St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

This is from the archives of my old LiveJournal, drawn (and slightly adapted) from two postings in December 2008 that mostly dealt with other matters:

The Prologue to the Gospel according to St. John is appointed for the third set of Eucharistic lessons for Christmas, and for the First Sunday after Christmas Day. It is how Christmas appears after long reflection – not the surprise of hearing the song of Angels, or running to the manger, or the darker tales soon to be heard from St. Matthew, but an attempt, long after the fact, to put into words what it all means.

I can imagine St. John, now far advanced in years, struggling to catch in words what the Spirit has shown him as the proper way to begin his account, so unlike the other Gospels that he surely knew: words about the Word, the Logos, the “brightness of (God's) glory, and the express image of his person” as the writer of Hebrews says (1:3), and the manifestation of God's love, as in the Matins lesson for Christmas Day from First John (4:7-16). “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. . . . full of grace and truth.”

It is too good to be true. But it is, nonetheless, true. It, or rather He, is Himself the Truth, come among us.

Since today is his feast day, here is my uneducated layman's theory about the origins of the Gospel according to St. John. I presume that the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine epistles (and, less certainly, the Apocalypse) are by John, son of Zebedee, the “beloved disciple,” and that the Gospel faithfully recounts the historical deeds, “signs,” and teachings of Jesus, as do the synoptic Gospels. Differences in detail between John and the Synoptics do not strike me as problematic; I think the differences are the point of the whole enterprise. I do not see any reason to suppose a different author of the Fourth Gospel, other than the perversity of the modern liberal Biblical scholars (nineteenth century and onwards) who must find a way to deconstruct everything.

St. John was, by tradition, young during the ministry of Jesus. Again by tradition, he lived to a very old age, perhaps in Ephesus. By his last years, the synoptic Gospels were in circulation. I can imagine him reading them, and thinking “Yes. This is all well and good. But what about. . . .” What about the miracle at Cana? The discussion with Nicodemus? That day by the well in Samaria? The raising of Lazarus? Or the Last Supper – they recorded the bare facts, but what about all the things that Jesus said that night? How could they leave that out? And Mary Magdalene at the tomb on Easter morning? And that morning when he was on the shore, and said to Peter “Feed my sheep?”

I can imagine all of this nagging at John, year after year, in the way that the Spirit often does with us when we resist doing something that we should. “Maybe I ought to write some of this down,” he thinks. And so, finally, he does. He sees little need to cover the ground that the Synoptics covered, and when he does, he goes out of his way to give it the way he remembers it, especially when it differs from the way they wrote it; he assumes that readers of his account will have theirs at hand, and will gain a fuller understanding of what happened, and what it meant, from the differences in the accounts. He is presenting only enough to help people believe (20:30-31). He is not attempting to tell the complete story; it cannot be done. For, as he says, “there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” (21:25)

An aside: I take the absence of a Johannine account of the Nativity as a support for Luke's account. According to tradition, John shared his household with the one person who knew more about these events than any other, one who had "kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart"(Luke 2:19). If John had reason to think that Luke (or for that matter Matthew) were wrong, he would have probably given his own version, or rather, a version that was more concerned with detail than John 1:1-18. As it stands, his silence on this implies agreement. [If St. John the Divine is the same as the Apostle and Evangelist, one might take Revelation 12 as an account of the Nativity and the Flight into Egypt, as well as a comment on the woman whom he had taken into his household as his mother: "a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." Verse 4 can easily be compared with Matthew 2:13-18]

As to how all of this results in divinely inspired Holy Scripture, and (apart from its other virtues) a masterpiece of the world's literature from the hand of an uneducated fisher-of-men, I do not know, understand, or dare to conjecture, beyond noting Acts 4:13:

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.


I cannot imagine life without the Gospel according to St. John. I can easier imagine life without sun or moon.

