Holy Week at Southwark Address 4: Crucified by the Crowd

There’s a word that St John might have liked in connection with his passion narrative. It’s ochlocracy, mob rule, the sway of a crowd. More than any other gospel, John’s underlines the role of the throng in deciding the fate of Jesus. They plead, they shout, they threaten, they argue, they mock, they sneer. And they kill, short only of hammering in the nails and pressing down the thorns. It is the crowd that secures Jesus’ arrest, screams for Jesus’ crucifixion, plays into Pilate’s fear of the emperor’s displeasure, convinces itself that its real king is Caesar and not God, taunts the Son of God and clamours for the release of a murderer. The turbulent atmosphere, electric with pent-up rage acts as a foil for the majestic figure of Jesus as he moves through the story towards his death.  

Listen to some of their lines, so memorably set to music in the fierce crowd scenes of Bach’s St John Passion. To Pilate’s question, “Shall I release for you the King of the Jews? they cry “Not this man but Barabbas!” – the robber, the murderer, the bandit. To his Ecce homo, “Behold the man!” they clamour “Crucify him! Crucify him!”. When Pilate tries to reason with them, they answer, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die because he made himself the Son of God”. When he tries vainly to let this innocent man go free they ambush him: “If you release this man you are no friend of Caesar. Everyone who claims to be king sets himself against the emperor”. Pilate presents Jesus to them a second time. No longer “Behold the man” but now “Behold your king”. And they cry: “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”. “Shall I crucify your king?” he asks. To which they reply, in the ultimate blasphemy for a people who since their wilderness days had called on Adonai as the Lord. “We have no king but Caesar!” 

The power of the crowd is the engine that drives much of the narrative along. The crowd is a major player in St John’s passion story, as essential indeed as the chorus in a Greek play. But whereas in Greek tragedy the chorus is there to comment on the action, interpret what is happening, suggest how the audience might respond, in the Fourth Gospel it is on the stage in its own right as a relentlessly hostile character. In the crisis of the passion I spoke about yesterday, John depicts the mob as the implacable enemy of the truth Jesus has come to bear witness to. They swallow all the falsehoods fed them by their corrupt leaders whether religious or political. Not once is there a glimmer of sympathy for Jesus in his plight, any hint that there might be more than one side to this drama they are instrumental in seeing played out to its bloody outcome. Leaders with no self-doubt should always worry us. When a crowd is like that, we should be deeply afraid.

No doubt there were good people in the throng who were also watching to see what would become of Jesus. We know that his mother and her sister were there, with Mary Magdalene and the disciple whom Jesus loved. Maybe Nicodemus who first came to see Jesus by night and who would bring spices to anoint his body, and Joseph of Arimathea the secret disciple who was afraid, who would bury Jesus and be the last person in this life to honour his sacred body. But if they were there that Friday afternoon, they remained hidden in the crowd, afraid to show their faces to a mob baying for death. Who can blame them? Would we have had the courage to behave any differently, for all that we had also been there on Palm Sunday to wave our palm branches and shout hosanna to the coming king? 

The religious authorities know how to work a crowd. They play on its fickle emotions like a musical instrument. You can hear the hatred behind every refrain. Pilate, instead of restraining the mob simply gives into it out of fear, and that has the effect of escalating the violence. But what is it about the power that the crowd finds it has? Why is its hold over individuals so strong?

This was a theme that fascinated the 19^th century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. He identified the frightening ease with which people lose touch with themselves, lose themselves in the pack and start behaving in ways that are unpredictable, irrational or even evil.  He wrote that “one can only say of people en masse that they know not what they do… A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power”. He never tired of pointing out that it takes huge courage for someone to emerge from the hiding place the crowd provides and become an individual making decisions on the basis of conscience and belief. It took great courage for individuals in Nazi Germany like Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stand for truth and conscience against the lies of the mob. I guess every atrocity in history has only been able to happen because of good people who stood by and watched the crowd and did nothing, or people who at any other time could never have imagined themselves doing harm to their neighbours and friends. Such is the coersive force of the crowd. We’ve seen it played out in our own day in the rise of populism across the world, in the bullying that is the new normal on social media, in the upsurge of nationalisms that wouldexclude the immigrant and asylum seeker and the stranger in our midst. 

Where does the cross belong in this landscape?

I want to go back to that notorious saying of Caiaphas I’ve already quoted a couple of times: “It is expedient that one man should die for the people so that the whole nation may not perish”. We’ve seen how the politics of expediency leads quickly into a politics of negligence which in turn gives birth to a politics of cruelty. What was never the conscious intention to begin with simply “happens” because of the dynamic of events and of participants in them. In particular, the need for the crowd to find someone to blame for the disturbance that threatens its safety and stability, the disaster that overtakes a society and risks destroying it. First century Judaea was part of a particularly febrile Roman province, that of Syria. We know that it was unstable, fragile, prone to messianic eruptions of violence and rebellion, yet always overshadowed by the imperial power that at any moment could sweep in and destroy it, as happened at the hands of Titus in the generation after Jesus when Jerusalem was overrun and the temple destroyed and what Caiaphas had most feared came to pass, and the nation perished.

Jesus sees through these fears that are driving Caiaphas and Pilate and the crowd. His is a kingdom not from this world, whose values are based on the truth that he has come into the world to bear witness to. He is no more interested than Pilate in the advent of some heroic deliverer who will redeem the people and set them free. He does not believe in this for a moment. For all the hosannas of Palm Sunday, his is not a messianic kingdom, for the truth he speaks about is not like that. And precisely because he will not base his witness on the vain hopes and false assumptions of the people, precisely because he will not accept and own the projected expectations they have of him, he becomes progressively isolated from them. And because nothing so fuels hatred as disappointed hope (which is one way of reading the story of Judas the betrayer), they turn on him. He must be driven out, banished, and must symbolically carry with him all the frustrated longings, the pent-up violence, the false ambitions he has been carrying all this time. It is not only expedient that he should die. It will be cathartic, cleansing, clarifying. So they shout “Away with him! Crucify!”

None of this happens consciously. Crowds have a mind of their own, but they often aren’t aware of why they behave as they do. Yet this kind of behaviour is familiar to all of us. The “othering” of people because they are female, or transgender, or black, or Jewish, or Moslem, or disabled, or gay; the subtle, then more overt ways in which they are separated from the group, marginalised, excluded from favour or full participation, even persecuted. My mother’s Jewish family were victims of the holocaust in Nazi Germany. They knew what it was to be blamed for the collective ills of a society, punished for it, banished either to another country (the fortunate ones like my mother) or to the death camps. But even in the school playground this dynamic can be acted out as many of us can remember; even in the workplace or local church or our own home. It may be in microcosm. But it is painful because it is a kind of crucifixion. The memories never go away and healing can take a lifetime.

