Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

Sunday Singing: Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord

“Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord” performed by The Redeemer Choir of Austin, Texas

This week’s hymn of ascension is a new one, as hymns go. Edmund P. Clowney (1917-2005) taught practical theology and was the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He published this hymn, based on Psalm 24, in 1987.

The tune, about a hundred years older, is by the Irishman Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. You’ll notice it’s different than many hymn tunes in its triumphal openness. Each verse ends on a high note, perhaps to lift our heads up to Christ above us. With that it doesn’t feel neatly wrapped. It feels as if it anticipates more to come.

The words are under copyright, so I will copy only the first verse here.

Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord,
to search the mystery in heaven stored,
the knowledge of the Holy One adored?
Alleluia!

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.

Sunday Singing: Unto My Lord Jehovah Said

“Unto my Lord Jehovah said” piano accompaniment of the Elbing tune

This arrangement of Psalm 110 first appeared in the Irish Psalter of 1898. It’s paired with the Elbing tune in the Trinity Hymnal, which I’ve shared above, but other hymnals arrange this text with at least two more tunes.

I offer it here today in that strange Palm Sunday attitude of singing praise to Christ the King, even as the Jerusalem crowds shouted Hosanna in ignorance. They didn’t know the irony of their words. They wanted Jesus of Nazareth to be a political king who would overthrown Rome, but he was the king of kings whose kingdom was not of this world.

1 Unto my Lord Jehovah said:
At my right hand I throne thee,
till, at thy feet in triumph laid,
thy foes their ruler own thee.
From Zion hill the Lord shall send
thy scepter, till before thee bend
the knees of proud rebellion.

2 Thy saints, to greet thy day of might,
in holy raiment muster;
as dewdrops in the morning light
thy youths around thee cluster.
The Lord hath sworn and made decree,
thou, like Melchizedek, shalt be
a kingly priest for ever.

3 The Lord at thy right hand shall bring
on rulers desolation;
the Lord shall smite each heathen king,
and judge each rebel nation.
He, swiftly marching in his wrath,
shall quaff the brook upon his path,
and lift his head in glory.

As an alternative, let me also share this 9th century French hymn, “Gloria, laus et honor,” performed by Harpa Dei.

Sunday Singing: Rejoice, the Lord Is King!

“Rejoice, the Lord Is King!” sung by the congregation of Grace Community Church,
Sun Valley, California

The great Charles Wesley gave us today’s hymn. “Rejoice, the Lord Is King!” focuses our attention on his perfect majesty and our glorious hope. The Trinity hymnal has an extra verse, which is also in some of the oldest hymn texts I checked, so I assume Wesley wrote it too.

As a man said on his dying day, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

1 Rejoice, the Lord is King:
Your Lord and King adore!
Rejoice, give thanks and sing,
And triumph evermore.

Refrain: Lift up your heart,
Lift up your voice!
Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!

2 Jesus, the Savior, reigns,
The God of truth and love;
When He has purged our stains,
He took his seat above; [Refrain]

3 His kingdom cannot fail,
He rules o’er earth and heav’n;
The keys of death and hell
Are to our Jesus giv’n: [Refrain]

4 He sits at God’s right hand
’til all his foes submit,
and bow to his command,
and fall beneath his feet. [Refrain]

5 Rejoice in glorious hope!
Our Lord and judge shall come
And take His servants up
To their eternal home: [Refrain]

Sunday Singing: Fairest Lord Jesus

Taken from “Fairest Lord Jesus” performed at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the St. Olaf Choir

This month, I plan to post hymns focused on Christ Jesus. “Fairest Lord Jesus” was written anonymously and set to a Polish folk tune. Franz Liszt used the tune in a crusaders’ march in The Legend of St. Elizabeth, which is apparently the most concrete thing that can be said about its origin.

1 Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature,
Son of God and Son of Man!
Thee will I cherish, thee will I honor,
thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown.

2 Fair are the meadows, fair are the woodlands,
robed in the blooming garb of spring:
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer,
who makes the woeful heart to sing.

3 Fair is the sunshine, fair is the moonlight,
and all the twinkling, starry host:
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
than all the angels heav’n can boast.

4 Beautiful Savior! Lord of the nations!
Son of God and Son of Man!
Glory and honor, praise, adoration,
now and forevermore be thine.

The Prince of Peace Has Come, Yet We Have Little Peace

The Christmas concert my church choir performed this year featured Vivaldi’s Gloria. The video above is the second movement, “Et in Terra Pax,” performed by the Oxford Schola Cantorum and Northern Chamber Orchestra.

“Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.”
And in earth peace to men of good will.

Vivaldi set these words to rather unpeaceful music. It has a dreadful plodding to it, as if we fear the coming of terra pax. Its slow tension is a beautiful metaphor for knowing the Prince of Peace has come and yet feeling our lack of peace throughout our lives. We long for the peace that has come, Lord. How long?

Of the increase of his government and of peace
  there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

   to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

   from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 6:7 ESV)

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.

Seraphic Fire performs “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” by Elizabeth Poston

This traditional Christmas carol would fit well during apple season, in September or October when many of us look for cider at a farmers market or visit orchards to pick or buy Jonagolds, Mitzus, and Arkansas Blacks off the trees around us.