Christmas Day: Hang on, and enjoy the ride

On this day earth shall ring
With the song children sing
to the Lord, Christ our King,
born on earth to save us;
him the Father gave us.
Ideo-o-o, Ideo-o-o-
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

Pencilled into my score is the admonition “LH bench.” This means to hang on to the bench with my left hand in order to get through this hymn with right hand and feet. We have it in our hymnal with its tune Personent hodie in the arrangement by Gustav Holst, and we sing it most every year on Christmas Day in the morning. The descending scale in D major which opens the piece is challenging, and the pedal part continues to bounce along through the hymn. Often as not, I miss quite a few of the notes.

It is enormous fun.

I was wrong in my previous entry when I claimed that December 25 is just another work day. How can it be, when it is our Lord's Nativity?

Sing, O sing, this blessed morn,
unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is giv'n,
God himself comes down from heav'n
Sing, O sing, this blessed morn,
Jesus Christ today is born.

Sure, there is work to be done. Once I finish my bread, cheese, and tea (I eat and drink it as I write these words) I must get back on the bench and prepare for tomorrow. I am playing settings of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen and Antioch (Joy to the World) by Kenton Coe and Emma Lou Diemer, and both need one more solid workout; it should take me about an hour. They are worth it; there is, for example, a special moment in the K. Coe where, after a pages-long buildup, we get to the refrain:

O tidings of comfort and joy!

It is glorious, worthy of these words of grace. Not many people play this music (the K. Coe setting), which is unpublished; I am pleased and honored that I am one of them.

It is not just another work day, for after the Nativity, work can never be the same. It is no longer the curse laid upon Adam and his sons, for in Christ, Duty and Delight become one, as my teacher Erik Routley liked to say.

No more let sins or sorrows grow,
Or thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

We had interesting services last night and today. At the early Christmas Eve service, two of our youth choir alumnae were back to sing with us. J. and her brother got here first, and when M. came in, J. leapt up, ran to the back of the room, and hugged her as if they had been apart for months, these two friends. As indeed they have. I almost burst into tears just to see it.

At one point in the hymns, I made a howler of a mistake, playing a chord from a different key than the one we were in. Y., one of our trebles, gave me a quizzical look: “Where did THAT come from?” All I could do was laugh, and be glad that someone was paying attention. She is an intelligent and talented girl, and whatever she does in life, it is likely to be good. I am glad for such people in the choir. Later on at the end of my postlude, her little brother came up and gave me their Christmas present; a chocolate-covered pretzel and a box of English Breakfast Tea.

Our big anthem, “Hope for Resolution” (which the RSCM readers of these pages will know), went well. I worked hard on the accompaniment after playing it badly last year, and did better this time, as did they. I wish we had the drums – I had a good lead this year on a drummer, but he and his family went to Minneapolis for the holidays. We have a good drummer in the choir, E., but we needed him to sing rather than drum. We had four fine young choirmen in the back row on tenor and bass, and they acquitted themselves well. I am proud of them, and find it hard to believe that they are so grown up.

The early Christmas service is the near-exact analogue to our normal Sunday “contemporary” service. It has become our largest Christmas Eve service by far, more than double the size of the Midnight Mass. This, in turn, is analogous to our Sunday Choral Eucharist, with choir and organ. A decade ago, the Midnight service packed the church; now, there are lots of empty seats, and the early service is the one with a capacity crowd. I am always sad about this, increasingly so as the Midnight service continues its decline. Would that all three services had capacity crowds. But (at midnight) the adult choir sang very well, and our instrumental group, “The (mostly) Brass Quintet,” going without their horn player who had slid off into a snowdrift on the way into town, added the dignity that only a (mostly) brass group can. Their fanfares for “O come, all ye faithful” and “Hark, the herald angels sing” were all that they should be, and their playing of the Schubert Sanctus (from the German Mass: S-130 in the Episcopal hymnal) and Stille Nacht were sublime. Missing the horn, they had to cancel their half hour of prelude music. I can attest that they were well prepared, for I heard most of their Thursday evening rehearsal.

