Thursday • 1/6/2022
The Feast of Epiphany

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

Dude! Bach is Bodacious!

If I could borrow Bill & Ted’s most excellent time-traveling phone booth, one of my first stops would be Leipzig, Germany, January 6, 1735. That’s the time and place one of the greatest worship leaders of all time worked some of his deepest magic.

Beginning on Christmas Day that 1734-1735 Christmas season, Johann Sebastian Bach had treated his congregation in Leipzig to five different cantatas celebrating different aspects of Christ’s birth. Now, on the Day of Epiphany (celebrating Christ’s “manifestation” as Savior of the world), Bach closes out his Christmas Oratorio with a sixth cantata. 

This last cantata in the Christmas cycle is an extended meditation on the Gentile magi bringing tribute to Israel’s — and their — newly born King. That’s standard Epiphany fare, with, of course, desperately power-mad King Herod playing the churlish foil, a pretend king resisting the coming of the true King. 

Yeah, we’ve all heard it before. So had Bach’s congregants. 

How to get their attention? How to keep the sublime truth of the magnificent reign of King Jesus and the stunning overthrow of faux-sovereigns like Herod from becoming just so much background music for our distracted lives? 

I wish I could have been there to hear the closing piece of the Christmas Oratorio BVW 248, “Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen” (English translation below).* For the first thirty seconds of the final piece of the cantata, the orchestra blasts out a bright baroque trumpet fanfare. They’re in the key of D major — the brightest and most triumphant of keys. Suddenly, the choir breaks in. The feel is still triumphant, and the key is still D major, but the tune is “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” — a melody that people had associated with Jesus’s suffering for our sins long before Bach made it the centerpiece of his St. Matthew’s Passion seven years earlier. The text the choir is singing now, though, is not about Jesus’s suffering. It’s about his victory over all that is evil, and about our resuming our rightful place at God’s right hand:

Now are You well avenged
Upon your enemies,
For Christ has broken asunder
All might of adversaries.
Death, Devil, Sin, and Hellfire
Are vanquished entirely;
In its true place, by God’s side
Now stands the human race.

Jaws must have been dropping. I know I would have been in tears. The precious truth of Jesus’s mission to die as our substitute can so easily become a coping mechanism at best, a prompt to morbid self-absorption at worst. The complementary truth of Jesus’s mission as our “Christus Victor” calls us to do more than merely put up with life’s tough stuff. Somehow King Jesus empowers us to share in his reclamation of life. Knowing that Christ is King “fortifies” us, as Calvin says, “with courage to stand unconquerable against all the assaults of spiritual enemies” (Institutes 2.15.4). 

Worship is a place where we get to enjoy the whole package deal. Worship craftsmanship calls forth from us — as it did from master worship leader J. S. Bach — the most faithfully imaginative ways of expanding our spirits to take in the fullness of God’s story. Christ is our substitute. We sob. Christ is our champion. We dance. He bears our sins. We drop to our knees. He breaks our bondage to sin. We rise with hands uplifted. He suffers for the world. We intercede. He empowers us to make the world different. We go to tell and live the story — excellently, even bodaciously. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay license

Sidebar — Resources

We’re all called to exercise the craft of worship leadership in different settings. Regardless of your setting, you personally may find Bach a worthy docent. No one has ever embodied theology more profoundly in music. Before we get too far past Christmas and Epiphany, his Christmas Oratorio would be worth a listen. 

Let me also recommend church historian Jaroslov Pelikan’s brilliant little book, Bach Among the Theologians (Wipf & Stock, 1986, 2003). Read about — and, of course, listen to — the way Bach fleshed out the twin portraits of “Christ our Substitute” in his Saint Matthew Passion and of “Christus Victor” in his Saint John Passion. 

* The YouTube rendering here is by Canzona and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, 12/24/2020