Holy Week in Hymns 5: "Praise to the Holiest in the height"

Tonight’s hymn is one of the best-known and best-loved in the English language. It’s by John Henry Newman whose long life stretched across almost the whole of the nineteenth century. He was a brilliant Church of England priest who, with John Keble and Edmund Bouverie Pusey played a formative part in the Oxford Movement that was launched in 1833. They were called Tractarians because they published their ideas in a series of ninety tracts which, circulated, read and discussed in every corner of the land, you could think of the equivalent of social media today.

The Tracts called for the return of the Church of England to the historic catholic Anglican position that stood “’gainst popery and dissent”. They believed these ideals had been upheld by the Christian fathers and by those we now call the high churchmen of the 17^th century in England. To them, both medieval catholicism and Reformation protestantism had departed from an ideal of Christian faith and life that the church urgently needed to rediscover. The Oxford Movement only lasted a dozen years in its original flowering. By the 1840s Newman was coming to the conclusion that the Church of England could never have the marks of what he held to be a truly catholic church. In 1845 he was received into the Church of Rome. He died as Cardinal Newman in 1890.

Praise to the Holiest is one of three familiar hymns by Newman, along with the endearing “Lead, kindly Light” written when he was still an Anglican, and “Firmly I believe, and truly” from the same source as tonight's hymn. That source is the celebrated poem Newman wrote in the 1860s, The Dream of Gerontius. The name, at least, will be familiar to many of you from Edward Elgar’s musical setting of it. It depicts the journey of a soul, an idea that at once gives it universal significance, for Gerontius, the dying man, is any of us and all of us. Memento mori, he is saying: remember you must die. None of us is exempt. As Jesus had to face death, so must we. Try not to be afraid of it. Learn what it means to die as a Christian. Let the example of Jesus on the cross inspire, comfort and sustain you.

The name Gerontius simply tells us that he is old: he has lived long and seen much. But age isn’t the point here: he stands for all of us. The Dream of Gerontius imagines his last journey. We meet him on his death bed praying to Jesus and Mary and being prayed for by his friends. Once he has died, his soul awakens to meet his guardian angel who will be with him on the path that lies before him. This takes him through the judgment court where the demons are assembling to “gather souls for hell”. But the hellish cacophony is dispelled by the choirs of angelicals whose unceasing praise of God Gerontius will one day join in. But not yet, not before he has been presented at the very throne of God. “Take me away” he cries, not because the vision isn’t unutterably beautiful, but because the holiness of God is too much for him. It is like looking into the sun. Overwhelmed, he realises that he is not yet ready for the beatific vision. So, filled with love for God, he is led gently into purgatory where God’s work of grace will be completed, so that when the time has come, his angel can return and lead him into heaven. “Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, and I will come and wake thee on the morrow.”

Praise to the Holiest is the hymn of praise sung by the angelicals as Gerontius nears the throne of God. And when you realise this, you see how beautifully it belongs in its context. For its theme is redemption through suffering, the pain that the dying man went through in his lifetime, and the coming pain his soul must courageously endure as it is perfected and made ready for his meeting with his holy God. But its focus is not Gerontius, not any of us mortals. Its gaze is firmly set on the crucified Christ who has both come to our rescue and has shown us in his example what it means to suffer for love’s sake, for the sake of the Almighty, the Wise and Loving God, the Holiest in the height.

The opening stanza captures the height and depth of God’s concerns: there must be praise not only to the Holiest in the height, but also in the depth be praise. This is because God’s words and works have demonstrated that he is both marvellous and trustworthy: In all his words most wonderful, Most sure in all his ways.

Newman goes on by pointing to where these words most wonderful and ways most sure are seen in their fulness. It is, he says, out of the loving wisdom of our God. In most of our passion hymns it’s God’s mercy and kindness that are emphasised. At this point in Newman’s hymn it is loving wisdom. That phrase says to me that the redemption of the world was the choice of a God who needed to put right a disordered world, restore what was lost at the beginning when a noble, beautiful creation was corrupted and broken by sin and shame. And so he sent a Redeemer to rescue the human race. Here we are close to last night’s Bishop Fortunatus and the heroic rescue that the Son of God has brought about. For he, the second Adam has come as flesh and blood to struggle with the adversary who caused that same flesh and blood to fail in Adam and his children. But now, in Jesus, flesh and blood should strive and should prevail -should, and can, and has done. So the word prevail hangs in the air at the end of the verse as if to say, here is a prevailing that will last for ever. You can trust it, for this second Adam will never fail, will never let you down.

The next verse explains why. Newman speaks about a higher gift than grace given to refine, to cleanse and purify our soiled flesh and blood. What is that gift? God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine. This is often taken to mean the gift of the Holy Sacrament, the everlasting sign of God’s presence here among us. I prefer to think of it as referring to the Incarnation, for the coming of Jesus imparts to our world nothing less than God’s very self, all that he is, all that he can ever be, now among us as flesh and blood to be broken, to be poured out for all humanity. What higher gift of grace could there be than the full incarnate reality that grace points to? This holy sacrament is precisely the divine gift for all of time that opens us up once more to the presence of the one who is the true Sacrament of God’s presence and his very self, the very Word incarnate.  

