One of Last Summer's Homework Assignments
A: Hey, Anthony, you’re Catholic; maybe you can help me with something.
B: Wow, I think that’s the first time someone’s said that to me at this school.
A: Yeah, I never expected it myself. Here’s the thing, I’m in the orchestra and we play “Resurrection” symphonies, “Passion” settings and overtly religious stuff like that all the time; almost everything I touch seems to be dripping with your religion- Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Verdi. In fact, Britten’s Requiem Mass is my favorite piece of all time. I know the history and some of the meaning behind these pieces, especially the best ones, and I know that most of them have something, in some way, to do with Jesus. I just don’t know what the composers believed about Jesus. So, after 11 years of playing music about the guy, maybe it’s time I learned something.
B: Those guys did write a lot of music with Jesus in mind, my favorite’s Mozart’s Requiem. But, I’m going to start by asking you a question, just bear with me. You know a little about Beethoven’s 9th, right?
A: Of course, I played it with the town orchestra 2 years ago. It’s one of the most influential pieces of music ever.
B: Yes, absolutely. So, you know how few people liked it when it premiered, I take it.
A: That’s right; it scandalized people.
B: It did. It scandalized the well-trained musical ear of his time, and even a few stubborn ones today. People hated the insultingly simple melody, trying to be glorified by a good orchestra. They were baffled by the overtly displayed folk elements in certain places juxtaposed with the astral-sounding fugue. Beethoven had corrupted the ‘pure’ form of the symphony by adding human voices, by teasing anthropomorphized sounds out of the basses with his theme, by turning a common drinking song into “high art!” To most of his contemporaries, Beethoven’s 9th was absurd nonsense. His brilliant fugue and the beautiful, heavenly heights scaled by the chorus were ruined by cheesy brass band and drunken-men’s part. It was combining two incompatible types of music- that of the lower classes, the kind of stuff you danced to, and that of the cultured, educated people.
But, that theme, the little ditty that we call “The Ode to Joy,” it sticks with anyone who hears it and brings smiles to faces. Well, now it’s perhaps the best known and most popular single melody ever, right?
A: I guess so, and now just about everyone can see how brilliant it was for its time. But what does that have to do with Jesus?
B: Well, Jesus and the things he said about himself and the things people believed about him and continue to believe today scandalized the world of his time too, in a kind of similar way. Let me explain.
Mozart and Verdi and I all believe that Jesus is God. We also believe that he’s a human, like you and I. He’s fully God and fully man (464), two different natures - human and divine - in one person, in the same stuff (465). We call the idea that God, who is One, the Creator and eternal, became a man “Incarnation,” in case you were wondering about terminology. But, what that means is that God basically left everything He had and became someone like us (461).
Jesus let people know He was God, saying that he had a special connection with God as “Son of God,” which his followers took to mean that He himself shared in the divine nature of God, being his only-begotten Son (442-3). But Jesus was clearly a man, who worried, suffered, wept, worked, and had friends and family, all in a historical time and place, 2000 years ago in Palestine (423). So, we believe that He is God and man.
That’s a little hard to stomach if you think about it for very long. How can God be a man and a man be God? Is Jesus half and half? Is he kind of man and kind of God? Is he the mind of God in the body of a man? These are the questions people asked. That is, they asked when they didn’t reject the idea altogether, which many did. To some, the idea that God would actually become a man was so insulting that they argued that Jesus was not a man at all, but God appearing to be a man (465). Others knew that Jesus was human but couldn’t stand the idea of God being born of a woman, developing from child to adult and suffering pain, so they argued that Jesus was a normal guy with God joined to him in some way, not really God Himself (466).
People argued about this stuff for centuries and had fights over it. The very thought that God, who is above all of us, completely perfect, outside of time, would stoop to our level was absurd to many people. He emptied himself completely so as to serve a ragtag group of sick humans in a specific time and place. He who is all-powerful and all-knowing mingled with the poor and morally corrupt, went to the bathroom and bled. He is all God and all Man, a thought that’s only thinkable with faith in God’s love. And why did God choose to come to earth? We believe that the Incarnation with the death and resurrection of Jesus constitutes an ultimate act of love, such that was never seen before and will never be seen again.
And this idea has haunted many, many people who’ve heard since it was first proposed. The Incarnation was an idea as scandalous to the philosophical minds of the early part of the first millennium as the 4th movement of the 9th symphony was to Beethoven’s audience, probably more scandalous. But, like the Ode to Joy, the idea of the Incarnation has stuck around. Beethoven, whether or not he meant to, captures an image of the Incarnation with his combination of folk music and symphonic work. Many people today, rather than being scandalized by the mystery of the Incarnation, believe it with great joy, because it means to us that God, who is the very source of the vastness of the universe, is also personally concerned with us, to the point of joining us in our misery on Earth and offering for us to break through it.
Just like the simplest melody of a drinking song being elevated to the dome of heaven in the 9th symphony, the idea of the Incarnation allows for us to ascend to the heights of God (460). God in Jesus Christ assumed our nature so that we might partake in His (460). The beauty of the 9th symphony is not only that it brings pretentious ideas about music crashing down to the accessible world of normal people, but that it also transforms folk music into immortally beautiful praises of a Transcendent God. That is essentially what we believe happens when God becomes man as he does in Jesus. And that’s probably a good part of the reason why our favorite composers write so much of our favorite music about a Jew from the back country of 1st century Palestine. Wouldn’t you if that’s what you believed?