Two years ago, at the last night of the Proms, Andreas Scholl received a tremendous ovation for his performance of the Song of Venus, that delicious ode to love, from Dryden’s King Arthur, set to music by Henry Purcell. The combination of romance and patriotism was hugely popular from the very beginning, and in the first half of the eighteenth century the song rose to dizzy heights in the hit parade of popular esteem. This stirred Charles Wesley a firm believer in the maxim that the devil should not have all the best tunes to adapt it to the celebration of a higher theme.
The adaptation is particularly pointed in the first four lines where Dryden’s
Fairest Isle, all Isles Excelling,
Seat of Pleasures and of Loves;
Venus here will chuse her Dwelling,
And forsake her Cyprian Groves.
becomes, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, if you didn’t already know:
Love Divine, all Loves excelling,
Joy of Heaven to Earth come down;
Fix in us Thy humble dwelling,
All Thy faithful mercies crown.
If Dryden then addressed his confident appeal to:
Cupid, from his Fav’rite nation
Care and Envy will Remove;
Jealousy that poysons Passion
And Despair that dies for Love.
Wesley addresses a no less passionate appeal to:
Jesu, Thou art all compassion
Pure unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with Thy salvation,
Enter every trembling heart.
Dryden continues in amorous vein:
Gentle murmurs, sweet complaining,
Sighs that blow the fire of love
and Wesley murmurs in a verse which is no longer sung:
Breathe, o breathe Thy loving Spirit
Into every trembling breast
Wesley takes Dryden’s theme of sensuous, delightful, love-making and, without diminishing it in any way, raises it at every turn to a higher spiritual level. Moreover, as is almost always the case with Wesley’s hymns, the text is full of scriptural references, mostly in this case to the throne room of heaven as pictured in the book of Revelation, but also referring to Paul’s concept of salvation by grace, our place in the new creation, and not least that glorious transformation, from one degree of glory to another, to which Paul refers in the passage from 2 Corinthians which was set as our second reading. The last lines of the hymn combine the Pauline and the Johannine visions as we sing:
Changed from glory into glory
Till in heaven we take our place
Till we cast our crowns before Thee
Lost in wonder, love and praise.
Moses’ face shone when he had been pleading with God on Mount Sinai for 40 days, pleading for mercy after the people had worshipped the golden calf, after he himself had angrily broken the first set of stone tablets with the ten commandments which he had brought down with him from the mountain; pleading for God to remain faithful to his people, to go with them as they travelled towards the promised land. Moses knew God as noone else had ever known God, he spoke to him so we are told – as we speak to one another, and the glory of God was reflected in his face as he came away. Moses needed no veil as he spoke to God, though God sheltered him in a cleft of the rock when his full glory passed by, but the people could not look even Moses in the eye when he had been speaking to God he had to cover his face.
Yet the covenant or promise which God made to his people in Moses’ time was fundamentally flawed, as Paul insists, because it depended on them finding the strength and determination within themselves to keep their side of the bargain by obeying the commandments they had been given. The covenant would be broken, again and again, the vision would fade, and the people who took possession of the promised land would ultimately overreach themselves and be driven into exile. So Paul’s point is this: if the old covenant, flawed as it was, nevertheless caused Moses’ face to shine when he had been talking to God, how much more gloriously should our faces shine when we have been in the presence of Jesus, whose life and death is the guarantee of the new covenant.
Thankfully, the new covenant, the new deal between us and God, which Jesus sealed by his death on the cross, does not depend on our efforts which must fail. It depends only on the love of God, which has never failed, and this makes it infinitely more glorious than anything even Moses could ever have known. The membrane which separates earth from heaven is perhaps not so impenetrable as we suppose. The disciples were witnesses to that on the mount of transfiguration. We cannot physically gaze at Jesus, as they did, but his Spirit is with us to help us recognise him, in the pages of scripture and in the love which reaches out to us from him, most often through the kindness of others. We cannot look straight at the sun, but Paul teaches that all of us, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor 3.18). Of course, if there is ever any glory for others to see, it is not our glory, but God’s glory, dimly reflected in our tarnished mirrors.
In Moses’ time the people of Israel were grateful for the cloud which hid God’s presence from them, and even for the veil which hid the reflection of God’s glory in Moses’ face. Our God is still full of dazzling majesty and overwhelming power, but the Cross teaches us that his glory also and equally finds expression in love and mercy and the utmost compassion. The wonder is that to-day, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, God our Father continually reveals glimpses of his glory in and through the lives, not just of his most prominent saints, but of all his faithful servants. And that includes you and me. If we can focus on Jesus our Lord, and learn from his example, if we can pray, as He did, Father glorify Thy name (John 12.28); if we really want any good we may do to bring glory to his name and not ours, then gradually there will be room for more and more of that brightness, that glory which is his signature, to be reflected in our lives. As we go about our daily lives in that spirit, we shall not know or need to know, but now and then, someone somewhere will catch a little glimpse of glory, and perhaps thank God for it. As Paul says, these little flashes of reflected glory, these little transfigurations, come from the Lord, the Spirit; to whom with the Father and the Son be all honour and glory, now and forever. Amen
Handley Stevens
Reference: Hymns as Homilies (Leominster: Gracewing) 1997, pp 65-71.