It’s the next two stanzas that point to what this higher gift than grace. They look back to the story of the Passion and make explicit what Newman had meant when he spoke about the second Adam coming to strive afresh against the foe. There, it was O wisest love! That is, I think, the resolve, the decision God has made to rescue lost humanity. But now it becomes O generous love! And this tells us what it was that prompted that decision. Grace, as theology understands it, is the choice God makes to act mercifully and kindly towards us, not holding our sins against us but seeing us as we are in Christ.

And, says the hymn, generous love entails that the second Adam, this immortal Man, can prevail only by being smitten himself, undergoing in his own self for mortals what every mortal knows he or she must undergo: this double agony of body and soul that The Dream of Gerontius lays bare so movingly. And like the height and the depth in the opening lines, Jesus models what it means to lay down his life, to suffer and to die in this heroic drama of redemption: And in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high. In the secret agony of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that the cup may pass from him. It does not. He was born for this destiny. The Son of Man must suffer many things, says the gospel. And so, alone because his disciples have abandoned him, he goes out to Golgotha, to be nailed on the Cross on high.

But the hymn has one further insight to help us make sense of the Passion. What the crucified Lord does, says Newman, is to teach his brethren, and inspire to suffer and to die. Here is the poet taking up another aspect of the cross which is this. When you have recognised how God’s grace has reached out to you at such cost, when you have seen what kind of conflict it took to ransom and reconcile you and make you the human being you were destined to be, ponder the example and live it out yourself.

So Newman ends by inviting us to contemplate the example of Jesus on the cross. Given the setting in Gerontius, he is certainly telling us what makes for “holy dying” as the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor put it. To die well is to accept the reality of death, prepare for it, focus on faith, hope and love, go thankfully and gently into that good night if we can. But to die well can have a redemptive effect on other people. I think Newman is telling us that we can be inspired to live, to suffer and to die as friends and companions to God and our fellow human beings, to be at peace with them, to be in a state of love like Jesus loved who, says the gospel, loved us to the end. Our own good deaths can be a gift to those who love us, just as Jesus’s has been.

It seems to me that two New Testament sayings are enfolded in these lines of Newman’s hymn. Jesus says that greater love means to lay down our lives “for our friends”. He also says that that to serve means imitating him who gave up his life “as a ransom for many”. Don’t these embody the redemptive power of goodness in the world when ordinary men and women like us want to try to make a difference to the lives of others? In such ways, in the strength God gives us when we most need it, we participate in striving afresh against the foe. We strive and we prevail, because of the double agony Jesus underwent for us - and because he prevailed. We are “more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

And in the paschal song of triumph we sing in this Great Week of our salvation, this marvellous hymn gives us the words to celebrate this wisest love, this generous love that brought into our very midst God’s presence and his very self. With the angels we praise the Holy One in the height and depth of creation and in the length and breadth of the story of our redemption: in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!

Wakefield Cathedral, Wednesday in Holy Week 2017

 

********

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
a second Adam to the fight
and to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
which did in Adam fail,
should strive afresh against the foe,
should strive, and should prevail;

and that the highest gift of grace
should flesh and blood refine:
God's presence and his very self,
and essence all-divine.

O generous love! that he who smote
in man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo.

And in the garden secretly,
and on the cross on high,
should teach his brethren, and inspire
to suffer and to die.

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

John Henry Newman, 1801-1890

 

 

Who is like God? A sermon for Michaelmas

Yesterday was Michaelmas Day.  It is a prince among seasons. I love it not just for the light and colour of autumn or because of my Christian name but because of the symbolic power of its themes. I was first a vicar in the parish of Alnwick where the whole town, not only the church, is under the protection of St Michael the Archangel.  At this festival the beautiful medieval church would overflow with Michaelmas daisies.  I left there to go to Coventry Cathedral, another hill-top church dedicated to St Michael, and persuaded the flower guild to do the same.  They were a bit sniffy at first and said that Michaelmas daisies were no better than weeds.  But in time they succumbed. After that I went to Sheffield Cathedral where I missed St Michael and his daisies, so the flower guild took pity on me and always put a vase of them on my office table for Michaelmas.  I have yet to work on Durham.

Who is Michael the mighty archangel?   That name asks a question in Hebrew: ‘Who is like God?’  It is a question, not a statement.  Angels are the Bible’s great questioners.  When an angel appears to Daniel and strengthens him, it is with a question: ‘do you know why I have come?  When the mysterious shadowy figure wrestles with Jacob in the dark, he asks him his name.  An angel in the book of Zechariah pesters the prophet with a full-scale catechism: ‘what do you see?’, ‘do you know what this is?’, ‘do you not know what these are?’  It’s as if God sends angels to tease us mortals with questions that are bigger than they seem. 

