Articles - From the Vicar

Around fifty years ago, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth suggested that the angels, when entertaining each other, played Mozart; when praising God, however, they played only Bach. If Barth was right, the ten days before Christmas on Radio 3 would have pleased God mightily. The schedules were cleared and uninterrupted Bach filled the airwaves, day and night, in unceasing tribute to a composer of whom the art historian Roger Fry said: 'he almost persuades me to be a Christian.' Bach himself wrote that 'the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul'.

Bach's music has been a constant companion on my own journey with God. During the days before Christmas I found myself especially moved when listening to his two great settings of the Gospel accounts of Christ's final hours, the St. Matthew and the St. John Passions. Hearing these works in the days before Christmas, rather than in their more natural context of Lent, gave me fresh insight into the mystery of Emmanuel, God with us. The manger and the cross cannot be separated if we are truly to understand the depth of God's love for his world: the angels' Glory to God above the Bethlehem hills had no answering echo in the crowd's 'crucify him' as Jesus travelled the road to Calvary.

These February days between Candlemas and Ash Wednesday, between the end of the Epiphany season and the beginning of Lent, offer an opportunity to reflect on the paradoxical truth that it is in an animal's manger and on a criminal's cross that we see the glory of God and the folly of human pretension.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay