Text: the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb (Rev 21.23)
According to our recent parish survey, we attach a very high value to the place of music in our worship, we would like more time for personal reflection and prayer, and we would also like a shorter service. Faced with these conflicting messages, I thought it might be helpful to consider why we invest time in listening to musical settings of the Gloria, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, when we could save time by just saying them. I’m going to start with the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, and come back to the Gloria.
The Sanctus and the Agnus Dei are embedded in the Eucharistic prayer, by which we give thanks for all that God has done for us. The first part of the prayer focuses on the role of God the Father, who created all things, forming us in his own image as beings capable of love, as he is love. We thank God the Father for the gift of Jesus, his only Son, who has rescued us by his life and death from the sinfulness to which we so easily succumb, and restored in each one of us the image of his glory, the face of the unique child of God, utterly ourselves and yet stamped with his likeness. As we reflect on this narrative of God’s saving action, we are drawn into the company of angels and archangels, and all the saints who have gone before us to worship around the throne of God in heaven. Holy, holy, holy Lord. The poetic imagery of the Sanctus, our hymn of joy and thanksgiving, draws heavily on the language of St John’s vision of heaven in chapter 4 of the book of Revelation. Sometimes the awe of that dazzling vision causes the music to almost hold its breath, at other times it overwhelms us with waves of exuberant joy and thanksgiving, especially at the end when we respond with cries of Hosanna in excelsis, Hosanna in the highest.
The Eucharistic prayer moves on to recall Christ’s institution of the feast of holy communion, at the last supper with his disciples. We are commanded to take part in that feast, as a perpetual reminder of his death and resurrection. As a sign of our fellowship with him and with all Christian people gathered around his table, we say the Lord’s prayer together. We then return as it were to the throne room of heaven to meditate on the image of Jesus, as the Lamb of God – Agnus Dei – who takes away the sin of the world, and is now enthroned with his Father in heaven. In this church we are fortunate to have a picture of the lamb of God in the stained glass window above the altar. We can use it, if we wish, to focus our attention as we kneel before the mystery of Christ’s saving action, preparing ourselves to receive in the bread and the wine that gracious presence of his Body and His Blood, by which His spirit dwells in us and we in Him. The music of the Agnus Dei is usually intensely devotional. The theme is often repeated, as the words themselves are repeated, and usually the musical conclusion gently resolves any discords, as it gives expression to our prayer for peace – dona nobis pacem. Alternatively the music may celebrate the granting of peace with a final flourish of joy and praise.
I think most of us find we can relate fairly easily to the singing of the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. The music of the Sanctus generally gives expression to that sense of awe with which we contemplate what God has done for us, whilst the Agnus Dei helps us to express the more personal prayers and longings with which we approach the Lord’s table.
The Gloria may be more of a challenge. It used to come at the very end of the service, as a final act of praise and thanksgiving. Now it comes at the start of the service, after confession and absolution, when our minds may still be busy with all sorts of other preoccupations. It may be relatively long, and we may not be comfortable standing up. When it’s sung in Latin, the words are harder to follow than the Sanctus or the Agnus Dei. But I’d like to suggest that listening attentively to the Gloria can really help us to get into the right frame of mind to take part in the Liturgy of the Word which follows.
There is, I would suggest, quite a large gap between the values of the world which surround us in our daily lives, and the values of the Gospel. And we are all infected. Most of us would admit that it is important to us to be successful, and to enjoy the good opinion of our peers, as well as the rewards and the life style that goes with it. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. I am sure Jesus worked hard as a carpenter. I hope he was decently paid and widely respected in his community for the work he did. But we owe our primary allegiance, as he did, to another kingdom where what matters is something else – our obedience to God’s will for us, our fulfilment of the destiny he has envisaged, shaped by his love for us and for those we are called to serve.
The Gloria speaks to us of that other city which has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. It begins with the song of glory with which the angels greeted the shepherds on the day that Christ was born. It then falls into three verses. First we have a hymn of praise to God the Father – Lord God, heavenly King … we praise you for your glory. Then we have a prayer addressed to Jesus, Lord God, Lamb of God, in which the glory he now enjoys at the right hand of the Father is linked to the sacrifice he made for us on the cross. This in turn gives rise to a final verse of Trinitarian praise and thanksgiving, addressed to the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father.
Even if it is sometimes hard to pick out exactly where we have got to when the Gloria is sung in Latin, it is usually possible to identify those three verses of praise, prayer and a return to yet more triumphant praise. And while we are being carried along by the music, there is time to reflect on the nature of glory. The references to the Incarnation at the beginning, and to the Cross in the middle verse are not accidental. They are absolutely central to our Christian understanding of what constitutes true glory. In the Incarnation God laid aside the glory of his divinity to become human. On the Cross he went still further in allowing himself to appear utterly defeated, shamed, even abandoned by God, if that was what it took to rescue us, for love’s sake, from the tyranny of our fatal intoxication with glory as it is more commonly understood. If God’s glory is revealed in the laying aside of the glory that was his by right, then we should not be surprised to experience something similar in our own lives when, as his followers, we distance ourselves from the values by which glorious success is more commonly measured.
What better preparation can there be for the liturgy of the Word? It takes a real effort to get ourselves into the right frame of mind to receive the truth of the Gospel. If so many of us said in the parish survey that the music was important, perhaps it was because we sense that the discipline of listening attentively to a choral setting of the Gloria, as well as the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, is a real help as we venture into the presence of God in worship. In the words of the Psalmist: Be still and know that I am God. It is one of the privileges of listening rather than singing that we have more of that opportunity to be still in the presence of God, to whom be the glory now and for ever.