This morning's Mass for Christmas Day is the analogue of our “eight-o'clock” spoken service. We had well over two hundred at the “contemporary” service last night, and about one hundred at the Midnight service; this morning's congregation numbered twenty-nine. But the priest was our distinguished Fr. H., who genuflects at the Words of Institution and says the Agnus Dei even though we aren't supposed to in this parish for anything except a Rite One service. I thought he was going to launch us into the Confession and Absolution, also notably absent from our services during the Twelve Days. There was certainly a long pause at that point, and I think he was considering the possibility. There are advantages to being old enough to not care what anyone thinks.

It was a happy and good service with the no-nonsense feel of a good Anglican eight-o'clock liturgy.

And now, back to work:

Oh, may thy house be mine abode,
And all my work be praise....

....
To those who read these pages, my grateful thanks and greetings. May all of you have a most blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Remind me why we are doing this

After describing his insanely busy schedule for Christmas Eve and the following two days, one of my musical colleagues wrote: “Remind me why we are doing this.”

Most years, I start to sense the answer to that question during our annual Advent Lessons and Carols service. It is the choir's only big event of the year, and a service I greatly enjoy from the first planning stages to the execution of it. The choir sang very well, and I played tolerably well. But not even the singing of “Joy to the world” as the final hymn could do it for me this year.

If not then, perhaps it would be when the Daily Office lessons get around to the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, after the Fourth Sunday of Advent. This is always a high point in the liturgical year for me; we have by then traversed much of Advent, heard much about our need for a Savior, and at last the Story comes to it: “There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth....”

I can deal with Advent. It is a time that requires discipline, more in its way than Lent. And this has been a good Advent; necessity has improved some of my work habits (though at the expense of some other things, such as writing in this Music Box). It has resulted in better organ playing in the services, and fewer important tasks left undone. I have been “purify[ing] my conscience” of much that is slovenly “that when [he] cometh he may find in [me] a mansion prepared for himself” more so this year than in any year that I can recall.

But in my efforts to lead a disciplined life, I often become too busy for Christmas, at least in any form that most people would recognize. December 25 is just another work day, and a hard one, for it comes on the heels of too many late nights, too little sleep, and is followed this year by another long day, a Sunday. I love the Daily Office lessons, and the return of the Te Deum at Matins, and I sing the Gloria in Excelsis for myself, since we do not get to do it in the Eucharist. And perhaps this is enough. But I find myself battling that deadly foe, Envy. Other people take time off, even members of the church staff; I can't, not if I am to play the Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch" for Evensong on January 2 and be ready for choir rehearsals on January 5. Other people have family and friends. Other people have wonderful, perfect Christmases full of love and happiness.

So, “remind me why we are doing this.”

-- After reading this morning of the Annunciation, followed by St. Mary rising with haste to go into the hill country of Judea, a passage that continues with the Magnificat, I did a workout at the organ of the Magnificat from Stanford in A, for tonight's choir rehearsal. The sheer infectious joy of this setting, combined with memories of the morning's reading, was enough to undo even a Scrooge like me. The first Christmas was neither leisurely nor pleasant for Our Lady, yet she sings Magnificat and the undoing of the old world of sin and death. Can I not fulfill my office as Organist to participate in her song, and enable others as well?

-- In the midst of this, two little children of the parish and their mother came in. The children presented me with a pint jar of cranberry-orange relish, which, they told me, they had made. The little girl, whom I expect to join choir when she is old enough, gave me a thorough listing of ingredients.

-- After Stanford, I started on “Hark, the herald angels sing,” in the arrangement by Willcocks found in Carols for Choirs, complete with the big optional fanfare at the beginning and the descant setting for the final stanza. That did it; I was so overcome that I could hardly play to the end.

Hail, the heav'n-born prince of peace!
Hail, the Sun of righteousness!
Ris'n with healing in his wings,
Light and life to all he brings!

Even to me.