Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology
Edited by Jeremy Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie
Eerdmans, 505 pages, $42.99
The essays in Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology, edited by Jeremy S. Begbie of Duke Divinity School and Steven R. Guthrie of Belmont University, are without many companions to sit alongside on the shelf. Theological explorations of music qua music, while not nonexistent, are lamentably few and far between, so this volume, published by Eerdmans in 2011 as part of its Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies Series, is a welcome voice to the conversation.
Its constituent chapters cover a range of subjects, from Augustine of Hippo to Karl Barth and Mozart, to South African freedom songs, to improvisation as a feature shared between jazz and the life of the church. As is often the case with multiple-author books, there is a bit of an uneven feel from one chapter to the next. Despite this unevenness, the book offers a rich foray into the world of both musical theology and theological aesthetics, making it a worthy addition to the library of anyone with an interest in the subject, and an interesting conversation partner with the earlier work of Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Wolterstorff, David Bentley Hart, and Jon Michael Spencer, among others. My goal is not to offer a review or critique of this book, but instead to highlight one chapter as a jumping-off point for a brief creative exegetical exercise.
At the School of Theology at Sewanee, I teach an Introduction to Church Music course to all second-year M.Div. students and many first-year M.A. students. In this course, I impress upon my students the idea that, before the Reformations of the 16th century, nearly all of the audible, public liturgical action of the Church—with the possible exception of preaching—was enacted in an intoned, lyrical manner: that is, it was chanted or sung.
The intonation of sacred text and prayer in a ritualized, heightened manner, somewhere on the spectrum of human vocal production at a distance from what we today would call “speech,” is of course not unique to Christianity, but is a feature of many religious traditions worldwide. Nevertheless, the lyrical dimension of Christian liturgy is a highlight and a marker of our identity: the worship of the Church for most of its history and in most of its geography has been a sung worship. This is a direct inheritance from our roots in Judaism, and an inheritance from our very Head: Jesus sang.
The final chapter of Resonant Witness, written by Michael O’Connor of the faculty of the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, is “The Singing of Jesus.” It explores the provocative fact that Jesus, in the fullness of his human nature, was a person who sang. O’Connor asks, pointedly, “We have no trouble imagining that Jesus ate, drank, and slept just like the rest of us; that is what people do. But singing? Why do Christians, who devote a great deal of time to singing, overlook their Lord’s practice in this regard?” (p. 434). In recent years, neuroscientists and anthropologists have begun to assert that music—singing—predates speech in the evolution of humanity.[1] We are a singing species: to be human is to sing. As Duns Scotus and his concept of haecceity remind us, Incarnation is always particular: just as each of us does, so too did the incarnate Jesus possess a distinctive voice. And as a human with a voice, Jesus used that voice to sing.
Over the course of his chapter, O’Connor presents the singing of Jesus through three modalities: (1) “the singing of Jesus during his first coming,” (2) “the singing of the Risen Jesus in the Church’s earthly liturgy,” and (3) “music and the Parousia.” Regarding the first modality, O’Connor couches Jesus of Nazareth in his first-century Jewish context. The synagogue liturgy was lyrical; Jesus, in reading from the scroll of Isaiah in Luke 4, would have done so with a chantlike cantillation.
At the Last Supper (Mark 14; Matt. 26), Jesus and his disciples “sang the hymn” before going out to the Mount of Olives. Provocatively, O’Connor points to Jesus’ final words on the cross (Psalm 22 in Matthew and Mark; Psalm 31 in Luke) were utterances from the hymnbook of his people: “In each of these narratives, a reminiscence of musical prayer accompanies the final moments of Jesus’ life … with the sounds of Jewish prayer. What Jesus learned in the regular worship … springs to his lips as his life comes to an end” (p. 439).
O’Connor’s second modality takes up the singing of the Church as the body of the risen Christ through its liturgy: “Christ sings among his people when they are gathered to worship on earth” (p. 442). Finally, he turns to the Parousia and the culmination of God’s purposes with images of the heavenly choir.
Staying with O’Connor’s first modality, I would like to explore an element in Jesus’ earthly ministry, on each side of his Passion, unconsidered by O’Connor, which I believe is a missed opportunity for consideration of the centrality of music and singing in the life of the Church. This exploration will take the shape of a “creative exegesis,” inspired by the Talmudic tradition of midrash, focusing on two passages from the Gospel of Luke.[2]
Our three-year lectionary cycle finds us in the year of the Gospel of Luke, which in a few short weeks will take us to the account of the Last Supper (chapter 22) on Palm Sunday. The reading appointed for the evening on Easter Day (all three years) is also from Luke’s Gospel, the story of the Emmaus Road (chapter 24). In Luke’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus “gave thanks” over the bread (22:17) and the cup (22:19). We should perhaps imagine Jesus offering the traditional Jewish table blessing over bread and wine—often referred to as the hamotzi and the ha’gefen prayers:
.בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יהוה, אֱלֹהֵינוּּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, הַמּוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ
Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.
