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The Music Exchange

A passion for the Cross

Easter is a time when music plays an important role in gospel presentation. Choral societies everywhere are performing ‘passions’ and other crucifixion-centred oratorios.

Most of us will still be getting music ready for the Easter weekend in our churches too. The ability of music to stir our hearts to reflect on the Easter events can be very powerful indeed.

The common pattern in many of our meetings is to be mournful on Good Friday, and then joyful on Easter Sunday. I wonder whether this is a right pattern. None of the gospel writers encourages a spirit of mourning over the action of Jesus on the cross. The only mourning and grief that is encouraged is over our sin — ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children’ (Luke 23.28, ESV).

This article then is an encouragement to use Good Friday as an opportunity to confess our sin together (as we usually do), but then to focus on the glory of the cross — to wonder at the way Jesus is so determined to go to his death to achieve such a great salvation.

Lord on the cross

After Jesus breathes his last, the centurion did not say: ‘I’m so sorry about all this, he was such a good man. Let’s be quiet now as I lead us in a time of reflection and meditation.’ There’d just been a total eclipse in the middle of the day, an earthquake, tombs split open, and the temple rendered obsolete! The centurion said: ‘Surely this man was the Son of God’. That was the whole reason the gospels were written, so that ‘you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20.31, ESV). So this year, why not sing songs about Jesus’s lordship, his majesty, his glory, his awesome power over every authority in heaven and earth to defeat sin? Songs that do this are not generally of a meditative nature, and inevitably, many of them take us through to the resurrection, but in that sense, Good Friday and Easter Sunday are both a proclamation of Jesus’s lordship. The cross is his crowning glory which is only then surpassed by his rising from the dead on the third day.

J.S. Bach

One man who understood the power of Christ’s work on the cross was Johann Sebastian Bach. His greatest skill was that he was able to present gospel truth through the sung word, accompanied by music that helped root that truth in hearts and minds.
If you go and listen to a performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion this Easter, this might be useful if you are taking non-believing friends. Listen to the way in which Jesus is portrayed musically — not as a weak, sorrowful figure, but as one who is sovereignly sure of where he has come from, and where he is going. When the ordinary characters speak in the narrative, they are accompanied by just a keyboard. Jesus, however, is always surrounded by a ‘halo’ of three violins. Every time he speaks, the halo is there. He is God’s dearly beloved Son, the apple of his eye, his most precious treasure, absolutely pure, perfectly holy, the image of God himself on earth.

But then listen to Jesus as he hangs on the cross, the burden of the whole world’s sin on his shoulders. He is drinking the cup of God’s wrath as our substitute. When he cries, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ listen for the halo of violins. You will notice that the violins have gone. He becomes just like ordinary man, bearing the full weight of each of our rebellion. God’s dearly loved Son, the apple of his eye, forsaken, for us.

Bach knew and wanted us to understand that Jesus has fully paid the price of our rejection of the Creator. Jesus was taking our place, the perfect Lamb becoming like sinful man so that we could be restored into God’s loving arms. Bach wasn’t just writing beautiful music. He was communicating the greatest message the world has ever known and ever could know.

The point of Good Friday is that we remember the good news that we have been rescued from God-forsakenness, and have had the full weight of our sin emptied onto Christ. The only better news I can think of is that provided by Easter Sunday — that new life is now a surety, for eternity.

Let’s mourn our sin, but let’s not mourn the cross.

Richard Simpkin