hymns, vol. 1, no. 4: silent night

Description

FULLY HELPLESS, FULLY DIVINE

At a particular time and in a particular place, God entered into creation. The veil that thinly hangs between heaven and earth was pierced, and the God of the cosmos took on flesh and became man. In the person of Jesus, the invisible Reality-who-is-God was suddenly made visible. And the Son of God himself was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.

Imagine the fragility of that moment. In that moment, infinity was wrapped up in finitude and a breathlessness hung in the air. The vulnerability that must have been felt to abandon one’s self for the sake of the human experience! What solidarity, what joy our God shows us to be born a baby — to trade omnipotence for total dependence, omniscience for the passing of time, and the depths of Being itself for the fragile frame of flesh!

This “self-emptying” (or in Greek, “kenosis”) would remain the pattern that defined the life of this Jesus of Nazareth. He emptied himself when he gathered fishermen, tax collectors, zealots, prostitutes, and sinners — and called them friends. He gave himself away to the outcasts, risked the touch of a leper, looked into the eyes of Samaritans and centurions and demoniacs. He sought the lost and lifted up the fallen, and he showed us what it means to be turned entirely inside out for love.

And on the Cross, that most humiliating and, literally, excruciating display of public torture and brutal execution, he continued to give himself away even while breathing his final breaths. This wandering preacher of radical love and wild beatitude spent the last dregs of his mortality to press on piercing nails and lift his broken body to fill his lungs just enough to say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This carpenter’s son from nowhere spoke across creation to remind the spitting and seething onlookers that God has been seeking and searching and thirsting for them since the beginning and even now, too. And when this man called Jesus handed himself over to the domain of darkness and succumbed to the ultimate dread of the human curse, he rested in death. Helpless, powerless, and now lifeless — the Son of God had nothing left to give.

But when God raised him from the dead, when his glorified body lived again, when he ascended into the depths of creation and sent his Spirit to draw us to himself — still in the flesh! — he showed us that life will have the last word. Goodness will have the last word. Love will have the last word! There is a bursting forth of grace and new life that has been emerging since before time began, and it has reached a new crescendo in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. And he-who-is-still-alive invites us even now to be carried away by this alleluia song into an experience of fullness, of beauty, of infinity itself — all because he allowed himself to be born and to dwell among us.

This arrangement of silent night approaches this self-emptied fragility with hushed intimacy and on bended knee. The crystalline harmonies leave the melody utterly exposed, like the faintest chorus of gloria in excelsis Deo, sung to lowly shepherds keeping watch over an otherwise ordinary and mundane night. The stillness is the stillness of an exhausted mother staring into the face of God and feeling eternity shift beneath her feet. The quiet is the quiet pianissimo of all creation, suspended in an infinite moment of wonder and awe, when even animals come to worship the newborn Lord. And, as all seems to draw to a close and the night just about wraps itself in silence, the wafted, open arpeggi lift from the rested melody and suggest that the story is not quite over yet. As it swirls and slows and ascends, it gives us a glimpse into the most breathtaking wonder of all — the story is just merely beginning.