The French philosopher René Girard has written about violence in religion. This is an aspect of the “dark” religion I spoke about on Monday, the shadow in which destructive forces can lurk. We are familiar with what happens when a crowd that is fuelled by religious passion decides to turn on some innocent victim. Girard’s image is that of the scapegoat, the innocent animal that in the Levitical code of the Hebrew Bible symbolically took the sins of the people upon it and was driven out into the wilderness to die. You may recall the bleak painting of this scene by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt. This ritual was prescribed on the Jewish Day of Atonement as an act of cleansing and purification. It’s a key theme of the passion, Jesus being driven out of Jerusalem to be crucified at Golgotha among the unwanted human detritus of every city – its bandits and abusers and murderers, crucified on that “green hill far away / without a city wall” as the hymn says, far enough away for eyes to be safely averted lest the sight of shed blood pollute a civilised society. 

It’s one of those “but fors” of history. But for the crowd that is so large a character in the passion story, there would not have been a crucifixion, for there might not have been a critical mass of violence and hatred. The paradox for us in Holy Week is that this “but for” means everything. For in Jesus’ casting out and ignominious death we see nothing less than redemption. Glory is how St John speaks of it, this Place of a Skull that turns out to be precisely where Jesus accomplishes his work of self-giving love and is enthroned as Lord and King. Christian theology speaks of the atoning sacrifice once for all, the Lamb of God who “takes away” – key words in the light of what I’ve been saying – who takes away the sins of the world and whose precious memory is invoked at every eucharist of his broken body and shed blood when we sing Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Have mercy indeed: on this world that is so addicted to violence, on us who know the violence that lurks in our own hearts. Have mercy on our broken humanity, and grant us peace while there is still time to learn to be God’s people once again, to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

There are two consequences I want to draw out before I conclude. The first issue for any of us who covet spiritual intelligence is how we are going to emerge from the crowd – whatever crowds we populate - and free ourselves from the unconscious forces that control us or threaten to, so that we can become truly human again, the individual men and women God meant us to be. This is one gift of the cross, one dimension of what it means to be redeemed, because the man who was crucified, whose life of truth and love has led to him to hang there for us, has come, he said, that “we may have life and have it in all its abundance”. The passion of Jesus is to remake us in the image of God that he himself embodies. To achieve what’s known as individuation, becoming the unique individual human being we were meant to be should be the lifelong goal of our human journey. It means discovering what it is  to be our best and truest and most authentic selves. The cross and resurrection will be at the heart of this transformation that enables us to follow Jesus in living cross-and-resurrection-shaped lives.

The second consequence is about our common life. We’ve seen how dangerous, destructive, even demonic, the crowd can be, how it can create innocent victims and then turn on them in vengefulness and hatred. What could it mean for the crowd to be redeemed so that it becomes not only a safe place but also a joyful one where people can flourish and find their truest selves? It may be fanciful to speak about the church as a redeemed mob, but as the people of God, his new humanity, isn’t that what it’s meant to be? 

Earlier in the Gospel Jesus has said, “If I am lifted up, I shall draw all humanity to myself.” In being drawn closer to him, we are drawn closer to one another as a community and  in relationships of grace and truth and love. This crowd of humanity is making the journey from the malign to the benign, from self-serving to self-giving, from cruelty to kindness. In John’s Gospel this society of friendship is born in little ways. It is found in the upper room where it learns to how to  love to  wash feet and to serve. It’s found again gathered round the cross, the mother and the beloved friend who are bequeathed to each other and who will care for each other once Jesus has gone.

This is the power of love that changes crowds, changes each of us, changes everything. In Holy Week we gather in this sacred space that exists for the coming together of God’s people. Here we tell the story of God’s great acts that make us the first fruits of a new humanity. I love to think that a crowd intent on crucifixion can become a crowd acclaiming a resurrection. In the light of this transformation, can we, the church, begin to grasp how the power of the crowd could be turned to good and noble ends in the service of God? “See how these Christians love one another!” We  are never more truly ourselves than when we offer ourselves to the crucified and risen Lord, this King whose reign of truth and love we gladly make our own.

John 19.13-16

Holy Week in Hymns 8 (Good Friday): "O sacred head"

Earlier in the passion story, St Luke tells us that when Jesus had been crucified, “the people stood by, watching”. The leaders “scoffed” and the soldiers “mocked”, but the people just “watched”. I wonder what Luke intends us to see in this crowd of onlookers. Some of them will have shouted Hosanna! on Palm Sunday and others Crucify! a few hours earlier. And no doubt there will have been people who cried both with the same conviction. Crowds are notoriously wayward. Never trust them.

But what if there were those, possibly only a few, who “watched” for a different reason, who wondered why this innocent man was being strung up on a cross, what crime he had committed. What if among the crowd were those who had followed him, who loved him, who were devoted to him? What would they read in the features of the agonised, pain-bearing, crucified Christ at the Place of the Skull? And the criminals being executed on either side of Jesus when there was nothing left to do but gaze around and think their own thoughts: what did they see in this man who shared the final hours of their lives on that green hill?

Our next Good Friday hymn imagines us on that hill of Calvary and asks us the same question: what do we see? O Sacred Head is one the most famous of all the passion hymns. The version we know is a translation of a German hymn that itself draws on a medieval Latin text. Paul Gerhardt, the German author, was a seventeenth century hymn writer, probably the greatest in the Lutheran tradition apart from Martin Luther himself. So well known was the tune that it simply went by the name of the “Passion Chorale”. Many of us learned it not through singing it in church but by hearing Bach’s St Matthew Passion where it features no fewer than five times. 

Gerhardt was famed for the intense devotion of his hymns and the vividness with which they made Christian experience real and alive to the worshipper. If ever congregations learned theology through hymn-singing, it was as true of Reformation Germany as it was of eighteenth century Methodism. And the skill of this hymn is to get us to see what is in front of us as we come to the cross on this holy day. Like There is a green hill, the Passion Chorale doesn’t speculate about the crucifixion. It isn’t interested in metaphysical questions about how God could die, and how this death makes a difference in the cosmic scheme of things. It is concerned simply with faith, trust, gratitude and adoration. Indeed, of all the hymns we sing at this season, this is the most personal and direct. There is a burning, passionate intimacy in Gerhardt’s words. There are only two people who matter: the believer, and the crucified Lord.

Like the people in Luke’s account, Gerhardt watches. But this is more than just looking. This is gazing with a contemplative eye that is fully present to everything that the crucifixion means. He takes it all in and meditates on it: the crown of thorns, the bleeding head, the pallid hue as the colour drains from his features as death draws near. If you have ever waited by the bedside of someone who is dying, you will recognise the language. But this is more than the brilliant depiction of how a life subsides into nothing. In his devotion, the poet sees into what is of eternal importance here. Yet angel hosts adore thee, and tremble as they gaze ­just like this poet, this follower, this lover does.

The middle stanza develops this image of the dying Jesus. Like Grünewald’s Crucifixion on the Issenheim altarpiece at Colmar, or Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ you are not spared the detail. Nor should you be, says the poet. Thy comeliness and vigour is withered up and gone, and in thy wasted figure I see death drawing on. Because of the immensity of this death, because of the love it demonstrates, the least we can do on Good Friday is to gaze on the Saving Victim for a while, learn to love and serve him in his disfiguring, unlovely dying as well as in the beauty we remember.

Here at last is Isaiah’s suffering servant for all to see. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him” says the prophet; there was “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom others hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him of no account”. Except we did; we do; we always shall. O agony and dying! O love to sinners free! Was ever love like this? In his very disfigurement, says the hymn, we can see the form and the majesty of God, and through them, the extent of love poured out to bring us back to ourselves, to remake us as new people, to reawaken us to a vision of life as his followers and friends, and who we could be in the service of this Jesus whom we resolve to love and serve till our lives’ end.

