De minste mens - beurtzang - hymne = The Least Of People - Antiphonal Song - Hymn, 1979 - 1981

Oosterhuis' refrain reflects a theme which threads its way throughout the Scriptures, as most notably expressed in Psalm 72: the lowly and the dispossessed are the most important in the scheme of God's justice. De minste mens, god overnieuw; de minste mens, god eens voorgoed; the refrain doesn't even capitalize god, avoiding any appearance of triumphalism, instead forsaking lordship, master, might. Using bold language, he writes, Zo zijt Gij en nog onafzienbaar meer of Gij zijt niets en niemand - So are You yet immeasurably more, or You are nothing, no one. Yet he always capitalizes the pronoun You. In his 1967 rendition of Psalm 72 in Fifty Psalms - towards a new translation, he had written: For lowly people, your hands are open, you give hope to the abandoned. Their blood is precious in your sight, you buy their freedom from slavery. This deity steps beyond the palace and the throne, no longer to ride on the clouds of heaven. Instead, the choice is made to live in the gutters of the city and the hovels beyond the city walls. Nietzsche may well have argued that God does not exist, but he was rejecting a God far beyond reality. For Oosterhuis, reality is the One Who has identified with the Voiceless, the Dispossesed.

Huijbers' intuitive choice of Pange lingua lauream for his melody is the perfect match between Oosterhuis' text and the original Latin hymn attributed to Venantius Fortunatus (530-609). This was written to extol the triumph of the Cross, accompanying a procession in 570 to bring a fragment of what was assumed to be the true Cross to Queen Radegunda of the Franks, foundress of the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. Thomas Aquinas made a medieval rendition of this for the Good Friday Veneration of the Cross. Its text evoked not the glory of a triumphant ruler, but the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, who took on the burden of our iniquities: look on the face of the Poor and you shall see God. - Tony Barr