Retreat Address on the Psalms 2 - Prayer and the Manifestation of God (Psalm 76)

Sometimes in the psalms, you feel that the worshipper is crying into the abyss. “How long, O Lord?” is a familiar refrain in the laments. The psalmist longs to detect some sign of God’s presence but he not to be found. “Surely you are a god who hides himself” laments the prophet. Deus absconditus Luther calls him. And when he does come, it is often as One unknown, still elusive as if protecting his own hiddenness from the human tendency to capture and contain. Yahweh the God of Israel is not a being who will be grasped hold of and held, the Hebrew scriptures insist. Or as C. S. Lewis puts it, Aslan is not a tame lion.

But in this psalm we find the paradoxes of God’s character set before us. It is one of the most vivid in the book. Here, announces the opening line, he is known for his name is great in Israel. Surely this is a god who reveals himself, whose splendour is manifest for all the world to see. He is known! Yet he retains his mystery, safeguards his own wildness if you like. He will not be subject to our human whims or to the rituals and ceremonies we devise in his honour. This God will do whatever pleases him. No wonder he inspires fear in the kings of the earth! as the psalm says in the last line. When the divine theophany blazes out in front of you, you are wise to be afraid, as Moses knew when the bush burned before him and he found himself treading holy ground.

The psalm is one of a number of Zion hymns that celebrate the city of David that God has chosen as his abode. Here in his temple is where God has freely chosen to reside and manifest his presence. It’s the focus of his activity in judgment and salvation. As in Solomon’s prayer of dedication as we saw yesterday, it’s the place towards which the people pray in their thankfulness and distress, and from where the Lord answers with a dramatic display of power and might. There he broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword and the weapons of war. “You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples” said yesterday’s psalm (65) which also began with Zion. Or as another Zion psalm puts it, the better-known Psalm 46, “He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.” The thought is not that God is a reconciler who brings enemies together in peace, rather that he is stronger than any mortal power and will defend his holy place against every force that threatens, and with it, the people who live around it.

This is the logic of the rest of our psalm. Glorious are you, more majestic than the everlasting mountains. Majesty means strength in this text. It goes on to tell how the enemy is defeated: at thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both rider and horse lay stunned. And in the light of this dazzling demonstration of divine glory, the psalm ends on a note of reverent worship. But you indeed are awesome! Who can stand before you when once your anger is aroused? From the heavens you uttered judgment; the earth feared and was still.  This seems to me to be the right way to read Psalm 46, “Be still, then, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.” I don't think it's inner peacefulness and calm that it means. The theme of God’s exaltation over his enemies suggests the stilling of the storms of chaos and  rebelliousness, the reverent silence of awe that you keep in the presence of the Almighty which is also how today’s psalm sees it. The earth feared, and was still - and with it, all creatures who know their place before the mighty Creator. No doubt the stilling of our wayward hearts and teeming minds is part of this, but the psalmist’s sights are set far beyond what is inward and personal to us.

The psalm maintains this vigorous tone to the end. Human wrath serves only to praise you. The futility of mortal rebelliousness is a familiar theme in the Psalms as we are seeing. As we saw yesterday, it's likened to the chaotic floods that are subdued by the power of God in the creation. Here, the image is daringly turned round to affirm that even wicked and  demonic powers unwittingly praise God because human rebellion merely leads to a demonstration of God’s deliverance, for which thanks are due. If even dumb stones cry out to God’s praise, how much more the energies of mortals, rebellious or submissive. And what follows praise is the offering of the promise of faithfulness. Make vows to the Lord your God, and perform them; let all who are around him bring gifts to the One who is awesome. The response to this awesome epiphany, these mighty acts of God who makes himself known to us in the cloud and the fire, can only be that we are brought into obedience and pledge our lives to him unreservedly, so that we fear and honour and love his holy name. 