The last verse is a prayer. In this thy bitter passion, good Shepherd, think of me with thy most sweet compassion, unworthy though I be. In the passage from St Luke that we read just now, we hear about the man who made just such a plea to the crucified Jesus. The two criminals on either side of him stand for the two ways with in which we see him. One is to deride him, taunt him or (what comes to the same thing), ignore him, turn our face away. The other is to find ourselves strangely drawn to him.

We may not know why he attracts us so, but we know that only in him shall we find the resolution of all that is conflicted and chaotic in our lives. Listen to the voice of the criminal: “we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds. But this man has done nothing wrong.” And then we imagine him turning to Jesus and looking at him – if such a movement is possible in the terrible pain of crucifixion - and pleading: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom”. And he replies in words generations of believers have treasured down the ages, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”.

This is the music I hear in this last verse of Paul Gerhardt’s wonderful hymn. Beneath thy cross abiding, for ever would I rest, in thy dear love confiding, and with thy presence blest. The place Jesus welcomes the penitent thief to is Paradise, that is, a garden. It is where the story of humankind began, and it is where it begins again, in the garden where his body is laid, and where the risen Lord will greet another penitent early on Easter Day, and call her by her name.

Those rhyming words at the end of the hymn – abiding, confiding, rest, blest – yes, I know they are in the English translation, but they sum up so well the sense of trustful resolution and fulfilment that Good Friday and Easter Eve are all about. When the ordeals of this dreadful day are over, the darkness begins to lighten a little. Jesus breathes his last, a peaceful goodnight prayer, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”. In the restfulness and peace with which this hymn closes, we know that something has shifted. It will soon be the time when earth’s morning breaks and shadows flee away.

Wakefield Cathedral, Good Friday 2017
Luke 23.39-43

********

O sacred head, surrounded
  By crown of piercing thorn!
O bleeding head, so wounded,
  So shamed and put to scorn!
Death's pallid hue comes o'er thee,
  The glow of life decays;
Yet angel-hosts adore thee,
  And tremble as they gaze.

Thy comeliness and vigour
  Is withered up and gone,
And in thy wasted figure
  I see death drawing on.
O agony and dying!
  O love to sinners free!
Jesu, all grace supplying,
  Turn thou thy face on me.

In this thy bitter passion,
  Good Shepherd, think of me
With thy most sweet compassion,
  Unworthy though I be:
Beneath thy cross abiding
  For ever would I rest,
In thy dear love confiding,
  And with thy presence blest.

Paul Gerhardt 1607-76 (translated H W Baker 1821-1877)                        
From a 14^th century Latin hymn                 

 

Bach's St John Passion: a short introduction

Does the St John Passion need any introduction?  Isn’t it one of those universal works of art that speak for themselves?

Let me speak personally for a moment.  The St John Passion was the first choral work I sang as a schoolboy in the early 1960s.  Singing the treble line gave me a lifelong love of Bach’s music.  More than that, it sowed the seeds of religious faith.  I look back on that spring half a century ago as a life-changing time that defined the course of my entire life.  What I have since come to appreciate is that in the long history of biblical interpretation, Bach is one of the great commentators on the Bible.  His music is art, not analysis, poetry rather than prose.  Yet the insights of his sacred music make him a theologian of the first order.  Albert Schweitzer, scholar both of Bach and Bible, said that ‘if we have once absorbed a biblical verse in Bach’s setting of it, we can never again conceive it in any other rhythm’.

To appreciate any of Bach’s religious works – cantatas, motets, masses, passions - we need to understand their libretti.  In Bach, the relationship between text and music is as inextricable as it is in Schubert’s Lieder or Wagner’s music dramas.  In the case of Bach’s two surviving Passions, it is clear that Bach had carefully studied the gospel accounts of the crucifixion and reflected their distinctive insights in his music.  The difference between the St John Passion and St Matthew is not principally Bach’s musical and artistic growth as a composer, as if the St John were merely a sketch for the later, larger and greater St Matthew: for only three years separate the two works.  No, the difference lies primarily in the kind of texts Bach was engaging with.  The passion accounts of St John and St Matthew are entirely different both as literature and as theology and spirituality.  So they naturally drew out of a composer finely attuned to the sensitivities of texts settings that are equally different and true to their unique sources. 

While both passions were written for the same liturgical context, they do evoke a different aesthetic and religious response.  St Matthew, focusing on the lonely agonised suffering of Jesus paints a tragic figure to whom we respond with a sense of keen sadness; we feel the tears in things, as Virgil put it.  His narrative with its changes of scene and pace allows for frequent pauses for reflection, and Bach takes full advantage of them in the chorales and arias.  St John, however, wants us to see in the cross the victorious consummation of divine love; his sufferer, while humiliated, is always majestic and noble, and this quality suffuses Bach’s setting throughout.  The narrative is faster and more relentless than Matthew’s with fewer opportunities for meditation – so there are only eight true arias; but on the other hand there is more scope in John for exploiting the dramatic possibilities of dialogue and the tension between the individual protagonists and the ever present malevolent crowd.  (We should however acknowledge that in two respects Bach filled out John’s narrative with episodes from St Matthew: the repentance of Peter after denying Jesus, and the rending of the temple veil and the earthquake after the crucifixion.  It is interesting that both of these Matthew episodes segue into exquisite arias that are reminiscent of the great contemplative arias of the St Matthew Passion, Ach mein Sinn and Zerfliesse mein Herze.) 

Let me try to illustrate how well Bach understood his text.  The heart of St John’s Gospel is the passion story.  In all four gospels, great emphasis is laid on the passion, so much so that they have been described as passion narratives with introductions.  In John’s case, the passion story proper begins not with the betrayal scene in chapter 18 but with Jesus’ triumphant arrival in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in chapter 12.  This means that more than one third of the book, 8 out of 21 chapters, is given to the last week of Jesus’ life.  The St John Passion is a musical setting of only the last part of this story.  This follows the medieval tradition in which those chapters, culminating in the death and burial of Jesus, were sung to plainchant in the Good Friday liturgy.  But this has to be understood in the light of the central themes of St John set out in what has gone before, particularly in chapters 12 to 17.  These are: love as sacrifice, glory as life laid down, the majesty of the suffering Christ whose crucifixion is exaltation and whose cross is a royal throne.  All this Bach understands with a profoundly theological and spiritual perspective.

Two examples from the Passion will make it clear how Bach the theologian informs Bach the musician.  The first is the great opening chorus, ‘Herr unser Herrscher’.  Lord, our Sovereign, your glory fills the whole earth! Show us by your Passion that you, the true Son of God, are glorified even in the deepest humiliation.  It is important to recognise that this text is a prayer to the Christ of the cross.  The key word is Herrlichkeit, ‘glory’, with its cognates Herrscher, ‘sovereign’ and verherrlicht, ‘glorified’.  This threefold reference to glory in two brief sentences is the clue both to the music of the chorus and to the work as a whole.  ‘Glory’ is St John’s most distinctive idea.  ‘We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth’ he says at the beginning: Herrlichkeit in Luther’s Bible, a word picked up frequently as the Gospel unfolds, where it specifically means the glory of the crucified Jesus. 

