Songs of Thankfulness and Praise

Christopher Wordsworth (1862)

“These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wanting,” cries the poet Hopkins. Wonders are right in front of us, if we would open our eyes! But sometimes it’s not the beholder that’s wanting. It’s someone who will do what our Word of the Week yesterday suggests: someone who will show you what there is to see. For twelve years I attended Catholic schools, and my boyhood church was covered over, walls and ceiling, with paintings and stained glass windows most of which I could not “read,” because nobody ever told us what they were about. I didn’t know that the tonsured man in the black cloak with the sunburst at his breast was Saint Thomas Aquinas. It never occurred to me to think that Irish coal miners might like to have a window in which St. Thomas More was delivering some unwelcome news to the English king, Henry VIII: “I am ever the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” And I certainly did not know that when people of old interpreted Scripture — and that included many of the writers of Scripture themselves — they saw all things as reflecting all others, simultaneously, so that it was natural for them to see in Joshua a foreshadowing of Jesus, the true Joshua, or to see in the Ark of the Covenant a foreshadowing of Mary, who bore in her womb the true scepter of Aaron, the new Covenant, and the living bread from heaven.

I had to learn all that, by the grace of God, from three professors of medieval and Renaissance literature, at Princeton, as dry and gloomy a secular place as there was to be found on earth. I will name them with gratitude: John Fleming, Robert Hollander, and Thomas P. Roche. They all taught me to read the old poems and plays in a way that nobody expects a text to be read now; a subtle and fascinating and richly rewarding way, sort of like hearing the various simultaneous instruments and their melodies in a symphony orchestra. And as I say, it wasn’t just that Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante expected to be read in such a manner — and Dante says so explicitly. It’s that everybody assumed so, and people who wrote or spoke about the faith, and people who treasured Scripture, assumed the same thing. Certainly that’s what Christopher Wordsworth assumed, nephew of the great poet, and author of our Hymn of the Week, “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise.” It’s a hymn for Epiphany and the season of Epiphany, which used to extend (still does, in some churches) from Epiphany itself to the third Sunday before Lent, Septuagesima Sunday, so called because it’s roughly seventy days before Easter.

Bishop Wordsworth wants us to think of several showings of Christ at once, several epiphanies. The first is Epiphany properly speaking, when the “sages from afar” came to Bethlehem to behold the holy Child. But that’s not enough. The second and third Epiphanies come when Jesus first shows himself as a man in public, baptized “at Jordan’s stream,” when the voice from heaven thunders, “This is my beloved Son,” and when he with his first disciples attends the wedding at Cana, and works his first miracle, changing the water into wine, that the wedding feast may continue. Of course, that’s all a foreshadowing of the eternal wedding feast, which we hear of in Jesus’ parables, and in the apocalypse revealed to the apostle John, on Patmos. But the Epiphanies in the hymn continue. Jesus goes on to manifest his goodness and his power divine in works of corporal and spiritual mercy, “making whole / Palsied limbs and fainting soul,” and then, by his Passion and Resurrection, in “valiant fight / Quelling all the devil’s might.”

That takes us to the fourth stanza, one that’s missing from many hymnals. It shouldn’t be. Suddenly, we turn our attention to the future, when “sun and moon shall darkened be,” in the end of time, at the Second Coming, the final judgment, the summation of every previous showing of Christ to mankind. The first Epiphany is bound up in the last. At which point the poet can go no farther, but to turn to Christ in prayer, in petition, that he may make our hearts like his heart, so that we will see him face to face; and thus the hymn ends as all the stanzas have ended, but now with ultimate and infinite meaning: “God in man made manifest.”

It is, I think, one of the ten or twelve mightiest of all hymns written in English. And editors should keep their inky fingers off that final line, which is simply perfect.

Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesu, Lord, to thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar;
Branch of royal David's stem
In thy birth at Bethlehem;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Manifest at Jordan's stream,
Prophet, Priest, and King supreme;
And at Cana, wedding guest
In thy Godhead manifest;
Manifest in power divine,
Changing water into wine;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Manifest in making whole
Palsied limbs and fainting soul;
Manifest in valiant fight,
Quelling all the devil's might;
Manifest in gracious will,
Ever bringing good from ill;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Sun and moon shall darkened be,
Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee;
Christ will then like lightning shine,
All will see his glorious sign;
All will then the trumpet hear,
All will see the Judge appear;
Thou by all wilt be confessed,
God in Man made manifest.

Grant us grace to see thee, Lord,
Mirrored in thy holy word;
May we imitate thee now,
And be pure, as pure art thou;
That we like to thee may be
At thy great Epiphany,
And may praise thee, ever blest,
God in Man made manifest.

Give the gift of Word & Song for the new year.