St Paul’s account of God’s mercy in I Timothy 1 frames much of our music this week.
We begin with the well-known ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ [432], a general hymn about God’s majesty and power, whose first line is taken from the Epistle. A vigorous Welsh tune, ‘St Denio’, built on cascading triads, and a rollicking amphibrachic metre make the long (eleven-syllable) lines ring out joyfully like a peal of bells. The Apostle’s message of God’s mercy, even to the ‘foremost’ of sinners who had formerly violenty persecuted the nascent Church, is the theme of the closing hymn, ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ [470]. God’s mercy stretches out like the sea; it is greater than any mercy known on earth; our task is to love, to have faith, to give thanks for this kindness, says our poet, Frederick Faber.
Our Sequence hymn, ‘The great Creator of the worlds’ [489], is a versification of a passage from the second-century Epistle to Diognetus, itself a paraphrase of John 3.16–17. The versification is the work of F. Bland Tucker, an Episcopal priest-poet whose many felicitous translations and versifications of, especially, early Greek and Latin hymns and other texts, grace the Hymnal. (In fact he is credited with more items in the Hymnal 1982 than anyone besides John Mason Neale, whose successor in this endeavor he might be said to be.) The music with which Fr Tucker’s text is paired is one of nine tunes written by the great English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis in 1567 for the metrical Psalter of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury during Elizabeth’s reign.
Though very much of our music is chosen for the direct correspondences of its texts with the appointed scriptures or other themes of the day or season, there is also room for more general texts of praise, devotion, or petition. The Offertory anthem sets a general text of praise from Psalm 33: ‘Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous; it is good for the just to sing praises. Praise the Lord with the harp; play to him upon the psaltery and lyre.’ The lively music, by Ludovico da Viadana, comes from the turn of the seventeenth century, when (among other styles) a new declamatory idiom that had been developing, especially in Venice, became more widely used. In contrast to the linear imitative counterpoint that reigned in the late Renaissance, this style invited groups of singers (and instrumentalists) to sing together in blocks of sound, and then in dialogue, whether within one single ensemble or among multiple ensembles. Even within a small-scale piece such as this one, the effect of overlapping and repeating phrases of rhythmic singing is infectious, embodying the very next verse of the Psalm – ‘Sing for [God] a new song’.
September 14 is actually Holy Cross Day, although the weekly celebration of the Resurrection – Sunday, the Lord’s Day – takes precedence, and we have transferred the observance of Holy Cross Day to Wednesday to allow greater attendance, including that of the St David’s Choir. Holy Cross Day – more properly, the Feast of the Exaltation (that is, the lifting up) of the Holy Cross – has its origins in a ceremonial exposition of fragments of what were believed to be the True Cross at the dedication of what is now called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 335. The observance (and relics) spread; in 569, at the Frankish queen Radegund’s convent at Poitiers, the Merovingian court poet Venantius Fortunatus wrote the great hymns ‘Vexilla regis prodeunt’ [161/162] and ‘Pange lingua gloriosi proelium’ [165/166], the latter of which, with one of the great plainsong hymn-tunes, will be sung as our Communion anthem and forms the basis of the prelude, three short pieces by twentieth-century French composer Henri Nibelle. While accounts of the Crucifixion are and never should be anything less than shocking and deeply convicting, this hymn is all the more striking for its vivid apostrophe to the cross itself.
Two hymns upon the cross by Thomas Kelly, ‘We sing the praise of him who died’ [471] and the better-known ‘The head that once was crowned with thorns’ [483], are sung congregationally. Together the two texts, each of which consists in part of lists of attributes and results of the cross, build up a picture of Christ’s work thereupon and its benefits: joy, love, life, health, hope, wealth (i.e. well-being), balm, cure, refuge; it strengthens, emboldens, sweetens and cheers; it takes away the fear of death; through it we participate in both Our Lord’s suffering and his triumph. Kelly (1769–1855), initially a minister of the Church of Ireland (the Anglican body on that island), eventually left the Church and founded his own evangelical sect, which did not long survive him.
Finally, our Offertory anthem is a setting of the great hymn of Christ’s humility and exaltation (again, literally, his lifting-up by God) from the Epistle (Philippians 2.5–11). The simple yet expressive music was written by seventeenth-century Spanish composer Juan Bautista Comes, priest and maestro de capilla at Valencia’s cathedral.
Holy Cross Day, rooted in the history and a devotional act just described, is a great thanksgiving for Christ’s victory over death through his complete self-offering and submission to death. The cross is seen on the present feast not primarily as an instrument of torture, but rather as an emblem of that victory: a royal banner or standard or scepter, or indeed a throne. The deeper history – the feast is related by its date to the ancient Hebrew feast of Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths, which among its many layers of meaning has a strongly eschatological component, as described in, e.g., Zechariah 10 and 14 – broadens its reach: Christ is lifted up in order to draw all people to himself. The lessons appointed for the Office on this feast fill in not only the historical picture, but also reinforce the themes of reconciliation, salvation, and the universal reach of God’s love and Christ’s work.
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