So the chorus sets the scene in which Bach conveys the paradox of glory revealed through suffering.  The restless string semiquavers and the woodwind dissonances create a disturbing, almost wild, sense of disorientation and unease.  Yet underneath the turmoil are the long pedal points in the orchestral bass that stabilise the music and ground it; while the cries of the chorus rising above the chaos establish who is in control of the sufferer’s destiny.  The answer is: Christ himself who, says St John, does not have his life taken from him but lays it down of his own will.  So the chorus acclaims his kingship even in his passion.  It is telling that this was not Bach’s first choice of opening chorus.  He originally placed here his great setting of the Lutheran chorale O Mensch bewein dein Sünde grosse: ‘O man, they grievous sin bemoan’ which concludes part 1 of the St Matthew Passion.  Bach decided that this hymn text, focusing on sin and repentance, did not sufficiently reflect the principal theme of John’s passion narrative.  The chorus he replaced it with, that we now have, is entirely right for the work it has to do in the St John Passion. 

My second example is the work’s climactic event, the moment of Jesus’ death.  The four gospels each depict his death in distinctive ways.  In Matthew and Mark, Jesus dies with a cry of abandonment: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  Bach’s setting of those words in the St Matthew Passion is perhaps the most agonised music he ever wrote.  In Luke, Jesus dies the serene death of the obedient martyr: ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit’.  But in John, the last word from the cross is a single word in Greek: tetelestai, ‘It is accomplished!’.  That word is the clue to the entire Passion and indeed to the Fourth Gospel.  What does it mean?

Bach sets the words Es ist vollbracht to a motif that seems to fall to the ground and die, echoing the bow of the head with which John says Jesus ‘gives up his spirit’.  Does Bach mean it to die away into nothing, as if it stands for resigned acceptance of an inevitable, tragic destiny with the overtones of defeat: ‘it’s all over’?  I doubt that.  We must read his meaning in the light of the movement that immediately follows it.  Es ist vollbracht begins as one of those poignantly beautiful contralto arias which Bach excelled at, where the soul meditates on the mystery of death.  But he suddenly interrupts this serene atmosphere with a stirring victory song: ‘the hero of Judah wins with triumph and ends the fight’.  His message is that while death is indeed ‘the last enemy’, this death marks the beginning of the great reversal through which life is given back to the world: not defeat but victory.  This means that the singer of Christus who takes his leave of the work with these all-important couple of bars somehow has to marry the fall of the 6 note musical phrase to the rise of spiritual hope and the expectation of triumph. It calls for musicianship of the highest order. 

And Bach will not let the word vollbracht go.  After the briefest of recitatives telling how Jesus ‘bowed his head and died’ comes one of the great surprises of the Passion.  Precisely where we would expect another sombre meditation on mortality, Bach instead launches into a radiant 12/8 D major aria for bass and chorus, Mein teurer Heiland. Here the soul converses with the departed Christ about how the gate of heaven is opened through his suffering.  ‘My beloved Saviour, let me ask you, as you are nailed to the cross and have yourself said it is accomplished: am I released from death?’  So this time es ist vollbracht features in a dance of contented release joy.  All this is entirely different from the way Bach treats the equivalent scene in St Matthew, but only because those gospels depict the scene in sharply contrasting ways.   For John, Golgotha is a not only a place of pain but – and pre-eminently – a place of transfiguration.  This is what Bach so marvellously captures. 

Let me offer one final comment on the work as a whole.  The artistry with which the recitatives and choruses, arias and chorales are worked into a coherent whole is Bach’s great achievement.  He recognises how John’s passion narrative is skilfully constructed as a series of scenes in which the action oscillates between personal encounters on the one hand, and public activity on the other.  Now we are in the high priest’s house, or Pilate’s chamber, or with Mary and the beloved disciple at the foot of the cross.  Their inner complex worlds are explored with acute psychological awareness.  But then we find ourselves abruptly thrust into the large arenas where history is forged: the garden of the arrest, the praetorium, the via dolorosa, Golgotha.  The interplay in the passion between private and public, intimacy and empire Bach exploits to the full.  He understands how the inward drama of individual hearts and souls is played out as games of politics and power in front of an entire world.  He knows that the passion is a story that works on many different levels.  This is reflected in the colouring and texture of the music, the symbolism of its motifs, and a finely judged pace that respects the hectic energy that drives the narrative, yet provides spaces for pause and meditation at the critical points that allow the drama, and us, to draw breath. 

You don’t have to be a biblical scholar, liturgical historian or musicologist to appreciate the depth of this work. Its greatness and its poignancy do not derive from any self-conscious artifice on Bach’s part, nor simply from his technical skill.  It comes from the direct appeal it makes to us for the engagement not only of mind but heart.  When the citizens of Leipzig came to church on Good Friday 1724, and heard the first, extraordinary notes of the opening chorus, did they realise that music had crossed a new threshold in its power to turn spectators into participants?  It is in that spirit that I invite us to listen to the St John Passion tonight. 

The Sage, Gateshead, Easter Eve 2011

 

 

A Dark and Dreadful Death

This is the sixth in our series of sermons on St Mark’s passion narrative. Throughout Lent we have walked the via dolorosa with Jesus. Today we have arrived at its awful destination: Golgotha, crucifixion, darkness, desolation and pain. It is a world away from Palm Sunday with its hosanna acclamations and royal expectations. If ever you needed a reason not to trust a crowd, it is Palm Sunday. For look what has become of this king! The mob has bellowed for his crucifixion. He cannot, will not, save himself from this destiny, St Mark’s three fateful ‘musts’ that have pointed to this journey’s end. Today, on this Sunday of the Passion, we contemplate him as the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

If we are honest, part of us does not know what to make of him hanging there. The trouble is, we know this story too well. We know, or think we know, what lies beyond the end of it, which is next Sunday’s theme. We also know how the other three evangelists tell it and they colour our reading of St Mark. If we only had this first among the gospels, it would both appal and baffle us. We would be baffled because Mark does not explain why the innocent Son of Man should undergo such suffering. We would be appalled because Mark does not spare us the agony: the darkness that falls on the scene, the desperation of this man’s last cry, the hopelessness of this death. And worst of all perhaps, he endures all this alone, taunted and mocked on every side, deserted by his friends, abandoned by God. This is a narrative of dread. We should tremble to read it.

Let me explore some of the themes in this part of the story. The first is the darkness. Forget about eclipses, even though they are recent memory this year. Mark’s darkness is altogether deeper than a mere shadow. It’s the darkness of judgment in our lesson from Amos which Mark quotes earlier in the gospel in a famous apocalyptic passage. ‘In those days after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and that stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken’ (13.24-5). Jesus is speaking just before the passion narrative begins. He says that the kingdom of God cannot come until there is an utter collapse of the present world order: the great stones of the temple will be toppled, human communities and relationships will disintegrate, the entire cosmos will fall in an instant like a house of cards. Mark expects us to remember that saying, so that when we hear of the sun’s light failing in the middle of the day, we recognise what it represents. It is the end of the world, and it is the end of Jesus’s world. He must be extinguished like the sun. He must collapse and die as everything dies round him.