Who is like God?  The Book of Genesis says that we are made ‘like God’, in his image.  Early on, the Hebrews thought this measnt that human beings looked physically like him.  Later, the image of God came to mean being aware, knowing right and wrong, being male and female, recognising beauty, or being capable of thought and speech. But I think from the way Genesis tells the story, that the image of God is most closely linked to the idea of authority and dominion.  ‘God said, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air and over all the wild animals of the earth.”’  To be a man or a woman, in the Old Testament, means the care and responsibility for the world.  One of the psalms says: ‘the heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the children of men.’  And if ever we needed to take seriously the thought that we are stewards of this good earth, it’s now.  The threat of climate change has made it all to clear how fragile our planet is and how easily the human race could wreck the delicate fabric of the life it sustains, including our own.  

We are called then to hold dominion responsibly, on God’s behalf.  In the Book of Revelation, there is a passage that speaks of the archangel Michael as the mighty warrior who ‘takes dominion’ against evil.  He stands for salvation, truth and justice against all that is evil and false, all that comes from the adversary Satan, ‘the deceiver of the whole world’.  By throwing the dragon out of heaven, Michael re-enacts the creation battle of ancient myth where sea-monsters are defeated and the world comes into being.  So there is a new creation: the universe is saved from chaos and destruction, and restored to the order and goodness it had at first.  By the one who is like God, what was lost in the fall is won back, put right. 

So much for what is going on in heaven.  But now come down to earth.  This question ‘who is like God?’ looks beyond the archangel, for Michael is not alone in taking the victor’s crown.  In that same passage from Revelation, the victor’s crown also belongs to ‘our comrades’ whom Satan had accused night and day before God.  It is they ‘who have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death’.  It’s a beautifully drawn contrast between the huge apocayptic events taking place in the sky, and the human scale of what is happening on earth. The vast canvas on which the angelic conflict is fought out is mirrored in the personal victories won by individual people, the martyrs of Christ.  We can imagine how this picture of evil defeated in dimensions unseen would strengthen those facing persecution at that time. So the question ‘Who is like God?’ is answered in those who follow Jesus in the fiery ordeals of passion and death, who ‘bear witness’ at the cost of their lives.  Their suffering shows the true meaning of dominion.  ‘This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith’. 

Discipleship, said Jesus, is to be so free within yourself, so given up to God, so focused on the kingdom of heaven that you can contemplate losing your life in order to find it.  And whatever the way of the cross holds, it means having the inner soul of a martyr which is what a ‘witness’ literally is. I believe the New Testament sees the disciple as a potential martyr: to be baptised is to be ready to bear witness to Christ wherever it leads, whatever it costs. It’s a hard truth for us to hear, and I find it as tough as you do, wondering how on earth I have got myself into this, not only as a Christian but as a priest, a public representative of this way of living.  What else might we have done with our lives if we had not chosen this way of crucifixion that commits us to live courageously for truth and righteousness, to reject worldly power and success, to disown human glory? 

In the early church, when persecution subsided, many chose what came to be called ‘white’ martyrdom, by entering monasteries as a way of dying to the world.  Perhaps baptism is a kind of white martyrdom, where being a Christian is unusual, eccentric, bizarre, an offence against the lazy tolerance that does not like the idea that truth is something you might not only live for but die for. There are many who have and they inspire us to this day: St Francis embracing Lady Poverty and kissing the leper; St Martin giving his cloak to the beggar; St Cuthbert turning his back on what comforts he knew to live alone on the Inner Farne and fight evil through his prayers; St Therese, the ‘Little Flower’, full of simplicity and purity, a young girl’s life offered to God’s love; Mother Maria Pilenko stepping into the queue to go into the gas chamber in the place of a frightened old woman.  It is stories like these that make me realise that Christianity is true. 

I am nowhere near it, though on my better days I do want to be, I do want to live a life that has this single focus of loving God with all my heart and being.  You become like the gods you worship, said a Roman philosopher.  The issue is, whom do we worship, what do we put first in our lives?  So this question, ‘who is like God?’ must be the question for all of us who want be serious about Christianity.  How do we live up to our name and bear faithful witness to Jesus so that our dominion reflects his own everlasting reign?  For if the demons that stalk this world are to be conquered, and the storms that threaten to overwhelm it are to be stilled: if people are to feel after God and find him, so much turns on how we live out our discipleship.  I ask myself the question, if you were up in court on a charge of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? 

Jesus calls us to lay aside everything that stops us giving ourselves to this great project of the Christian life.  For God walks the earth and looks for those who will bring in the just and gentle rule of Christ.  He asks us the archangel’s question Mi-cha-el, who is like God, who will take the dominion of Jesus and bear God’s grace and truth to our world?  He waits for our answer, and only God knows what it will be.