Category: Uncategorised

They rise, and needs will have
  My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
  The Prince of Life they slay.
    Yet cheerful He
      To suffering goes,
      That He His foes
    From thence might free.

The whole hymn grates with irony. They save a murderer, and take the life of the Prince of Life. The word ‘cheerful’ seems so out of place when describing how someone undergoes suffering, and not for his friends but for his foes.

Holy Week is about an upside down world, where nothing is as we think it should be. Hosanna becomes Crucify, and in a holy mystery lovelessness becomes loved, then lovely. How that happens, only God knows!

Prayer: Lord, we do not ask to understand a love that willingly suffers for the sin of humanity. Enough that your love should be known by us, and made known to others, in all its incomprehensible mercy and grace. Amen.

The image is a tapestry I designed as a gift to a friend more than 10 years ago. It is based on the an cient image of the Lamb of God who conquers through the sacrifice of love.

"Behold the Lamb of God, who carries away the sin of the world…the Lamb in the midst of the throne…" 

 

Why, what hath my Lord done?
  What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
  He gave the blind their sight.
    Sweet injuries!
      Yet they at these
      Themselves displease,
    And 'gainst him rise.

The rage and spite are inexplicable. Far from causing injury, the Lord brings healing. But compassion, welcome, kindness, and indiscriminate goodness are a threat, and unconditioned love is a strange, subversive presence for the status quo. The crowd, and the powers of Rome and Jerusalem do what power does when seriously threatened – eliminate the threat using lethal force.

To call goodness evil, and see in ubiquitous kindness a social threat, betrays the deep-seated toxins of societies which find ways to justify lovelessness. To people and cultures like them then, and us now, the Crucified Saviour came to transform, lovelessness to redeemed loveliness. 

Prayer: Lord we live in a world rediscovering the menace of rage and spite. By your Spirit, may your love unknown be made known, spreading abroad in our hearts, and overflowing in peace, hope and love across our fractured and fractious world. Amen.

Photo of a corner of the study, with the XII Station of the Cross, a studio model by Alexander Stoddart, a personal gift from the sculptor. It seemed the right place alongside Barth's massive work on the doctrine of reconciliation.

Sometimes they strew His way,
  And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
   Hosannas to their King.
    Then 'Crucify!'
      Is all their breath,
      And for His death
    They thirst and cry.

In such a short time, ‘Hosanna’ translated to ‘Crucify’. In the volatile alchemy of crowd excitement, praise and celebration turn to rejection and menace. Voices breathless with laughter and shouted gladness, are now breathlessly shouting for violent death. The crowds thirst and cry; later it will be the One who came from ‘his blest throne’ who will thirst, and cry.  They won’t save him, and he won’t save himself.

Prayer: Lord, forgive us when our Hosannas ring hollow, our praise is muted, and our hearts angry. Transform what is loveless in us, by your Love for us. Amen

The photo is the work of my friend Graeme Clark, who is a gifted photographer and very generous with his skills and time. The image is a detail on the top of the gate to the cloisters of Paisley Abbey. 

He came from his blest throne
  Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
  The longed-for Christ would know.
    But O, my Friend,
      My Friend indeed,
      Who at my need
    His life did spend!

He came to his own people and they didn’t recognise him. How can hearts be so estranged that God walks amongst us as a stranger?  He comes in love and mercy, as our Friend, but we recognise neither Him nor our own need. Holy Week is a time when we bring all that estranges us from God, to the Friend who came to bestow salvation by self-expending love.

Prayer: Lord we are sorry for the sins that estrange, and our failure to recognise you as our Friend indeed. Have mercy on us. Amen

Photo taken September 17, 2023, on South Anderson Drive, Aberdeen, while awaiting the funeral cortege of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The two pigeons add their own poignant note to a day which I found deeply moving. The cruciform image against a blue sky resonates, for me  at least, with Crossman's words in the first two lines. 

This Holy Week we will dwell in the verses of the hymn, My Song is Love Unknown, written by Samuel Crossman in 1664. It has seven verses, one for each day. TFTD will have a verse, a brief meditation, and a short prayer of response. On the flyleaf of the book in which it was first published, the author quoted the words of Paul: “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

My song is love unknown,
  My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
  That they might lovely be.
    O who am I,
      That for my sake
      My Lord should take
    Frail flesh and die?

Love beyond our knowing, love made so personal ‘to me’, even me; love shown to the loveless, that we might lovely be. Holy Week begins with amazed wonder and a declaration of the Saviour’s love. The hymn begins as love speaks its truth four times with gentle insistence. Then in four brief lines, the long drawn out self-questioning of one who is both ashamed and amazed. The question “Who am I?” is to be asked, with head bowed in breathless awe – love to the loveless shown…frail flesh…for my sake. 