There are a number of levels at which we can read this psalm. At its root there no doubt lies the memory of some act of deliverance for which the people of Judah gave thanks and elaborated with extravagant poetic imagery in the way they told the story. Such an event could have been the crisis at the end of the eighth century when in 701 BCE the superpower Assyria invaded Jerusalem which only narrowly escaped from a terrible siege. (Indeed, the Septuagint Greek translation of this psalm makes this very connection in its title concerning the Assyrian.) The line when God rose up to establish judgment, to save all the oppressed of the earth attests to the helplessness of tiny Judah in the face of this mighty assault by Sennacherib. (In the British Museum you can see in the Assyrian Galleries amazing palace reliefs from Iraq from this period when the empire was at its strongest and peoples across the ancient near east feared for their survival. But the prophet Isaiah promised that Yahweh would deliver the city and its temple from the invader, and Zion was indeed preserved – for a while – until the next invasion by the Babylonians a century later. And then it fell, never to rise again. And great was the fall of it.)

But I think it’s very likely that the proper life setting of this psalm is the temple cult. We need to imagine a great festival, perhaps the annual autumn celebration of new year and covenant-renewal that I suggested was also the setting of yesterday’s Psalm 65. At such celebrations the ritual would enact the revelation of God’s presence in glory through words, images, symbols, music and ritual movement. In this, the king had a key part to play as God’s anointed vicegerent or representative over the people with a priestly role towards them. I suppose it’s tempting for those of us of a catholic persuasion to imagine that the Jerusalem Temple was a place of advanced ceremonial. In fact, I don’t think it’s a matter of conjecture. The form-critical study of the Psalms, once upon a time under the rubric of “myth and ritual”, uncovers an unexpectedly elaborate liturgy that far exceeded in its symbolic power anything we are familiar with in Anglican or Catholic worship even in the heyday of old-fashioned ritualism.

It’s impossible to reconstruct in detail what this liturgy would have looked like, though psalms like 24 (an entrance rite on the threshold of the sanctuary), 50 (a ceremony of covenant making) and 118 and 132 (royal processions into the sanctuary) offer clues. But what we can do with confidence is to say that at the core of Israelite worship was the dramatization of the fundamental realities of the relationship with God. I’m thinking of the defining memory of deliverance at the Exodus, the signs and wonders of the wilderness journey, the giving of the law, the making of the covenant and the entrance (or the promise of it) into the promised land. All of these feature prominently in the psalms in ways that are anamnesis, that relive the past in the present and actualize it for succeeding generations so that they can say, this is our story. 

We can touch the ways in which those present at these ceremonies responded, how they felt  as they were drawn into these powerful, life-changing liturgical dramas. In this, our psalm is rich in insights. I’ve already mentioned many of them. One group of words would include awe, reverence, fear in the presence of this Mysterium Tremens et Fascinans as Rudolph Otto’s great book The Idea of the Holy helped us to name it. When God manifests himself, when you are in the presence of the Holy, you reverence the time and the place in the way Moses did at the bush, as I’ve already said. Another group would be praise, gratitude, gladness, celebration, joy. In the psalms, when God acts as judge and deliverer, the whole creation is called upon to join in the song of joyful thanksgiving. And a third catena of ideas would include submission, promise, resolve, vow, offering, obedience, gift. I'm reminded of the Victorian architect of Truro Cathedral John Loughborough Pearson who said that a church building ought to bring us to ur knees. Its majesty should enable us to know our place in God’s scheme of things. This is the message of Psalm 76. It makes worshippers of us. God’s mighty works call for an act of our own, not simply to be reminded but to be responsive and find our lives changed as a result.

So this psalm invites us to interrogate our own investment in the liturgy and the way we respond to it as participants in worship. I can remember what a penny-dropping moment it was when someone explained to me how the divine liturgy is meant to be an event that transforms us. I then read Peter Brooke’s great classic on the theatre, The Empty Space and understood how this is the aim of all dramatic performance – to touch lives and change them. The tragedy was, he said, that so much theatre had lost its power to do this. It wasn’t difficult to transfer the insight to liturgy. Brooke more than hints at this in his chapter on “holy theatre”. He says that one of the problems is the low level of investment in theatre by those charged with delivering, whether it is directors, architects or the actors themselves. But although their commitment to theatre is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient for it to touch people’s lives. For that, there has to be the expectation of the audience and its willingness to become involved in the drama. Translate into the life of our church and draw the obvious conclusion.

