young.”

In point of fact, Jesus came as the harbinger of a whole new creation. In His coming as the Second Adam — as the founder of a new human race — the future has invaded the present. Accordingly, Christ’s ongoing, eschatological presence in the church is necessarily fresh, intense, and unsettlingly forward-thrusting.

Every musical groove we establish is a potential rut. Every way of worshiping is a potential object of worship. And so every generation is like the Blues Brothers. Remember the movie? Jake and Elwood’s music was rooted in a heritage (soul music), but they were on a “mission from God” to save the orphanage in which they had been raised, that is, to take care of the next generation. In the process, they broke a lot of rules. Like them, we are called to do the best we can with the musical idioms we have inherited to help the next generation hear the Savior’s song and take up their own voice in response.

IT’S ABOUT HIS SONG, NOT OURS

When seen in the light of the person of Jesus, the church’s Lead Worshiper, our squabbles over how to do it right — which group’s aesthetic will be honored, and which group’s dishonored — take on their true measure: they are pathetically small-minded.

While we try to pare His song down to a manageable repertoire, He is expanding it. While we are doing market research to decide whom we want to reach and, therefore, to whose aesthetic tastes we want to pander, the Singing Savior is distributing His magnificent voice across an increasingly wide spectrum of musical idioms. While we are dividing congregations along age lines, He is blending the songs of generations and nations and families and tribes and tongues to make sweet harmony, precisely through the differences, to the Father.

The day has come for us to mute our provincial songs, and start listening for His voice, for it is “like the sound of many waters” (Revelation 1:15), as rich and complex as the constitution of His people.

Jesus’ voice is what counts, not ours. And His is the voice of the Jew and the Gentile, the poor and the rich, those who have already had their say and those who have not yet even come into being. There is a unity and diversity in the voices of His assembly which we may not be able to hold together on our own, but which the Risen Christ, because He is literally and vibrantly present among us, can.

This article originally appeared in the RTS Reformed Quarterly, Summer 1999

Anybody who knows me knows that one of my working hypotheses is: “If you can’t make your point by quoting Bono or Dylan or C.S. Lewis — or if you can’t make your point by describing a Rouault painting, your point probably isn’t worth making.”

In downtown Tokyo there are not one but two museums given to the art of Georges Rouault, the Idemitsu Museum and the Shiodome Museum. The Idemitsu, in fact, is home to the gorgeous “Christ with Arms Raised” that graces the cover of With One Voice. So, I’ve been waiting for years to get to Japan to see firsthand my first Rouault paintings ever, and especially to admire “Christ with Arms Raised.”

You know where this is going.

Both museums, of course, were between major showings of Rouault’s works, so between the two museums there were but twelve paintings on display (which is exactly twelve more than I had ever been able to see except in art books). And naturally, “Christ with Arms Raised” will be “prominently displayed,” so we were assured, in the Idemitsu’s Rouault Retrospective which was to begin eleven days after we left Japan. Asked if there was any way we could see it anyway, we were politely rebuffed (everybody in Japan is exquisitely polite), “Sorry, it’s not even in the museum. It’s in our warehouse being prepped for the exhibition.”

But, my goodness, were the colors and the textures and the composition of the paintings we did get to see magnificent! I had no idea Rouault laid the paint on as thickly as he did. Or that his colors are really as vivid and as evocative as they are. Or that his clown faces could be as sad as they are up close. Or that his biblical landscapes could draw you in as effectively as they do.

My missionary friend Nancy Nethercott (she shows up in a later “Reason No. …”) and I talked about the attraction of Rouault’s vision for Japanese people — his sense of the way the sadness of life prompts hope for some sort of resolution from beyond, his sense of the way you can say more through less, something complex through simplicity of line and color. Maybe somebody needs to develop a series of lectures on “Georges Rouault and a Christian Apologetic for Japan.”

One of Paul’s finest moments is his finding in an unnamed pagan prophet from Crete’s past a diagnosis for which his own gospel is the antidote (compare Titus 1:12 with 2:12).

“We Cretans are (religious) liars,” confesses the prophet. “God’s grace became incarnate to teach us godliness,” counters Paul.

