The shape of Evensong - the shape of the Cross

Our Evensong this evening, with the welcome of this year’s new pro-Choristers and Head Choristers and Choral Scholars and organ scholar and Lay Clerks to the music foundation, is a wonderfully memorable occasion. To have all this on the day in the Church Calendar called Holy Cross Day is perhaps quite a challenging occasion as well as being a memorable one.

Outside the usual timescale of Holy week and Good Friday we are invited to face the cross of Christ – the symbol for centuries of the Christian faith. But this may help us tonight to try to grasp how important is the worship we offer here, the faith we proclaim here, and the services that our Cathedral choirs sing here day by day and week by week.

The cross has taught generations of Christians to see something about God which enables them genuinely to have faith, to love other people, to reject cynicism, to lead lives of real unselfishness, and to face death without fear. Yet it is a fact that the cross stirs mixed feelings, including feelings of hostility and disgust – and increasingly in recent times of indifference. This should come as no surprise – Christ said of himself that he would be a sign of contradiction. In the words of the second reading: through the cross, God’s strength is shown in weakness and God’s wisdom in foolishness.

Perhaps it’s no accident that the very shape of the cross expresses tension and contradiction. The upright pulling against the crossbeam - as each of us in our daily lives so often feel pulled apart by contradictory longings and loyalties – sometimes straining up towards high ideals, sometimes pulled down by a force like the force of gravity towards selfishness and self-gratification. At one moment we may be driven by absolute conviction, at another wracked by self-doubt; people who within a matter of hours can act with the tenderest love and be swept by murderous hate. We human beings, all of us, are full of contradictions.

And this is part of why music can offer so much in our worship and in our memories about the past and our longing about the future. Music can hold these contradictions about our life experience and about the part that faith plays in in our life. Through music we are put back in touch with our earliest selves – witness perhaps the memories evoked for many by the Last Night of the Proms. And music helps us express a nostalgia that points us towards a future that we dream of and reach out towards, a fulfilment which our lives and hopes are shaped towards beyond this life, and beyond our capacity to express – to others, let alone to ourselves.

We offer music here, through the ministry of our choirs, almost every day of the week. Evensong is sung five times weekly – a tonic of prayer and praise at the end of the day, open to all who wish to dip into this opportunity to reflect and reset. And within Evensong itself we are reminded each day of the shape of the cross and its power and potential for our lives.

The cross overturns all human expectation – failure is transformed into victory, shame into glory: or in the words of St Paul, weakness into strength and foolishness into wisdom.

And this is expressed for us at every Evensong in the words of the Magnificat. The first canticle at Evensong reminds us of God’s power to turn upside-down our assumptions and expectations. Mary, the mother of Jesus, sings of God’s commitment to us and to the world, in lifting up those who are cast down, filling those who are hungry with good things, while at the same time promising that the proud will be brought low and the rich sent empty away. Every Evensong bears the imprint of the cross with the Magnificat, as the singing of the choir tells us that God can do things beyond our imagining, can turn all our expectations upside down, and fulfil our deepest longings beyond our wildest dreams.

And at Evensong we are brought face to face with that other aspect of the cross each day: the fact of our mortality, and the hope of immortality that Christ opens to us on the cross. In thissecond choir canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, we hear the song of Simeon who knows that he can trust God to the uttermost. The Nunc Dimittis is about letting go of life in the sure knowledge that God’s protection and peace will be with us beyond this life. This is a prayer that Evensong helps us to make our own: which we pray at the end of each day so that we will be able to pray it to the full at the end of our lives, whenever this may be;when we can say with Simeon: Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen the salvation you have prepared for all people. 

Simeon was to see the shape of the cross even as he recognised the infant Jesus as the light of the world: that Christ on the cross would bring about the destiny, the rising and falling, of all hearts and lives.

For me, Evensong embraces the whole of human life and experience – the amazement and wonder of the Magnificat and the resignation and trust of the Nunc Dimittis. We are lifted up in song and praise and we are held safe in confidence andprayer. And this is all upheld in the reach of the cross of Christ, and the victory Christ won for us on the cross.

So when we look at the Cross – as we do today on Holy Cross Day, and we do each day through the offering of Evensong that the music of the choir possible, we see a passionate God, a caring God, who will go to any lengths to inspire us and give us confidence, to show us where our happiness  and fulfilment lie. In the Cross, we see how precious we really are, precious because God has shared our world and our human experience, has known our weakness and limitations, precious because God was prepared to pay such a price to prove his love.

This is what sets our hearts on fire with faith, and sets our hearts and lips singing in response. Evensong, sung by our Choirs, is an inspiration for us all to sing our thanks and praise to God – for the sake of our world, and our loved ones, and all those whose lives have little of the joy that music represents.

We offer our song of faith along with the choir here day by day and week by week, and we will offer our song of faith to God with the hosts of heaven through all eternity.