That is dreadful enough. But my second theme is darker still: Jesus’s last word from the cross. Was ever a cry more desperate and more desolate than this awful cry with which he dies? Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? We must tread carefully here, for we are on holy ground. Our Lama Sabachthani crucifix in the north quire aisle captures something of it: the figure of Jesus whittled down to its bare essentials like the skeleton of a dead tree, his back arched in agonising pain. ‘Was ever grief like mine’ he seems to say to us. But this is more than physical suffering. There is a godforsakenness of the soul as the world ends for him and his existence is snuffed out. ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ The quotation is of course from Psalm 22, one of the psalms like 69 that so profoundly influenced the way in which the evangelists shaped their passion stories. These psalms end on a note of hope that God does not forget his suffering children and will bring them to a place of deliverance and thankfulness. Does Jesus anticipate the rest of the psalm when he cries out in its opening words, as if he can envisage his own resurrection? I doubt it. I believe that as the abyss opens up beneath him, he takes to his lips the words no doubt learned from childhood that so aptly echo his despair. God has handed him over, betrayed him. He has turned his face away. He may cry, but there is no answer. Elijah will not come to save him.

At the instant of his death, an extraordinary event takes place not far away from Golgotha. This is my third theme: ‘the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom’. For the evangelists, this was remembered as deeply significant on that terrible Friday afternoon. But what did it represent to them? The ‘veil’ hid the holiest part of the temple where only the high priest was allowed to go once a year on the Day of Atonement. Does this violent tearing symbolise the passing of the old religion with its worn-out dependence on rituals and ceremonies? For now a new and living way to God is opened up through the blood of Jesus.

And Mark sees this as another scene in the apocalyptic drama acted out on the cross. Like the darkness at noon, like Jesus’ wrecking of the money-changers’ tables in the temple precinct, the rent veil stands for judgment on Jerusalem and its religious institutions. The old must be swept away before the new comes. When Mark wrote, probably in the 60s of the first century, the temple was about to be destroyed by the Romans. The unthinkable would happen. Was this not a sign of the end of days? In his description of the tearing of the temple veil, Mark uses a word he has already used early in his Gospel. At Jesus’ baptism, he says that the sky is ‘torn open’ as the dove descends and the voice from heaven speaks, and Jesus announces that the kingdom of God is at hand. The rending of sky and curtain is linked to a new world order we call the kingdom. But this can only happen if he drinks the cup we heard about early on in this series, this cup that will not pass from him. He must drink from the pressed grapes of the vine-press of the wrath of God. If he is to save the world, he must be utterly crushed.

What strange work is set before us in Holy Week at Golgotha! But what do we need to do as we watch these events unfold? Mark answers his own question. Forget the crowds shouting hosanna one day and crucify the next; forget the disciples who forsook Jesus and fled, forget the cynics who hail him as king, or the thieves and soldiers who mock him. There is an individual who stands out from the crowd and sees differently: the centurion. Maybe he is in charge of the soldiers who have crucified Jesus. Watching, this gentile Roman, this Jew-hater, this military man whose trade is power and cruelty, has an epiphany. ‘Surely, this man was the Son of God.’ Not just innocent, not just a good man, but the Son of God. The centurion isn’t a bystander now. He has become a participant whose words form the climax of the entire Gospel in one of the Bible’s great recognition-scenes. Mark sees this not just as one man’s confession of faith but as speaking for all humanity, for us as we acknowledge the majesty of this crucified Messiah. Bach took it this way when he gave these immortal words to the full chorus in his St Matthew Passion, the two greatest bars of music ever written. The only reason Mark is writing his Gospel is to make believers out of us, to draw us from being bystanders to participants as we become subjects of God’s kingdom and follow the crucified Lord. In last week’s preacher’s words, God renounces all power but the power of love, yet faith is possible in the teeth of suffering and ridicule. In the darkness, we can still believe.

Which means that we cannot simply watch him hanging there, but must summon up an act of faith that acclaims him as our Lord, and puts right our perspective on the world as God’s, with ourselves as loyal followers and subjects. To mould the church’s faith and our own in this cross-shaped way is the only reason we observe Holy Week with such care and devotion. By remembering in this way, we place the cross at the very centre of our lives, this everlasting sign of God’s ‘tender love towards mankind’, this saving death that sets us free to live again, this life freely poured out for us. Yes, indeed. ‘It is a thing most wonderful’.

Durham Cathedral, Palm Sunday 2015
Amos 8.9-12, Mark 15.33-41

Have You Any Soul? A sermon for a music festival

This church is one of the North East’s finest monastic buildings. Brinkburn was Augustinian, though our music today is being by the choir of a Benedictine Cathedral. So let me honour this place by asking what Augustine of Hippo had to say about music. In Book 10 of his Confessions, he admits that he loves music, and that when sung, ‘sacred words stir my mind to greater religious fervour and kindle in me a more ardent form of piety than they would if they were not sung’.  But he is aware of a trap: ‘finding the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys’. He talks about the risk of gratifying the senses on the one hand, and the gifts that music has to confer on the other. He asks for help not to confuse the gift with the Giver. ‘Have pity on me and heal me, for you see that I have become a problem to myself.’

More famously, he said: ‘whoever sings, prays twice’. This is usually taken to mean first through the words and then the music. But I don’t think he means this. He is saying that when we praise God, our music is transformed through the act of offering: it is lifted above the ordinary song of the dance floor or tavern or concert hall. It becomes an act of self-giving devotion. The ‘twice’ is first what we hear physically, and then where it comes from spiritually, its source at the heart of a human soul when it comes not just out of musicianship but from love.

This is the cue for my theme at this music festival, when the Old Testament reading charmingly announces that ‘the time of singing has come’. In the gospel reading, Jesus draws on a musical analogy. ‘This generation is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “we piped to you and you would not dance; we wailed and you would not mourn”’. There is no pleasing this crowd – that’s the message. A prophet appears, the ascetic John the Baptist, calling for austerity and repentance, and this doesn’t satisfy them. But neither does the Son of Man who loves a party and sits at table with all comers. They don’t like that either. Singing and dancing, wailing and lament – neither finds a hearing among a stubborn, unresponsive people. Whether the music is in a major or minor key, they want none of it. You could say that they have no soul.

Some of you know Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity or have seen the film. It’s set in a record shop (a dying species: if you find one, support it at once). A woman comes in. “‘Have you got any soul?’ she asks. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.” Nick Hornby charts (forgive the word) the fortunes of an obsessive. His public world is the record shop, his private one his collection of discs, his relationships and the complexities of the male psyche. In its off-beat way, the book is not only funny but accurate in the way it lays bare an ordinary human life. His records are a metaphor of his personal world, but they are also a gateway to it. ‘Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in.’ Yes, that is indeed art; and that is indeed the human soul. ‘Know yourself’ says the wisdom of antiquity. To peer into our own soul and recognise what is there takes insight, patience and courage.