So like yesterday’s psalm, this one urges me to live eucharistically, practise doxology as a way of life. It helps to form me as a liturgical celebrant but even more as a member of the worshipping assembly. I was fortunate enough to preside at and attend worship in three cathedrals day in, day out for thirty years. I became familiar, perhaps too familiar for my own good, with “the beauty of holiness”. Now that I find myself sitting next to my wife in the nave of a village church, my assumptions about the “performance” are necessarily very different. But I am trying to learn that my expectations of a divine event happening in the liturgy should be just the same. I need to invest in the liturgy and by trying to practice a that reverent stillness the psalm talks about: to listen more and speak less, not only to see or even discern but to reflect and more than that, to contemplate – these ought to be part of the normal habitus of the worshipper. And if only I could emulate our psalmist whose reverence for the awesome holy name and presence of the Almighty is so eloquent and moving, it would transform my experience of the Sunday morning eucharist. And maybe not just mine.

So we have the glowing memory of a great event, and the eye of a contemplative worshipper. But there’s a final dimension to this psalm that we should consider. And this is the eschatological aspect of it, reading it as a promise of the future that God will bring in his time. There is a long tradition of understanding psalms like 76 to point not only to the truth of yesterday or today but to project it into tomorrow. That isn’t at all to rule out the dimensions of past event and present reality, but it is to orientate the text to the future as if to say, it’s in the day that God comes to complete his work, to reign as Lord and bring the world into submission under his feet that the glorious vision these words express are finally and completely fulfilled. 

We are used to handling texts in this future-oriented way. Among the best known psalms are those called royal psalms that speak about Israel’s human king. “You are my son, today I have begotten you” says Psalm 2; and we feel no awkwardness about seeing a depiction of a messianic image, Jesus the Son of God, the anointed Christ in both his first and last comings. Typology has to be used carefully, but the New Testament offers plenty of precedents. So here, we can see how Israel’s future hope was formed and shaped out of her ancient and precious memories. When Jesus took these words upon his lips, as he must have done, what went through his mind? Something like his first homily in the synagogue at Nazareth, “today these words are fulfilled in your hearing?” Or in his own vocation, maybe, the vocation to proclaim the kingdom of God, announce its advent breaking through into human history and the lives of mortal men and women? And if this was his call, then it is ours too, for it's the basis of Christian hope. As it was then and is now, will be in the future, only to perfection when the last enemy has been overcome and God is all in all and we know as we are known. 

So this is a psalm to sing on Ascension Day or Christ the King, for it celebrates the final victory of God’s judgment and love over all things. It looks forward to the day when sorrow and sighing shall flee away. It anticipates, not least in the liturgy as if it were now, the reign of God and ultimate banishing of all that is evil and unreconciled and wrong in our world. And in particular, it answers the sighs and dreams and hopes and longings of the victim, the voiceless and the poor, “how long O Lord, how long?” It does this by setting forth a marvellous promise enfolded in those words I’ve already quoted towards the end of the psalm, when God arose to establish judgment, to save all the oppressed of the earth. 

I’ve said all my life as a preacher that what the gospel brings humanity as its supreme gift is promise and hope. In a world that looks hopeless, when so many find themselves victims of the indifferent forces of nature or the unending cruelty of other human beings, when it is tempting to despair because God has abandoned us, here is a song to put us back together again and give us hope once more. Yes, he is a God who hides himself, as we said at the beginning, but not for ever, and not for long. If we have eyes to see, we glimpse the signs that his kingdom is coming. If we have ears to hear, we sense the word of comfort that whispers, “all shall be well”. And if we have hearts to dream, we can already imagine ourselves inhabiting that glorious kingdom where

Faith will vanish into sight;
Hope be emptied in delight:
Love in heaven will shine more bright. 

For as the gospel shows us, it is love that is the truest and most final expression of God’s glory and God’s love. Amor vincit omnia, love conquers all things. So we pray Therefore give us love. And soon, we dare to hope, love’s dream, and love’s work will become love’s reality, world without end.

So in our retreat reflections today, and in the light of what we know of power-and-glory-as-love, we might like to ask ourselves where and when we have seen God manifest himself in the past and where we expect to see him in the future. And also, how we look for transfiguration in the present moment: in the creation, in the liturgy, in our encounters with humanity, in the mystery of our own selves, and in our life together. 

Holy Week in Hymns 3: "The Royal Banners Forward Go"

On our journey through Holy Week, we are exploring some of the great hymns of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Tonight we come to one of the oldest and greatest of them all, The Royal Banners Forward Go, or in the majestic Latin of the original, Vexilla Regis Prodeunt.