Eric Hollas has a beautiful story of the apple trees his father tended in the inhospitable climate of Oklahoma City.

So it was that each autumn we ate apples until we grew tired of them.  And when it was clear that we’d eat no more, he turned to pies.  Late into the night, night after night, he peeled apples relentlessly, while my bemused mother baked on and on.  Our kitchen became a pie factory, and by the end of the season there could be eighty or a hundred pies in the freezer.

“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” has been found in print from 1761 and possibly a bit earlier, attributed to Rev. Richard Hutchins, a clergyman of Northamptonshire, England.

The Word Was Made Flesh, Merry Christmas

This is the real meaning of Christmas: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 ESV).

This does not mean God posed as a man for a few years, casting an illusion on everyone in order to influence them with well-spoken sermons.

It does not mean God sent his spirit into a man for a time, having found someone who was sufficiently humble to indwell for divine purposes.

It does not mean that God actually is a man who lives eternally on another plane but for a season he came to Earth to do things.

It also does not mean that Jesus was only a man who connected dots like no one before him and introduced some darn good principles to Western civilization.

It does not mean that a uniquely spiritual man called on divine power to perform marvelous works and speak with wisdom beyond the scope of mortal reason.

Those ideas are a bit easier to understand. The truth is beyond us. Christ Jesus, born as a child to a poor, virgin woman, was the Word of God from the beginning, both with God and actually God. The invisible, eternal God became a mortal man. That doesn’t make complete sense to us, but it is the only hope for ourselves and all the world.

Merry Christmas.

Searching for a Better Conspiracy

I’ve heard a little about QAnon in the wild, primarily that one of my congressional candidates has favorable views on it. World’s current cover story reports the rising concerns among Christians over friends and family members who profess to believe in the QAnon conspiracy. As I understand it, they believe an secret society of Satanists is running the world or pushing toward an evil one world government and Donald Trump is the chosen one to defeat them. I’ve read that he has already defeated many of them in secret ways the public may never know.

“In the pandemic lockdown, QAnon accounts exploded in popularity as people spent more time online,” Emly Belz writes. “Many Christians have sunk so deeply into Q that it fills a lot of their conversations and most of their time online.”

The theories spun are the sticky, tangled kind. I don’t want to try to refute specific claims here, but I do want to talk about conspiracy theories in general, their uselessness, and how they run contrary to what we know of human nature. First, let’s look at what conspiracies actually are.

You could easily come to think a conspiracy theory is just wild hare, an elaborate explanation for a particular disaster with an unsatisfactory explanation or a series of unthinkable events. The Kennedy assassination, the Zodiac killer, and why Firefly was cancelled are prime subjects for theories like this. The official explanations are either incomplete or unsatisfactory, so some people construct better theories.

Conspiracy theories argue that the powerful have fed us these incomplete explanations because the lie is better than the truth at maintaining the status quo. They remain theories because investigators cannot unearth enough facts to prove them; if the claims were to be revealed as true, we would call start called the theories “history.”

The world’s most famous actual conspiracy led to the death of Christ. Temple leaders, including the high priest, wanted Jesus of Nazareth dead for political, and ultimately spiritual, reasons. They were powerful men, but they didn’t have that kind of power. If Herod or Pilate or Caesar Tiberius had wanted him dead, they could have given the order, but the high priest didn’t have the power to execute people. Plus he didn’t have the backing of all of the temple leaders. Plus the optics weren’t right; too many people loved this wandering rabbi. So a few of them conspired behind the backs of other temple leaders to conduct a mock trial, get him before Pilate, lobby for his execution, and have him dead before Monday. That’s a conspiracy.

The Gunpowder Plot that launched the face of a thousand Guy Fawkes was an attempt to blow up the House of Lords with the king and many supporters with it. They had to plot in secret because they didn’t have any real power to direct or overthrow their own government. They had to try unexpected brute force. What they should have tried was some explosive ideas, but with all of this gunpower lying around, why let it go waste?

This is how conspiracies actually work (or don’t). These secret cabals didn’t have the power to accomplish their goals outright, so they did what they could in the shadows. Compare that to modern day China murdering and abusing the Uighurs for the last few years. They aren’t conspiring against them; they are directly abusing them and lying to the world about it. The only secret is what the outside world knows about it. This is not like the QAnon claims of the powerful directing our society through shadow strings, celebrity endorsements, and trafficking networks. We’ll get to a better explanation in another post.

As Abe Lincoln’s first VP, Hannibal Hamlin, famously said, “Once the twenty-four news gets ahold of this, there’ll be a conspirator in every pew. Verily.”

Photo by Mohammad Hoseini Rad on Unsplash

Ascension Day


Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome 1510 – 20

It’s Ascension Day, a very important feast in the Christian calendar, which (like so many important feasts) is little noticed today.

I read something in one of Francis Schaeffer’s books a long time ago that left an impression on me. I’m pretty sure he was citing someone else. The idea was that the importance of the Ascension is (at least in part) that it proclaims the physical existence of Heaven. According to the testimony of witnesses, Jesus had (after the Resurrection) an actual body that could be touched and consumed food. And that body went somewhere. Not to a “philosophical other,” but to some place where bodies can live.

It’s part of our hope of eternity.

Happy Ascension Day.