‘Have we any soul?’ That is the question music and art puts to us. Art says: here is beauty, here is delight, here is tragedy, here is a view of things we may not have glimpsed before. The question is, have we the soul to hear and to listen, to be touched by it and respond to it; even to be changed by it? I doubt it happens by itself. We can use music as mindless wallpaper, even in churches, but there is no guaranteed osmosis that will get inside and make a difference to us. Or we can pay attention, not just hear but listen. Then communication takes place: music becomes a form of speech whose language can elicit a response. Beethoven wrote on his Missa Solemnis, ‘from the heart: may it go to the heart’.  When heart speaks to heart, there is recognition; and by being spoken to, as if by name, we realise in a new way who and what we are. We are brought back into a relationship with our own soul.

I’ve often spoken of the part Bach’s passion music played in my becoming a Christian and later on, a priest. I would not be here now if it were not for the transformative part Bach played in my life: a fifth evangelist indeed. I look back on this experience as one of the ways in which I was humanised, brought back from illusion and fantasy to a deep truth about human life, put back together again. To become more fully human is to rediscover how we are made as the image of God the divine artist and musician who has given us mortals the faculty of imagination, the capacity to respond to beauty, the gift of being enchanted, the ability to create worlds of melody and harmony as God himself creates and sustains the universe. John Milton speaks of the ‘perfect diapason’ that was lost in the fall, but not irretrievably, for the work of redemption is once again enabling mortals to ‘sing in tune with heaven’. So music does not simply give us a glimpse of redemption: it has a redemptive dimension in itself. In the Psalms, the invitation to make music is not, I think, only to celebrate God’s praise but it is to invoke his very presence amidst humanity, to bring him in our midst. With God among us, all of us become musicians who join in the music of the spheres. We dance when God pipes joyfully to us; we enter into his lament when there are tears in things. ‘Do you have any soul?’ It’s God’s question to each of us.

If we take ‘soul’ seriously, music will always be an act of love in all its aspects: composing, performing or listening. This was Augustine’s point: we pray twice when we sing with love. Elgar said of The Dream of Gerontius, ‘this is the best of me, written from my insidest inside.’ He has put the whole of himself into it, an offering of love because love costs everything we have. This is why faith often seems to hover on the periphery of music even when it is not consciously recognised. Herbert Howells said that he was agnostic except when he was composing. Music, like architecture, painting and poetry is one of faith’s companions and interpreters. It enables us to grasp reality in fresh ways. And when it is put to work in the service of the church, it becomes conscious, capable of enabling worship to soar to the heights and plumb the depths of our human life as we experience under God.

Musicians are not named among the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers whose gifts adorn the church.  But don’t musicians bring good news too?  The great rose window of Durham Cathedral that I call ‘God’s Eye’ has the twenty four crowned elders of the Book of Revelation arrayed round Christ in glory, each playing a harp. It tells me that music is enshrined, not just among the arts, but among the bearers of God’s truth and light.  There is the answer to the question, ‘Have we any soul?’ Augustine was right: to sing out of love and adore the eternal God is what we were made for. Just as we are doing in this eucharist right now.

Brinkburn Abbey, Northumberland: at the Music Festival Eucharist, 6 July 2014.
Song of Songs 2.8-13, Matthew 11.16-19, 25-end

Bach's 'St Matthew Passion': four short talks

Four addresses given in the course of a 'come and sing' workshop on Bach's St Matthew Passion. 

TALK 1  WHAT IS A PASSION?
The St Matthew Passion is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. Not just ‘religious’ music, whatever we mean by that, but music. It’s one of those works that are universal in their value and their appeal. It seems to speak to people of all faiths and no faith with a depth and directness that only a few works of art ever achieve. Bach’s family used to call it die Grosse Passion, the ‘great’ passion. No-one will argue with that.

I’ve loved the Bach Passions since I was a teenager. I came to faith singing Bach’s St John Passion so I suppose I can say that were it not for Bach I wouldn’t be here now doing what I do in Durham. Soon afterwards, I discovered the St Matthew. And these two works awakened an interest that I have had ever since in both the music of Bach and in the passion narratives of the New Testament. So I want in these short talks to try to open up these musical and spiritual worlds as we enjoy working on the St Matthew today.

Why did Bach write his Passions?  Nowadays, we always hear them as stand-alone ‘concert’ performances. But they were of course written as liturgical music which formed a central part of the Good Friday church service at Leipzig where Bach was cantor. The reading or chanting of the passion accounts in the four gospels had been at the heart of the Good Friday service for many centuries.  In the 18^th century Lutheran Church, this liturgy was celebrated in the afternoon as a long vesper service. It began with a hymn, followed by a prayer and then the first part of the passion. The sermon followed, and we should imagine it lasting for up to an hour. The second part of the passion was then sung, with a motet, more prayers and a final hymn to end with. In Leipzig, the service alternated year by year between the two town churches of St Thomas and St Nicholas. 

Bach did not invent this musical form. Other German composers wrote passions which like Bach’s included the reciting of the gospel text or a paraphrase, arias, choruses and chorales. But no-one ever composed passion music with as sure a touch as Bach. He both understood with profound theological and spiritual insight what the gospel story was all about, and also how best to weave it seamlessly into the church’s liturgy.

In both the St John and St Matthew, the concept is the same. Bach firmly believed that the music should honour the words of the biblical text rather than make do with paraphrase. This is sung by the evangelist as tenor recitative. Soloists take the parts of the protagonists – Christus, Peter, Judas, the Chief Priest, Pontius Pilate and so on, with the choir or choirs performing the crowd scenes. But because the reading of the story took place within a public liturgical service, it was important to pause the action frequently to give the congregation plenty of opportunity to reflect on the narrative ass it unfurled and also to offer its own response. So the arias, sometimes supported by the choir, provide spaces for meditation, while the chorales were familiar Lutheran passion hymns in some of which the people would be able to join in singing.

The St John Passion was first performed in 1724 at St Nicholas, and the following year in a revised version at St Thomas. In 1726, a passion by a Hamburg composer Friedrich Bruhns was sung at St Nicholas. Bach composed the St Matthew for the 1727 performance at St Thomas’s. He was 42 by then, and still had over two decades of composition ahead of him. But the care he took over the final manuscript of his 1736 revision, written in two different colours and two distinct scripts, tells us that he knew he had written a work of defining significance, at least for him.

So what makes it the great work we now recognise it to be?

It’s many things. At the most obvious level, Bach is a musician of the first order whose technical mastery of shape and form is wedded to a profound humanity, an inner ear for what has beauty and a mind to give it utterance. Then Bach is a master of biblical interpretation, a supreme commentator on scripture alongside the classics of written commentary. As the cantatas show, he knows and handles the text with the utmost care and reverence: I’ll try to show later on how he does this in the St Matthew. Another is what I would call his ability to read the heart, uncover character, motive and attitude in a story so that it is brought to life as a human drama.  Bach knows the comedy and tragedy of life. Unlike Handel, he never wrote operas; if he had, they would certainly have been wonderful, for in a way, the sacred drama of the Passion is almost operatic in its effect. And because of that, we who listen begin to feel that our own humanity is understood in this music too, the beauty we aspire to in our best moments, the disintegration we experience in our worst. This is what gives this work what I have called its universality.

