Jesus, Your Boundless Love So True

Jesus, Your Boundless Love So True

Jesus your boundless love so true

No thought can reach, no tongue declare

Unite my thankful heart to you,

And reign without a rival there.

Yours wholly, yours alone I am;

Be you alone my sacred flame.

In suff’ring be your love my peace

In weakness be your love my pow’r,

And when the storms of life shall cease,

O Jesus, in that final hour

Be then my rod and staff and guide

To draw me safely to your side.

In the midst of the disruption and destruction of the Thirty Years‘ War, many hymn-writers began to seek a different kind of language than had been employed in the first flowering of Reformation hymnody. In place of manifestos, didactic texts, and close paraphrases of Scripture came more extravagant and personal poetry expressive of the relationship of the individual to God.

Chief among these seventeenth-century Lutheran hymn-writers was Paul Gerhardt, the 400th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year. His life was typical of the era: his home town was destroyed by an invading army; his career and marriage were delayed for years by the disruptions of war; his professional position ultimately fell victim to religio-political dispute. He sought in his hymns not to promulgate dogma but to speak of his own experience as a person living in difficult times and to speak of God in equally personal terms.

In Christian tradition, the chief way of approaching God in a personal light is of course through the figure of Jesus. His birth and death in particular – often to the exclusion of everything that came in between – have always caught our imagination, perhaps because it is in those extremes of life that Jesus seems the most vulnerable, the most human, and thus the most approachable. Even if we twenty-first-century people no longer tend to lose ourselves in meditation upon the wounds of Jesus, we can still get stuck in the stable easily enough.

Gerhardt’s hymns, seeking that close connection to God, do deal quite a bit with the manger and the cross (and some painfully medieval theology to boot). It is refreshing, then, to come upon a hymn like ‘O Jesu Christ, mein schönstes Licht‘, which conspicuously avoids both the baby and the blood (oddly enough, John Wesley apparently felt the need to add a couple of stanzas, now usually omitted, about Jesus‘ blood and humans‘ unworthiness when made an otherwise fine English translation of this hymn). Instead we have a love song pure and simple, a hymn celebrating a mystical union between God and the human soul, a complete surrender and submersion in the love – that is, the being – of God.

Language like this is beautiful and inspiring, but in reading or singing even this hymn we must be careful not to mistake a warm glow for the full light of God: for divine illumination, far from being comfortable and easily attainable, is much more likely to be blindingly harsh and to come only after a long journey which involves hard work, suffering, patience, discipline, and a great deal of time spent in the dark. The great contemplatives teach us much about this hard road and warn against stopping along the way to bask in the warmth of sentiment. Among others, Jan van Ruysbroeck, a fourteenth-century mystic, railed against those who, having perhaps caught a glimpse of God, are content to stay in a state of psuedo-rapturous self-absorption, unaware of the true demands of God or the world around them.

The season of Lent and the disciplines which many Christians undertake during it remind us of those demands. In the Episcopal Church (USA) we began our Lenten observance with a reading from Isaiah 58 which proclaims that our ability to apprehend God’s light, God’s guidance, God’s providence – the very things that Gerhardt longs for and celebrates in this and other hymns – is contingent upon our willingness to serve others:

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke….

to share your bread with the hungry

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

and your healing shall spring up quickly.

In seeking union with God we have no better guide than Jesus himself, who became so completely identified with the will and being of God that it became possible to speak of him as divine. His path involved individual disciplines: he fasted in the wilderness and often withdrew for periods of intense prayer and meditation. It also involved interaction with others: not only teaching and healing them, but also being willing to be served and to listen to and even learn from them. And it involved political action: taking on social, political, and religious systems which kept so many from assuming their full place in God’s kingdom.

As our tradition is at pains to remind us, Jesus did experience a very real birth and a very real death. He also lived a very human – the most perfectly human – life, one so fully lived that it transcended even death. He is indeed the ‘schönstes Licht‘ of which Gerhardt speaks. May that light always shine forth in our lives.