I remember we sang it on my first Good Friday after ordination. I was arrested by those first few words, powerful, evocative, strong. They struck me so forcibly because they seemed to cut through the traditional sombreness of the day as suggested by the devout Victorian hymn, not much sung nowadays, “O come and mourn with me a while”. By contrast, the spirit of this hymn felt vigorous and bracing.

“The royal banners”: what on earth are they? A vexillum is a military standard or ensign that rallies the troops and sets off before them. Think of the “eagles” that led the Roman legions and the lengths to which they would go to safeguard the standard or recover it, as n Rosemary Sutcliffe’s great children’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth. On a commander’s tent, the red vexillum would be flown to muster the troops and prepare for battle. So the “banners of the king” are a sign of engagement in conflict. And afterwards, the standards would be raised in a victory celebrated by a triumph with a great procession into the city led by the banners, and the scattering of bounty as the people cried out kyrie eleison and begged to be thrown the spoils of war.

This hymn comes out of the era immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire. Venantius Fortunatus was born in the Veneto in around 530 AD, a few years before the death of another great Italian, St Benedict. It breathes the spirit of Latin antiquity at precisely the time it was transmuting into the early middle ages. The memory of Roman triumphs was recent enough to be given poignancy by the physical signs of a great civilisation falling into ruin all around him. Like Benedict, Fortunatus saw the church as a bastion against the chaos he saw taking control in lands that had once enjoyed the pax Romana with its civic institutions, legal system, market place, temples and academy whose noble buildings, now falling into decay, stirred proud memories in the hearts of those who loved Rome.

He had trained as a poet and orator. Even in translation, his hymns demonstrate his flair for words. However, his sight began to fail until one day he went into a church in Ravenna and washed his eyes with oil burning in a lamp at an altar of St Martin of Tours. He was healed at once, and in gratitude went on pilgrimage to St Martin’s shrine in France. He settled in Poitiers, the city where Hilary had been bishop centuries before. There he was ordained, becoming Bishop of in 599. He died the following year. Our hymn comes out of Poitiers. Fortunatus wrote it in 569 in honour of the relics of the Holy Cross that were brought in a magnificent procession to a royal monastery there, “with much singing and gleaming of tapers and fragrance of incense” says the report. The cross shines forth in mystic glow.

This hymn is rich in theology as well as piety. The opening stanza cuts to the theological chase: “Where he in flesh, our flesh who made, / Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.” In the Latin, the emphasis is not so much on any theory of the atonement, but on the mystery of who it is who is hanging on the cross. Literally, the words speak about the One who made us flesh and blood is himself fastened to a criminal’s stake as that self-same flesh and blood. Mysterium is a big word for this hymn writer, and the profound insight of the cross is the “glow of mystery” that proclaims the identity of this Saving Victim, none other than the Son and Word of the Eternal God himself.

What this means is explored in a later verse. Upon its arms, like balance true, / He weighed the price for sinners due, / The price which none but he could pay, / And spoiled the spoiler of his prey. This stanza is dense with symbolism. The key is the “price for sinners due”. Jesus is hanging on the tree because there is a great work for him to do there. It is to pay that price once and for all, the price of redeeming humanity. In the middle ages, the idea of the ransom to be paid became the dominant way of understanding the cross. Put briefly, the sin of Adam had handed the human race over into the power of Satan. Our freedom needed to be bought back by the payment of a ransom, the perfect victim who was not himself compromised by the fall. That offering put the scales back into equilibrium and made release possible. If you’ve read C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe you’ll understand how the deep magic of an innocent victim has power over evil.

The image of the Incarnate Word on the cross, triumphing harrowing hell, releasing its captives and triumphing over the powers of death runs through many of these ancient Passiontide and Easter hymns. “Sing my tongue the glorious battle” is another of them by this same hymn writer, very close in spirit to “The Royal Banners”. On Easter Eve we shall sing “Ye choirs of new Jerusalem”, another medieval hymn from France that picks up where “The Royal Banners” left off. In their different ways, all the hymns we are exploring in these addresses owe a great deal to this one writer who teaches us what it means not only to commemorate but also to celebrate in Holy Week, and why we call the Friday of the crucifixion Good Friday.

