I used to tell my students that for me one of the saddest moments in the New Testament, though wonderfully understated, comes when Luke is describing what it was like for his comrade Paul to speak to the Athenians. Their days of glory, as you may know, were long past. Philip of Macedon had subjugated them, then his son Alexander and his successors, and now the Romans were in charge. The great philosophers and dramatists had long returned to the dust. But they were a proud people still, or maybe rather a vain people, since they knew that if you were a Roman senator such as Cicero and you wanted your son Marcus to get some schooling, you’d send him to Athens and hire him a teacher. So Paul climbs up the steep path to a place called the Hill of Ares — which you might know as the Areopagus, or, changing the name of the war-god, Mars Hill. It is an immense and rather eerie outcrop of volcanic rock, bowl-shaped on one side and thus ideal for public speakers. Six centuries before, it had been the chief site for the Athenian governing council. When democracy swept the city, it became the principal court of law, though gradually its authority had been restricted. By the time Paul arrived, it was like the famous Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, in London, except that, seeing how glorious Athens had once been, it was but a shadow, an echo. Yet the clever and the curious used to hang around the place. “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there,” says Luke, “spent there time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.”
When people have lost their hold on immemorial truth, they seek novelty. How seriously they seek it is another matter. And there, at what once was the heart of Athenian political life, in the city that prided itself on teaching the world that had conquered it, Saint Paul preached the God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being,” the God the Athenians were unwittingly in search of. Luke does not, in that particular speech, mention the Cross, but it is implied when he says that God has raised the man ordained to judge the world — raised him from the dead. We may think of what he wrote to those other Greeks, those in Corinth, more mercantile and hedonistic than the Athenians, that “the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling stone to the Jews, and folly to the Greeks.” Yet as I write these words, I glance up at a crucifix on the wall, and a lovely plaque given us by a dear Baptist friend of ours, the good Revered Walter Lawrence, now returned to the Lord. It reads, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Our Word of the Week is reason, and I think sometimes we can divide the world or even our own hearts into two camps. I’ll put it as one of my heroes, Malcolm Muggeridge, put it, some years before he gave over his atheism and came to Christ in full, whom I believe he had always loved. He imagines a place called the Cafe Limbo. On one side, you have bright lights and a lot of noise and publicity. On the other side, darkness, and faint “sounds and sweet airs.” The first is called Legend. That’s where all the “important” work in the world gets done. The second is called Life. “In Life there is suffering, deprivation and sanity,” says Muggeride; “in the Legend, happiness, abundance and madness.” The Cross is really a cross, as it turns out: a crossroads, or a crossing against what we think we want, to embrace what we do want and need. The Cross is a gift; it is the key that turns the lock. And the natural man in us cries out, “That’s not reasonable!” But yes, it is. I’ve lived a long time in this world and seen much, and I can say that, in the ultimate turn of divine irony, the Cross is the only thing that does make sense.
The author of our Hymn of the Week, Fanny Crosby (and yes, Bing Crosby was a relation), may as well have been born blind. She lost her sight when she was but six weeks old, though it seems that some slight shading of light could strike her eyes. The three main characteristics of her hymns — she wrote thousands, many of them under one of her 200 noms de plume, because she didn’t want to seem to be hogging things, nor did she court the attention — are sweetness, simplicity, and an embrace of the Cross. She led a happy and full life; her husband, Alexander van Alstyne, was a musician, and he too was blind. She could play the piano and the guitar, and in fact she sometimes composed the melodies for the hymns she wrote. I doubt that you could find, in nineteenth century America, a more tireless woman than she was, in her charity work, and in her advocacy for various social causes. She lived to the ripe age of 94. But aside from the noise, and there would be a good deal of it wherever she went, she was most herself in the quiet hours when she drew near and always nearer to the Cross. There is no self-pity in her; it is all childlike trust and love.
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I am thine, O Lord, I have heard thy voice, And it told thy love to me; But I long to rise in the arms of faith And be closer drawn to Thee. Refrain. Draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord, To the Cross where Thou hast died; Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, To thy precious, bleeding side. Consecrate me now to thy service, Lord, By the power of grace divine; Let my soul look up with a steadfast hope And my will be lost in Thine. Refrain. Oh, the pure delight of a single hour That before Thy throne I spend, When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God, I commune as friend with friend. Refrain. There are depths of love that I cannot know Till I cross the narrow sea; There are heights of joy that I may not reach Till I rest in peace with Thee. Refrain.
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.
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Thank you so much for giving us the historical context.
This is a first for me. Never before have I heard this hymn. Good one. Thanks!