Now Advent Can Begin!

Just as Christmas cannot begin (for some people) until the Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College, Cambridge have been read and sung, so I cannot begin Advent until I have heard the Nine Lessons and Carols at St Johns College (also Cambridge). I listened to them today on the BBC Radio Three. 

The high mark of the service (for me) is the singing of the wonderful advent hymn, "Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending" (at roughly the 90 minute mark of the service). Each year in my Worldview and Culture class, I introduce my students to this hymn, with its linking of the birth of the baby with the return of the King in power and great glory.

Lo! he comes with clouds descending, once for favoured sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! God appears, on earth to reign.

 

Every eye shall now behold him robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at nought and sold him, pierced and nailed him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, Deeply wailing, Deeply wailing, Shall the true Messiah see.

 

Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears,
Cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshippers:
With what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture, gaze we on those glorious scars!

 

Yea, Amen! let all adore thee, high on thine eternal throne;
Saviour, take the power and glory: claim the kingdom for thine own:
O come quickly! O come quickly! O come quickly!
Alleluia! Come, Lord, come!

 

As I tell my students, this hymn contains possibly the most terrifying lines in English: "Those who set at naught and sold him, pierced and nailed him to the tree, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see." My BIC and Mennonite training shrinks from the image of God's judgment, but Scripture holds divine love and wrath together in a seamless whole -- and so must we.

In Charles Wesley's original, there were more verses: how many, I am not sure. This website gives seven. In my class, I contrast verse three above with Penn State fight songs. [For context, in the previous period I had introduced my students to the phenomenon of school spirit via university songs -- a phenomenon that leaves my Canadian students, for whom school spirit is an alien concept, shaking their heads.] "Fight on State" contains the words, "we'll hit that line, roll up the score, fight on for victory ever more, fight on, Penn State!" I have a recording of the Men's Glee Club singing vigorously at Homecoming, and it is stirring stuff!

Contrast this ethos -- when you're ahead, finish 'em off! -- with the hymn: "Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body wears." God's omnipotence revealed through Christ's ultimate weakness. "With what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars!" In the recent American election, Trump's refusal to concede flows from a conviction that any weakness is unacceptable. In the hymn, God's power glories in Christ's death! Weakness is in our blood. We rejoice in and embrace our own weakness as Christ takes it into his own death.

I could go on, but close with some links to youtube versions of this wonderful advent hymn:

The Cambridge Singers (a wonderful rendition with brass, but omitting verse three)

Saint John's College (1994: perhaps the original that I first heard, but omitting verse three)

Saint John's College (2015: with verse three, and with a descant that blew me away)