Prayer: Lord and Saviour, this week we turn in both repentance and joy towards the love that wins the loveless and makes them lovely, because loved. Amen

The photo is my own, and was taken on Aberdeen beach following a storm that exposed the old breakwaters. From a particular angle the the cross and heart shape coincided. And yes, I did get my feet wet taking the photo!

1 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
as all the tribes 'Hosanna!' cry:
Thine humble beast pursues his road,
With palms and scattered garments strowed.

2 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
in lowly pomp ride on to die:
O Christ, thy triumph now begin
O'er captive death, and conquered sin!

3 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The winged squadrons of the sky
Look down with sad and wondering eyes
To see the approaching sacrifice.

4 Ride on, ride on in majesty,
The last and fiercest strife is nigh:
The Father, on his sapphire throne,
Expects his own anointed Son.

5 Ride on, ride on in majesty,
In lowly pomp ride on to die:
Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, your power and reign!

H. H. Milman, 1821

Right! Let's start with some of the well-intentioned 'improvements' of various hymn book editors.

Ride on, ride on in majesty
as all the crowds 'Hosanna!' cry:
through waving branches slowly ride,
O Saviour, to be crucified.

Those last two lines of the first verse are a complete rewrite! In line two, I guess modern sensitivities will prefer the amorphous 'crowds' to the biblical term for diversity, 'tribes'. In English, 'tribes' and tribalism carry negative baggage, a veiled condescending echo of patronising colonialism. But, yes, crowds works just as well as tribes, and is less problematic.

But then the donkey disappears! Now granted Milman's line 3 about the ' humble beast' is hardly poetic genius, but it does evoke the narrative of the Gospel of Matthew on which the hymn is based. It also plays into the irony and paradox of the entire hymn, about a humble and humiliated Messiah submitting to the will of God.

The donkey is not a war horse, that's the point! And in the next verse, 'lowly pomp', which the hymn re-writers leave unchanged, has the intended rhetorical force of an oxymoron which carried enough Christological meaning to be repeated in the last verse.

I think Milman knew perfectly well what he was doing when he wrote "Thine humble beast pursues his road" – apart from anything else, Jesus riding a donkey is surrounded by those who have no such humility, and soon will show they also lack the humane qualities of a donkey bearing the Saviour's weight. The palms and scattered garments testify to excitement, not loyalty, and suggest more a simmering riot than a good natured day out for the family! The whole hymn advances to the slow beat of foreboding, fate and finality, the steady plod of the donkey towards its rider's Passion. 

One other change worth noting is in verse three line 2.

Ride on, ride on in majesty
the angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.

I'm sorry, but "The angel armies of the sky" has nothing like the mystical and metaphysical force of "The winged squadrons of the sky…"! Isaiah chapter six should be enough for any interfering hymn-book editor to know why Milman used such a circumlocution for the simpler word 'angels'. This is about God's messengers rendered helpless to intervene, restrained by God! Remember Milman was writing nearly a century before winged flight became a reality for human beings. This is divine power and enforcement intentionally constrained by divine purpose.

There are times when hymns are genuinely improved by light editing. But the removal of metaphors, biblical allusion and symbolic resonance from a fairly straightforward hymn, simply diminishes its power. Allowed to retain the original, albeit slightly odd language, a hymn like this can force us to think outside the limits of our cultural vocabulary. Our culture, both in church and outside it, seems impatient with, and perhaps even resistant to, religious language expressing transcendence, mystery and that which trips us up precisely because it makes us think.

As to the hymn itself, I think it's a tour de force, pulling us into a story as it unfolds, and making us watch to the end, an end we already know but need to hear again, and again. That final verse is what Amos Wilder called theopoetics, theology expressed through poetic imagination in order to fly below the radar of prosaic reason.

"Lowly pomp" refers to the startling reversal of values taking place on that Palm Sunday parade. Jesus comes as a King to reign, from the cross. The Father throned in sapphire expects the return of his Son, surrendered to death, and raised from death. The Crucified reigns in power, but it is the power of atoning love, the chosen road of self-giving sacrifice winding up to Calvary, the final obedience to the Father of "He who knew no sin being made sin that we might become the righteousness of God." 

Ride on, ride on in majesty! That line is at the start of each verse, laden with irony, laced with defiance. The majesty of the cross, the meekness of the crucified, the humble beast pursuing its road, the adulation of the crowds, the temporary grounding of the 'winged squadrons', the Father throned in the sapphire light of holy love; all culminate in triumph, which is no surprise since it was already anticipated in verse two:

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
in lowly pomp ride on to die:
O Christ, thy triumph now begin
O'er captive death, and conquered sin!