The other stanzas of this great hymn adorn the “mystery” that shines out of the cross by weaving evocative poetry around the suffering of the man who hangs there. For one verse, Fortunatus lingers on the soldier’s spear and the precious flood of water mingled with the blood that flow out of the side of the crucified Christ as St John is careful to emphasise: precious because “the life is in the blood” as the Hebrew law says, and this life is given in the healing, life-giving sacraments that for all time will nourish the church as his new humanity.

But then the hymn writer launches into a passionate hymn of praise for the Holy Cross. O Tree of glory, Tree most fair, / Ordained those holy limbs to bear, / How bright in purple robe it stood, / The purple of a Saviour’s blood! By a brilliant figure of speech, gratitude for the ransom that has been won is transferred to the very object that is the source of the Saviour’s pain and agony. Far from being commemorated as an instrument of suffering, the cross has become an emblem of glory in its own right. This becomes even more extravagant in the poet’s other hymn “Sing my Tongue” in the stanza we know as Crux Fidelis: Faithful cross above all other, / One and only noble Tree, / None in foliage, none in blossom, / None in fruit thy peer may be; / Sweet the wood and sweet the iron, / And thy load, most sweet is he.

Devotion to the Holy Cross is a very ancient liturgical practice. In the liturgy of Good Friday we shall acclaim as the great Cross is brought into the Cathedral, “Behold the wood of the cross, on which the Saviour of the world is hung”. Soon afterwards, when it has been set up in full view of us all, we shall be invited to make our own personal devotion to it by touching it, embracing it, kissing it – in whatever way we want to pay our homage to the crucified Lord. I always find this intensely moving. So many emotions are gathered up for me at this symbolic Golgotha moment: sorrow, lament, repentance, pity, gratitude, rescue, and above all, love. How could the sacred cross not touch us and transform us for ever? How could it not draw out of us all the love we have to give in this most solemn Week? 

You may wonder where the good bishop Venantius Fortunatus got his theology from. After all, this extravagant poem in praise of the Tree of glory, Tree most fair is a thousand miles away from the agony and darkness of St Matthew and Mark with their desolate cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The answer is, he learned it from St John. We’ve already seen on Palm Sunday how “Ride on, ride on in majesty” culminates in a great acclamation of victory, “Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!” It’s in the same spirit as Fortunatus seeing into the heart of the passion and glimpsing How God the heathen’s king should be, for God is reigning from the Tree. In St John, Jesus often speaks about being “lifted up” and vindicated in “the “hour” that is coming, the hour of his death. He links the cross with exaltation and glory. “Now my soul is troubled” he says. “And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name!” And again, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself”. And at the end, when the agony is over, he cries out a single word in Greek, tetelestai: “it is accomplished”. The work is done. Redemption is achieved. On his throne of glory, the King is crowned.

This is why we pay homage, in this Week when we recognise once again who our King of glory is, and what he has made us: subjects, citizens who are a people of the cross and an Easter people, for whom Christ has died and ransomed us from the hells that threaten to devour us, for whom he has triumphed as the heavenly Victor who is forever our Champion and Advocate at the throne of grace. No wonder the hymn ends in a doxology of praise to God the Holy Trinity. For all that needed to be done has been finished. He has done all things well. There is nothing left for us to do but to worship the King all glorious above, and offer him all that we are as our act of wonder, love and praise.

Wakefield Cathedral, Tuesday in Holy Week 2017

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Vexilla Regis Prodeunt

The royal banners forward go;
The cross shines forth in mystic glow
Where He in flesh, our flesh who made,
our sentence bore, our ransom paid;

Where deep for us the spear was dyed,
Life's torrent rushing from His side.
To wash us in that precious flood
Of water mingled with the blood.

Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old;
How God the heathens' king should be,
For God is reigning from the Tree.

O Tree of glory, Tree most fair,
Ordained those holy limbs to bear,
How bright in purple robe it stood,
The purple of a Saviour's blood.

Upon its arms, like balance true,
He weighed the price for sinners due,
The price which none but he could pay,
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey.

O Cross, our one reliance, hail!
So may thy power with us avail
To give new virtue to the saint
And pardon to the penitent.

To Thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done
Whom by the cross Thou dost restore,
Preserve, and govern evermore.

Venantius Fortunatus, c530-600
Translated by John Mason Neale