By Canon James Mustard
A new academic year has begun with a new choir year. Last weekend we welcomed eight new probationer choristers, a new lay vicar, a choral scholar and an organ scholar. Cathedral Music may appear unchanging, but any choir is constantly in flux: children progressing, adults coming and going, new repertoire learned, schedules and opportunities changing. Cathedral Music is the epitome of evolution, not revolution!
Sometimes, as a result of this apparent unchanging nature of Cathedral Music and worship, cathedrals can be accused of being too conservative in their approach. How are we doing “mission”? Why do we put so much of our resources into what might be considered a “niche” activity? Why are we not being more “radical”?
We might look to Jesus for inspiration. On the one hand, he seems to be the epitome of all things radical: aggravating the religious, turning tables in the Temple, winding-up the High Priest and so on. He appears every bit the fiery, itinerant preacher, with no need for fine robes or elaborate rituals. But Jesus is simultaneously deeply conservative. He is far more interested in the prophets, especially Isaiah, and the Law of Moses than the teachings of more modern religious groups, pointing out their contradictions and bringing him into conflict with the Pharisees and the Saducees. He spends most of his ministry moving about the region of Palestine, echoing the nomadic tribes of ancient Israel, preaching on the pastoral, sheep, flowers of the field, fish, wheat, rather than addressing the urban and sophisticated, and he quotes endlessly from the psalms.
The Gospel writers pick this up in various ways. John famously takes us back to an evocation of Creation “In the beginning”, and Luke peppers his account of Jesus with angels and song. Song because this is one of the ways in which characters of the Old Testament express themselves, and angels (at the Annunciation, Birth, and Resurrection) because they had largely been excised from the Hebrew Bible in the sixth-century reforms of Josiah, and even from Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, completed only years before Jesus’ birth. Jesus may appeal to us as a radical, but he was also harking back to very ancient customs, traditions and scriptures.
For me, it is the psalms that epitomise our mission and ministry here. Our job, like that of a monastery, is to recite the psalms daily, all 150 every month. We do this, not just because it is an attractive or pleasing thing, but because it helps us get close to, even into the mind of, Jesus. Jesus, the rabbi who quoted the psalms endlessly, who shouted them as his last words on the Cross, who inhabited the Psalms of David, the Royal hymnal.
Many churches have lost the habit of daily recitation of psalms, but in keeping that tradition going, we are keeping alive that tradition of inhabiting the texts that Jesus inhabited in the hope that it will bring us closer to him, and him to us. Our worship is constantly evolving, but the psalms are our constant.