The question "What Would Jesus Do?", shortened to WWJD as a concession to our 21st Century surrender to the acronym, goes back to the novel In His Steps, by Charles Sheldon. The novel began as stories Sheldon wrote for his Sunday Evening Services, they were then published in serial form, and finally as a novel in 1897. The book was a bestseller for over 60 years, selling around 8 million copies.

There's something attractive about such a simple approach to Christian discipleship. But to ask ourselves 'what would Jesus do', is at best an interesting experiment. To have any informed view of what Jesus would do in any given situation you need to know the Gospels, deeply, intimately and in a way that makes us familiar with the habits of speech and behaviour of Jesus, as remembered by those who wrote our Gospels.

That's just for starters. Many of the classic devotional writers speak of Christians dwelling in Christ, and Christ dwelling in us. Paul's frequent appeals and encouragements are a call to live within the sphere of the risen Christ, to breathe the atmosphere of the resurrection, to know the reality and daily experience of Christ dwelling in us, and we in him. In John's Gospel the older word 'abide', is the Johannine equivalent of Christ remaining in, living within, abiding with Jesus' followers. Hence Jesus' command, 'Abide in me as I in you.' 

So the question 'what would Jesus do' was never intended to be a subjective playing of spiritual hunches, even less a sentimental picture of Jesus not always rooted in the Jesus of the Gospels. To know the mind of Christ, another of Paul's phrases, is a process of discernment, and as nearly always, Paul's words are to a Christian community. What would Jesus do is a question we ask each other, as together we try to find the Jesus way to act, speak, behave and live out our lives as the living evidence of what Jesus did, and was known to do.

Then there's the teaching of Jesus. It may be that the far more searching question is "What did Jesus say?" The teaching of Jesus is far too easily cherry-picked, or toned down, or is one of the last places we turn to for wisdom about what to do. Forgiving times without number, which is what 70x 7 means both rhetorically and literally; turning the other cheek goes against every instinct of self respect and self-preservation; not worrying about clothes, money, food – goodness these are our top anxiety drivers in our consumer driven and market obsessed ways of organising human community. 

Then there's the call to take up a cross, to expect and accept persecution, to live with Matthew 25 as a manifesto of how to treat the hungry and thirsty, the homeless and the stranger, the prisoner and all the other folk for whom life is a struggle, an endless loneliness, a journey into fear without seeing an exit. What would Jesus do? Read the Gospels and learn. What did Jesus say? Read the Gospels, again, and again. "Forasmuch as you did it for the least of these…you did it for me." 

Add to all of this another question: "What did Jesus feel?" Our feelings often reveal our emotional intelligence. Christian faith and life is deeply rooted in our emotions, feelings, what older writers called the religious affections. Jesus looked on the crowd and had compassion. Jesus was angry at their hardness of heart. Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus said, "It is I, be not afraid'. And to all who would follow him he said "Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden", meaning folk who have had enough, who can't do this any-more, who are emotionally exhausted and are physically out of energy.

The clue to 'What would Jesus do' is very often discovered in Jesus' inner reaction to people and the situations they find themselves in: the weeping woman at his feet, a Samaritan woman miniding her own business till a Jewish teacher spoke to her, a Jewish Rabbi so nervous about being seen talking with Jesus that he came to see him at night, a Roman Centurion broken hearted about a dying servant. And as a more detailed example, an anti-social outcast living in a cemetery, self-harming and lonelier than a human being could bear, and for the first time since who knows when, he was asked for his name. It takes deep emotional intelligence, the habit of compassion, and the desire to understand, to ask such a man such a question.

So, "What would Jesus do?" It started as the serial stories of a social Gospel activist minister in small town 1897 America. Somehow it caught on and keeps coming back, on T-shirts, car windows and bumpers, subway posters (not so much now). It was intended to clarify and make more straightforward the process of discerning what God's will might be for any of us in the more difficult situations. 

But for it to have the kind of impact that actually does clarify and concentrate the demands of following Jesus 'in his steps', the question pushes much more deeply into who we are as Christians, our identity as disciples.

How familiar am I with the Jesus of the Gospels so that I at least have a well read and well thumbed handbook of what Jesus actually did as I consider, What would Jesus do, here, and now?

The question "What would Jesus do?" presupposes we are serious about following Jesus and have committed our life to him. To be in Christ, and to know Christ in us, is the essential spiritual context out of which comes the call and the urgency of obedience in doing what Jesus does. 

What did Jesus teach? That's the biggest clue to what Jesus would do! Most of the time, and in most of our life situations, Jesus has already left guidance in the manifesto of the Kingdom of God. The written memories of those first followers, from the stories to the parables, the Sermon on the Mount to the Farewell Discourse, his actions and his explanations, these already push us towards the answer to our puzzlement about what Jesus would do. Read, mark and learn.