We owe the rediscovery of the St Matthew to Mendelssohn who revived and performed it in 1829. This to my mind is the really great achievement that we should thank him for – giving Bach back to the world. I don’t think we are ever the same when we hear the Passions well performed, nor are we the same when we perform it ourselves. We should be touched and moved, and maybe glimpse possibilities we had never thought about as I believe I was for a moment on that far-off day 50 years ago.

TALK 2  ST MATTHEW’S PASSION STORY

To understand the St Matthew Passion we need to know it as Bach knew it, get under the skin of this powerful biblical text. We’ve asked what a ‘passion’ was in Bach’s 18^th century Lutheran worship. We now need to ask what a ‘passion’ is in the New Testament. When Matthew wrote his story of the suffering and death of Jesus, what was his intention?

The obvious way of reading any of the four gospels is to see them as ‘lives’ of Jesus that inevitably conclude with accounts of his death. But this is the wrong way round, and it’s obvious for two reasons. The first is that the length of the passion narratives is out of all proportion to the rest of the text. In St John, for instance, the events of the last week of Jesus’ life occupy the last 10 chapters out of a total of 21 – nearly half. In Matthew it is 8 out of 28, still a very significant amount. Clearly, what took place in that week was given huge emphasis; so much so that the passion narratives are the culmination of everything that has gone before. Indeed, we could say that a ‘gospel’ consists of a passion narrative with an extended introduction. So if we read the gospels ‘backwards’, starting with the passion, we begin to see how the crucifixion was the lens through which the writers saw the entire life of Jesus. He was, as we say on Good Friday, born to die this death.

But this leads to the second reason why the passion narrative is not simply an ending. For in the gospels, it isn’t an ending at all. They conclude not with the cross but with the resurrection. In St Mark, the meeting of the disciples with the risen Lord is promised as a future event; but Matthew, Luke and John all record the Easter recognition scene as the culmination of the story. For all four gospels, the resurrection is the transforming event of human history, not an end but a new beginning, a new world. This was the starting point of all four gospels. The only reason for telling the story of Jesus at all was that the crucified Son of Man had risen from the dead. And this explains why the cross is dwelt on in such loving detail, because it was a (literally) crucial part of the story of redemption. Theologically, we should speak not of two separate events, Jesus’s death and resurrection, but of a single one, cross-and-resurrection together, through which, the gospel writers claim, the salvation of the world is won.

Originally, the liturgy of Easter did not separate these ‘moments’ of redemption. It was one story that was celebrated, death and resurrection as one redemptive event. However, early in the Christian era the liturgy began to extend back across an entire week with each day given to marking the events of that day as the gospels record them: Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the last supper and betrayal on Maundy Thursday, the passion and crucifixion on Good Friday, the burial on Holy Saturday. By the time of Bach, Good Friday had taken on the character of a day dedicated to the solemn commemoration of Jesus’ suffering and death; hence the central part the passion story on its own played in the liturgy of the day. 

We can see how, separated from the resurrection account that follows it, St Matthew’s passion takes on a decidedly dark aspect. I want to look later on at how the story depicts Jesus himself, but we should notice how he enters and leaves the passion. It begins on a note of foreboding as Jesus says to his disciples: ‘you know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’. And the words with which he dies fill out that ominous prediction. There is darkness over the whole land, says Matthew. After three hours he calls out to God from the cross, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and, says Matthew, dies with a cry on his lips. It is hard not to feel it as a cry of despair. Bach’s agonised music seems to read it that way.

If you read St Mark’s passion account, you will find that he tells the story in much the same way. In particular, he records the same bleak word from the cross. The consensus of biblical scholars is that Mark’s story came first, and that Matthew had it to hand when he wrote his own gospel. Matthew edited Mark, omitting some details and adding others (for instance, the earthquake and the bodies of the saints rising out of the earth is pure Matthew, an episode that gives Bach scope for some dramatic word-painting that I dare say he enjoyed).

But it is substantially the same message, written with the same purpose in mind. What is that?

It is to elicit the reader’s response. Matthew and Mark do not simply tell a story for the sake of the story. They tell it as a proclamation of the Christian message so that we who read may gain insight and understanding. For this is not just anyone’s death. It is the death of the one who has come into the world for our redemption. This is why telling it at such length, and meditating on it in a way that takes time and effort is fundamental to our recognition of who Jesus was and is for us. It explains why Bach thought that three hours of musical contemplation on Good Friday was not too much to give to a task that in reality belongs to a lifetime. 

TALK 3  SINGING THE PASSION

So far I have taken the perspective of the listener (or perhaps I should say the worshipper): how does our understanding of the Passion help us to respond to this majestic music? I’d like in this talk to reflect on performance: how do we sing the St Matthew Passion? I’m conscious that singing is not the only performing art involved: the instrumentalists are as vital as the singers and in no sense reduced to the role of merely ‘accompanying’. But since today is billed as a ‘come and sing’, you will forgive me for focusing on the part the chorus plays in the music.

Both Bach’s passions approach their texts with a view to creating out of them a sacred drama. In the St John, the hectic pace of the narrative sweeps all before it, and a major role for the chorus is to portray an angry and hostile crowd intent on being rid of Jesus. This aspect is certainly present in the St Matthew too: ‘he is worthy of death’, ‘now tell us who smote thee?’, ‘let him be crucified’. But these numbers are fewer than in St John, and apart from two, they are terser and less elaborate. Bach takes this to an extreme in the episode where Pilate asks the crowd which of the two men, Jesus or Barabbas, they want him to release. Their response is a single eight-part shriek on a diminished seventh chord: ‘Barabbas!’ Just half a bar of music, yet how superlatively effective as a dramatic device, for any development would have lost the demonic decisiveness with which the crowd, by casting its vote, condemns Jesus to death.

Playing this hostile part in the drama is not, however, the most important function of the chorus in St Matthew. What the choir is principally there to do is more like the chorus in a Greek tragedy: to observe the action and to offer commentary and interpretation from the edges of the drama. In the St Matthew, they often do this through an overheard conversation with one another: the ‘daughters of Zion’ and the community of believers or those who aspire to faith. In this, the chorus ‘bears witness’ not only to events as they unfold, but their meaning. Sometimes this is in the form of affirmation, sometimes in questions. In this, they are the mouthpiece of the largely silent congregation. This audience that is listening to the Passion understands that the story is ultimately for us and about us, and from time to time is given permission to offer its own response through the congregational chorales it is invited to sing.

It helps to understand the structure of the work and how the chorus fits into it. The St Matthew has 15 main scenes according to the scheme by which Bach’s librettist Picander arranged the material. In part one we have Jesus’ anointing at Bethany, his betrayal by Judas, the last supper, Gethsemane, Jesus’ prayer for deliverance and finally his arrest. In part two, he is interrogated by the high priest, Peter denies him, Judas’ remorse in the temple, Jesus before Pilate, his scourging, Simon of Cyrene carrying his cross, the crucifixion itself, the descent from the cross and lastly his burial. At the end of each of these, Picander inserted a poetic meditation which pauses the action and allows for reflection. These are the points at which the arias are inserted, usually preceded by a recitative-type arioso. In some of them the chorus is in dialogue with the soloist. ‘I would beside my Lord be watching’ sings the tenor while the second choir responds ‘and so our sin will fall asleep’; or the alto, imagining herself at Golgotha, ‘Come, see the Saviour’s outstretched hands’ while the chorus asks ‘come where?’. In these ways we the audience grasp how the Passion is not being sung to us, still less at us. It is being sung with us as conversation partners.

