Het lied van de Heer in ons midden = The Song Of God Among Us, 1967

Celebrating a Critical Moment The three Synoptic Gospels grew from the experiences of the Apostolic Church as a means of evangelizing the Early Church, by introducing the remembered and embellished teachings of Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah. These are not biographical chronicles of a peripatetic wisdom teacher but a precis of what he had come to do and say. The Gospel of John, the latest to be compiled, served an entirely different purpose. This was not an evangelical Gospel but the reflections of a mature community, possibly in the northern extremities of Palestine, and in all likelihood not written by John himself but influenced by ‘the beloved disciple’ whom scholars regard not as the Apostle John but most likely as an ‘urchin child’ who had attached himself to Jesus’ community, and in later years proved to be an invaluable eye-witness.

Like all of the other Jewish-Christian sects, this community continued to observe the Jewish liturgical calendar, a three-year Palestinian cycle of festivals and readings. This formed the structure of the Gospel. Jesus is the One who fulfilled all of the expectations of Jewish eschatology. The time of judgement had arrived, but this was not judgement of humanity by God, rather it was judgement of humanity by itself. The Jesus of the Gospels is confronting us, challenging us to follow, and how we respond to this is the basis of our own self-judgement. This is what crisis means, a time of evaluation, discernment; a time for risk-taking or hiding; a time for discipleship or escape. There was a constant wavering among the early followers of Jesus, and in the Johannine community a major rift developed between those were faithful to the core values of a higher Christology and those who chose to go in other directions. The fact of God walking among us would be meaningless unless it demanded a response on our part. The Prologue to the Gospel encapsulates the entire Book. The Word which ignited Creation has taken on human flesh and is now here. And yet you do not know him.

Huijbers’ melody is an oscillation between descending and rising musical phrases, not descriptive of the movement from heaven to earth (as though heaven were somewhere up or out there), but of a rising plain of consciousness, a deepening of awareness. It may be sung simply in unison, but where resources permit, harmonies should be added. Although appropriate as a Christmas song, it is more appropriate throughout the entire liturgical year, on any occasion which sings of discipleship. It celebrates all of the rites of passage which we encounter in our gathering. As we listen to the gentle stories of Jesus the wisdom teacher, we are expected to respond.

A relevant anecdote. Several years ago, I was invited by the chaplain from the State of Oregon Juvenile Corrections division to form a choir in the Hillcrest facility The ‘cottage’ in which I mainly worked was comprised of a number of teens, all of whom had been convicted of murder. Prior to the invitation, the local Western Baptist College had been proselytizing, who misinformed the kids that if they embraced the Lord Jesus Chris aas their peresonal Savior, they would be free. The Governor was inundated by letters requesting freedom. I was invited to counteract this. At the initial rehearsal, a large group of boys and girls showed up, many from the Klamath Indian Reservation. Throwing caution to the winds, I chose this particular song as an ice breaker. I first played it for them, but before we could even begin singing, they had been captivated by the text and wanted to talk about it, with genuine interest and amazement. This took up most of the rehearsal. I invited them to look each other in the eye, and sing the refrain, there among you is One you do not know. The following week when I came back, all they wanted to do was talk about this song and sing it again, and again. The great feature about Hillcrest was that it was remedial and not punitive, and so the kids were highly sensitized to a text with such meaning. The echoes lingered for weeks, as though resounding with its own cosmic microwave background. - Tony Barr