“We Cretans are vicious beasts” admits the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us justice,” urges Paul.

“We Cretans are lazy gluttons,” bemoans the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us self-control,” offers Paul.

I wrote all that up in more scholarly form some time ago in “Titus as Apologia: Grace for Liars, Beasts, and Gluttons” (for a copy, click the link), insights from which my friend Phil Towner adroitly worked into his truly outstanding NICNT commentary, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Eerdmans, 2006).

My main summer project has been completing a short writing project for Baker Book House: essentially fifty-plus words per verse of commentary on these three letters to Paul’s two most trusted lieutenants.

The writing comes on the heels of three lectures and some valuable interchange with University of Florida students at the Christian Study Center (headed up by Richard Horner, himself an exceedingly astute scholar of Western intellectual history) in Gainesville during this past spring semester. My lectures, How Pauline are the Pastorals … and why does it matter?, are available in mp3 format from the CSC website).
That lecture series and this summer’s writing have provided the first chance I’ve had in a while to work carefully through these last of Paul’s letters. It’s been both bracing and convicting.

This summer happens to find us in the midst of a political season. For that reason, when the writing brought me at long last to the beginning of Titus 3 and to Paul’s instructions on civic virtue there, I found myself having to linger a while.

In a word, Paul says that Christians should not only be passively obedient, say, in praying for government (1Tm 2) and in paying taxes (Rom 13), but beyond those duties we should be ready “for every good work” (Titus 3:1). He’s talking about works done in the public square, not in the Christian ghetto.

Moreover, as if to anticipate those who assume he means we should lead with indignant anger and strident denunciations of all that is wrong with the world, Paul urges us: “to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2 TNIV).

I thought those words were worth calling attention to during the summer of a presidential race, so a few days ago I posted some reflections at Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds Online community, “Paul to Titus: On Christians in the Public Square.” I’d be pleased to have friends drop in there to continue the conversation about what Paul would have us do.

But before I stop keyboarding, I also have to recommend a sobering article by David Brooks of the New York Times, “The Great Seduction: America’s Next Moral Threat Isn’t Sexual — It’s Financial” (NYT, June 10, 2008). Brooks, in turn, refers to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “A Nation in Debt: How We Killed Thrift, Enthroned Loan Sharks and Undermined American Prosperity”).

Its Puritan theology and Franklinesque ethic of prudence, opines Brooks, originally enabled the U.S. to be wealthy without being corrupted by wealth. But that legacy has given way to a culture of financial decadence, an explosion of debt, and the division of our citizenry into an “investor class” and a “lottery class.” At our peril, may I suggest, we neglect the prospect of resentment-fueled class war.

Between them, Brooks and Whitehead offer various suggestions for turning things around, e.g., tightened usury laws, raised awareness about debt, access for the poor and middle class to financial planning, re-purposed lotteries, foundation- and church-based short-term loans.

What they leave for somebody else to say is this: What’s going on around us in the collapse of the housing market and in the skyrocketing of personal debt has everything to do with what happens when we do not pay attention in the marketplace and in the public square to the basic values the gospel teaches: truth will eventually out us, and we can only deny the claims of justice and self-control so long (Titus 1:12). If we’re a city on a hill, as it was put by the One who came to teach us to deny ungodliness and worldly passions and to live soberly, justly, and piously, now is a time for shining (see Titus 2:11-12; Mt 5:14-16).

In sum of this post and of my explorations in the Pastorals over the last few months: we dare not keep our faith in the prayer-closet — and we could do worse than to heed the apostle’s considered judgment as to how he wanted his theology to be applied in the next generation.

I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot

Praise be to God for the fortitude and restraint Robinson displayed on and off the baseball field, deflecting hate with love, overcoming evil with good.

Praise be to God for Branch Rickey’s relentless pursuit of just the right man to rise to Jesus’ challenge to turn the other cheek.

Praise be to God for Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ, the book that gave Rickey the words with which to couch the challenge to Robinson.

This Thursday I’ll write in more detail for Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds community about this shining moment in the history of racial reconciliation. But I just had to put up this brief tribute today.