Triple C News - APRIL 7
Hey, everyone,
Wouldn’t you have loved to have heard it??
In Mark 14, verse 26, it says that Jesus and His follower friends “sang a hymn” together before they left the home where they had passed their last hours before His sufferings.
We know what songs filled that hall and those hearts.
Like the carols we love at Christmas, at Passover, Psalm 113 through 118 were the songs of the Season for all!
How I would have loved to have heard Him sing!
When John, who had followed the words of Jesus for so many years, one day heard His beautiful voice again, he wrote that it was “as the sound of many waters”!
When Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his amazing “St Matthew Passion” about the sufferings of Jesus taken from Matthew’s telling of it, there are plenty of sopranos and tenors but the one who sings His beautiful words has the voice of the deepest heart-breaking bass!
In C S Lewis’ brilliant kids’ book The Magician’s Nephew, he tells the story of the beginning of Narnia.
A Lion had begun to sing!
“…It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself...It was beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…”
There is a place in the darkest of all days, when Jesus in darkness was taking our place…
when His voice was heard in unexpected strength, calling
“My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me?”
The title that the centuries have given to this moment is “the cry of dereliction”.
And surely it was.
In ways that are deeper and darker than the human mind or heart can reach, Almighty God the Son was bearing the estrangement from the Father of Love so that we might never know this banishment though we are the ones who deserve it.
And yet, I believe that even then…
Jesus was singing.
These words of His come from the first lines of Psalm 22.
And all the Psalms were songs they sang.
Many believe that Jesus was reciting to Himself Psalm 22 through to Psalm 31, which He would also quote.
You can’t really remember the lyrics to songs you know without singing them.
You sing them to remember them.
“But how could He sing in a moment so sorrowful?”
Maybe it’s because there was something He wanted to remember.
Something He sang to remember.
In that ancient Psalm and song, written two thousand years before the day of His suffering…
as He sang of those gambling for His clothes after they had so cruelly “pierced My hands and feet” (Psalm 22:16-18)…
the song continues…
“From You comes My praise in the great congregation…
those who seek Him shall praise the Lord!…
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before you!” (Psalm 22:25-27)
He sang from His cross to remember in His pain that because of that day another day would come when around the world men and women, boys and girls from “all nations and tribes, all races and languages” would sing together of our love for Him!
Jesus sang and died and rose
to have your heart…
your love…
your song.
Good Friday service tonight at 7:00