There are four particularly important choruses that stand like cornerstones at the beginning and end of each part. These frame the entire story. The first, ‘Come ye daughters, share my mourning’ sets the scene by inviting the audience to imagine themselves taking part in a worldwide funeral march to Golgotha. But already there is a key conversation taking place between the doleful E minor lament of the eight-part chorus, and the hope-filled G major hymn sung by the ripieno choir whose words ‘O Lamb of God most holy, have mercy on us’ that point not simply to an event but its profound meaning for the human race. The second cornerstone, positioned at the dramatic point where Matthew says that ‘all the disciples forsook him and fled’, is an extended setting of the chorale ‘O man, thy grievous sin bemoan’. This was transferred to the St Matthew from St John and eloquently captures the brokenness of humanity in turning away from Jesus as the source of light and life.

The third cornerstone opens part 2 of the work. Here the ‘daughter of Zion’ who personifies the people of God is asking desolately and insistently where her Saviour has gone, while the chorus sympathises with her. There is no da capo in this piece as in many of the arias, no going back to the beginning again: the question mark with which it ends is all important, symbolised by ending not in the tonic home key of B minor but the dominant F sharp major. And finally, of course, the concluding double chorus ‘In tears of grief’, a lullaby in which the Christ, and the passion, are gently laid to rest (the theme also of the choral recitative that precede it). This chorus is both theologically and psychologically essential. It is not that there is resolution in the story yet (that must wait for Easter Day), but it is important that the narrative can end on a properly cathartic note, having cleansed both listener and performer, enabling us all to leave the story without experiencing a wrenching dislocation as we return to ordinary time.

I think that when we remember the St Matthew Passion and ask ourselves why we love it so much, it’s for these ethereally beautiful reflective moments where arias and choruses somehow enable the music to glow from within. Like the halo of strings that surrounds the words of Jesus in the Passion, they too illuminate the story with meanings that turn out to be about the transfiguration of life. That is the all-important contribution the chorus makes in this most exquisite of sacred works. There could not be a more privileged role to have.

TALK 4  THE FACE OF CHRIST IN THE PASSION

In the last of these talks, I want to focus on how Jesus is portrayed in the St Matthew Passion.

I am going to start not at the beginning but at the end, or almost. It may be foolish to ask you this question, but I am going to anyway. What are the two greatest bars of music ever written? I reply, the brief chorus you will find on page 173 of the Novello score, embedded in movement no. 73. This is the earthquake scene I referred to earlier. ‘Now when the centurion, and they that were with him watching Jesus, saw the earth quake and those things that were done, they feared greatly saying, truly this was the Son of God’.

As you can see, here is where Bach breaks the rule he has set himself throughout the narrative parts of the Passion. We would expect a single tenor or bass voice to sing the part of the centurion, or perhaps a semi-chorus representing the other bystanders. But Bach assigns it to the whole chorus, choirs one and two and treats it as if the chorus were in its ‘reflective’ mode. The rise and fall of the beautiful melodic line, the richness of the choral and orchestral textures, the Lento mark all tell us that Bach sees this as a transformative moment in the work, a kind of apotheosis. It’s as if the Passion simply stops and stands still at this point, so that the wonderment of recognition can sink in. A sensitive conductor knows not to hurry back to the recitative and break the spell too soon.

Here Bach the theologian, the biblical interpreter, informs Bach the musician. For St Matthew, the centurion, a non-Jewish Roman soldier, is not simply speaking for himself when he utters these words. They are articulated on behalf of the whole world that has followed the events of the passion story to their end. At one level, it is a baffling tragedy of a good man on whom cruelty is inflicted and evil done although he has done nothing to deserve it. But the eye of faith sees deeper into the mystery. It perceives that in the demeanour of Jesus, even in the awful godforsakenness of the cross, some other story is being acted out. For the evangelist, it is the story of a redemption that embraces all of humanity. So the centurion gives voice on behalf of us all when he recognises who it is who has suffered and died in this way. The lonely sufferer had thought he had been abandoned. The centurion recognises that even in the darkness, the light of God’s Son is not extinguished for ever.

These two bars are surrounded by the same halo I spoke about in the last talk. One of the characteristics of the St Matthew Passion compared with the more spare St John is how Bach adorns the harpsichord and cello continuo accompaniment every time Jesus speaks with an ethereal halo of strings. This serves to underline whose voice it is we are listening to, not simply the words of a man but the divine utterances of the Son of Man. So Bach creates a highly dramatic effect on reaching the last words of Jesus from the cross: ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  Here alone in the entire work, the string halo we have come to expect every time Jesus speaks is suddenly stripped away, as if to leave him naked in his godforsakenness. Bach commentators often say that this reduces him to being 'just' a man like any other crucified man, like the two thieves on either side of him.

However, I doubt if this obvious reading is what Matthew intends and Bach was too good a theologian not to realise this. The issue is the paradox that Jesus as God’s Son no longer experiencing himself in that way, as if God could both be God and yet know what it is to be not-God at the same time, suffering as God himself and yet being abandoned by him.  I think we should construe Bach’s musical language as meaning not that Jesus’s divinity was stripped from him in his death but that his experience of God’s presence was taken from him in the terrible ordeal he underwent. This is where the centurion’s utterance is all the more powerful. It’s as if the halo that was absent in the word from the cross has slipped across the boundary of death and is now present once more as the chorus recognises who this divine man was all along.

I have emphasised the way Jesus is portrayed at the end of the Passion as the divine man whom God abandoned because it is fundamental to the rest of it. I’ve already spoken about the opening words in which Jesus foretells what is to happen to him. The cross’s inevitability has already become a theme earlier in the gospel. It is relentlessly underlined by foreshadowings throughout the passion narrative. Here are some early instances. The anointing by the woman at Bethany is meant, says Jesus, to prepare his body for burial. Next, Judas obtains money from the chief priests and begins to ‘look for an opportunity to betray him’. At the last supper, he says that ‘the Son of Man goes as it is written of him’ and declares that the poured-out wine his blood ‘poured out for many’. On the Mount of Olives, he quotes the prophecy about God striking the shepherd and the sheep being scattered. In Gethsemane he prays that the cup of suffering may pass from him. We are all familiar with these, but we need to notice their cumulative effect. Early in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says that ‘the Son of Man must suffer’. The Greek word for ‘must’ captures this unavoidable vocation to suffer, the sense of destiny that pervades the story. The king must die.

So the St Matthew Passion is a sombre work. Perhaps it’s right to speak of it as a tragedy, not because of any tragic flaw in Jesus but because of the tragedy of the human condition that brings his crucifixion about. The Passion confronts us with the image of suffering in a way that is profoundly challenging. It should disturb us, and it does. But it is not desperate and not bleak. It is not simply Bach’s Christian vision that shines through the warmth and humaneness of the music; it is St Matthew’s as well. His, and Bach’s, invitation to us who sing or listen is quite simply to begin to see things as the centurion did: to look into the face of a death and recognise there the seeds of light and life.