Blessed art thou, Lord God, king of the universe: who bringest forth bread from the earth.
.בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יהוה, אֱלֹהֵינוּּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, בּוֹרֵא פְּרִי הַגֶּפֶן
Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melekh ha’olam, bo’re p’ri ha’gefen.
Blessed art thou, Lord God, king of the universe: who createst the fruit of the vine.
These blessings, grounded in the language of Psalm 104:15-16, are referenced in the written tradition in the earliest strands of the Mishnah—which was compiled towards the end of the second century, but preserves hundreds of years’ worth of oral rabbinical tradition—so there is little reason to doubt that these might have been the very words of blessing and thanksgiving prayed by Jesus that night in the upper room. These blessing prayers are never just simply said—as with all prayer and liturgical utterance, they are voiced in a lyrical manner—they are, in a word, sung.
And, just as no two people share the same physiological vocal tone or timbre, so too no two people sing the hamotzi and ha’gafen with the identical cadence or melodic inflection. The singing of these prayers is taught and learned through oral tradition, passed down within families and communities in such a way that no two households or assemblies will intone them identically to each other. Jesus sang these blessings with his particular voice, in his particular style. During his three-year ministry, Jesus’ disciples would have come to recognize his distinctive melodic cadence in prayer.
In Luke 24, the risen Jesus joined the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus, although they did not recognize him. It is once they are at the table with him in the house, when he breaks the bread, that they recognize who he is. If Jesus was the one who broke the bread, then by implication, he offered the prayer of blessing and thanksgiving over it: “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.”
How provocative it is, then, to consider that Cleopas and his fellow disciple recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread by the way he sang the blessing. Perhaps Jesus’ voice, perhaps his singing, was why the disciples’ “eyes were opened” (v. 31). Perhaps it was their ears as much as their eyes that were opened in that instant. This theme of the risen Jesus’ identity being hidden from his followers is not unique to Luke 24, nor is that of the eventual revelation of his identity through his voice—consider also the episode of Mary Magdalene in the garden in John 20:11-17.
Staying with John’s Gospel, the passage from John 10:27 suddenly now carries an extra layer of significance: “my sheep hear my voice.” Even as the risen Jesus’ visible body was in some unknown and unexplained way altered to evade immediate recognition, his voice was inherently and uniquely his. Jesus’ singing continued to be a fundamental marker of his identity on each side of the Passion.
So what? So what do we make of this facet of Jesus’ humanity? What are the ramifications for us here and now in the exploration of Jesus as a singer, and a singer with a particular voice? O’Connor reminds the reader that, in the locus of the Church Militant here on Earth, we are the body of Christ (p. 441): “he is the high priest who leads the priestly prayer of his body the church.” In this regard, O’Connor references St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos (85,1): “He prays for us as our priest, prays in us as our head, and is prayed to by us as our God. Let us therefore acknowledge our voice in him and his voice in us.”
Making the specific musical imagery even more explicit, O’Connor also turns to two provocative passages from two 18th-century writers steeped in church music: Johann Mattheson and John Wesley. Mattheson, in a treatise on heavenly music, refers to Jesus as the divine Oberkapellmeister for the angelic choir. Similarly, in his Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, Wesley presents the image of Jesus as Precentor: “‘In the midst of the church will I sing praise to thee’—as the precentor of the choir. This he did literally, amid his apostles, on the night before his passion. And … he has done it in the church by his word and his Spirit; he still does, and will do it through all generations.”
Jesus’ singing is not only a facet of his incarnation. Our Lord sang at the creation of the world, and sings still, both through us and through the saints and angels who surround the throne of God. As the body of Christ, the Church is called to continue his song both now and in the age to come. Singing is not just an aesthetically pleasing “extra” for the life of the faithful, lovely perhaps but ultimately of little consequence. Singing is not frivolous. It’s serious business, it’s sacred business, and it is incumbent on us to approach it with all the intentionality and prayerfulness that the things of God demand. Singing, modeled for us by our Lord, is an integral and fundamental marker of who we are as followers of the living God, our Lord to whom we pray to be known to us in the breaking of the bread.
[1] See, for example, Edward Gorzelańczyk and Piotr Podlipniak, “Human singing as a form of bio-communication,” in Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems, Vol. 7 No. 2, 2011.
[2] In this midrashic exploration, I owe a debt of gratitude to my seminary classmate, Dan Randall, who first called my attention to the inherent and fundamentally lyrical nature of these actions recounted in the Gospel.
Mark Ardrey-Graves, DMA, is Assistant Professor of Church Music and Organist-Choirmaster of the Chapel of the Apostles at the School of Theology of the University of the South (Sewanee). Prior to his post at Sewanee, Mark served parishes in North Carolina and Virginia as organist & choirmaster. He served on the Task Force for Prayer Book and Liturgical Revision of the Episcopal Church during the 2018 – 2020 triennium, and is active in the Association of Anglican Musicians and Royal School of Church Music in America.