What did Jesus feel and think also takes us deeper into the call to discernment. Being like Jesus in our responses to people grows out of the Christ in us and we in him experience. And to learn the mind of Christ there is the need to dwell in prayer, in the Gospels, and in a community of folk equally in love with Jesus and asking about what obedience looks like for us today.

I still think it's a helpful question, "What would Jesus do?" But under-writing such a question are fundamentals of Christian discipleship. To dwell in the Gospels, to abide in Christ as he abides in us, to hear and do the teaching of Jesus, to seek the deepening of our responses of heart and mind to people and situations in the light of Jesus' ways of being and doing. 

What would Jesus do? My answer to that question, day by day, presupposes a loving trust in Jesus, the urgent and creative  experience of God's love shed abroad in my heart, a desire to abide in the One who abides in me, and a deepening of understanding, compassion and commitment in the face of all those other peoplke who move in and out of my life. 

 

Monday

Isaiah 51.1-2 “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord:
Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn; look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, who gave you birth. When I called him he was only one man, and I blessed him and made him many.”

Time and time again Isaiah tells his people to listen, just listen. Shut up for a minute and listen! Instead of complaining about how things are now, think back, remember what God has already done, who God has shown himself to be. When God makes a promise God keeps it, and he has promised blessing, righteousness and shalom.

Tuesday

Isaiah 51.1-2 “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord:
Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn; look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, who gave you birth. When I called him he was only one man, and I blessed him and made him many.”

Same verses as yesterday, but listen – again! Those who live in Aberdeen know about granite, and the huge historic quarry at Rubislaw which provided rock for use all over the world. Isaiah is telling his people, and us, we are cut from ancient granite! The Psalmist knew about God the Rock, and the rock solid dependability of God and his promises. Listen…look…and trust. God’s love endures forever; likewise his promises.

 Wednesday

Isaiah 51.3 “The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing.”

Comfort is Isaiah’s speciality. His is the audible reassuring voice of God to people who are struggling with faith, life, and with themselves. God looks with compassion on us at those times when we are familiar with ruin, loss, and the sadness that comes from being and feeling alone. The Psalmist also trusted God in the dark, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Listen. Those promises again! Gladness, thanksgiving and singing are not extinct – they will come again.

Thursday

Isaiah 51.4 “Listen to me, my people, hear me my nation: The law will go out from me, my justice will become a light to the nations.”

Listen. Pay attention. Get it into your head. In a broken and dangerous world, God’s justice will become a light to the nations. These are words spoken in a time of empires, and the seeming unbreakable strangle-hold of political power over people’s lives. Comfort is more than emotional support; it is promised help from a credible Helper. However dark our world is growing, (and there are deep shadows across many places), God’s laws of righteousness and justice are not so easily ignored. Faith and hope are rooted in the truth of who God is, Sovereign, Creator, and Redeemer.

Friday

Isaiah 58.5. “My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way. And my arm will bring justice to the nations.”

Reassurance has to be more than promises that keep receding into a distant future. Isaiah was aware of God moving in the contemporary history of his people. Looking on our own fractured and fractious world, his words come down the centuries to us as a reminder that for people of faith, God is here, now, and active. Justice includes peace, compassion, the harmony of peoples, that catch-all word of God’s peaceful benediction, shalom. Pray for it. Work for it. The Lord says, “My salvation is on the way.”

Saturday

Isaiah 51.5b “The islands will look to me and wait in hope for my arm.”

For a land loving people like Israel, the islands were far away. But not so far that God is out of sight or out of mind. The furthest reaches of God’s creation look and wait in hope. So should we. Hope is a deeply human longing for the coming of that which is on the side of life. Such hopeful waiting gives energy and purpose to the life we live. We are living through a time of hope recession, a growing sense of anxiety is felt about the way the world is. Isaiah’s words are to people feeling exactly the same. 

Sunday

Isaiah 51.6 “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath; the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail.”

Isaiah often contrasts the shortness of human life with the enduring and steadfast love of God. Life is transient, passes quickly, and is gone; God is eternal, the sustaining Creator, and the One whose salvation lasts forever. And it is this God who calls us to hope and trust in his promises because, his “righteousness will never fail.”

A Prayer for the Week: Eternal God, we look to you, the Rock from which we were hewn. In a changing and worrying world, lift up our hearts to the One who is the renewable energy of hope, hold us firmly as we trust in your promises, and raise our eyes to see that, beyond our limited horizons, your righteousness draws near speedily and your salvation in on the way. In the name of Christ the Redeemer, Amen