God's new Messiah

 


By email yesterday I had a question from a sermon I preached a couple of years ago, about our abandoned hymn "Once to every man and nation" and its source, James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis". The question: "who the 'new Messiah' was in Lowell's poem". It's a good question that requires a look and contemplation, including reading not just our hymn, but Lowell's entire 18-stanza 90-line poem and researching Lowell himself. 

To begin, Lowell's "God's new Messiah" is not "Jesus Christ" as I assumed all my growing up years singing and loving the hymn, and having not paid attention in Bible class the summer it was our theme hymn and study topic at Camp Weed. We/I tend to be single-mindedly focused! But nothing could be farther from Truth than our notion that God is unchangeable, unchanged, unchanging. Or equally distant from Truth, our Christian notion that Jesus was/is God's one and only Messiah. For, at least from our perspective, and in our perception, and retrospectively in our Heilsgeschichte, since the anointing of Saul, then David, ... , Cyrus of Persia, Jesus of Nazareth, God has anointed and does anoint a new Messiah as needed from age to age in God's striving against Evil, which is human sin.

As God is dealing with humans, God's act of anointing is in our hearts and minds, our imagings and imaginings, in our holy stories, sometimes in our sight, in our memories, and, in our day, in the midst of us. Sometimes the Anointed is Human, sometimes Idea, Notion, a godly Ideal, some great Cause, a Force, a Protest, a tiny mustard-seed-ische Beginning; to say it another way and along with Gospel John, whether Flesh, Spirit, or Ideal, the Anointed is Logos, Word, not only Speaker but what is Said. Quest for Perfection. From the Logos Himself: Love. For Lowell, earlier, God's Messiah was Mayflower and Pilgrims against religious tyranny. In Lowell's own age and in his poem, God's new Messiah was the Abolitionist Movement against slavery; and also, (written in 1845) ignited by the imminent prospect of Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the Protest against the American government's empirical expansionism. Annexing the Republic of Texas and then war with Mexico forcibly to settle the southern border. 

God's new Messiah in Lowell's poem was "some great cause" -> the Fight for the Ideal of Freedom and Justice: overcoming a culture and its government that embraced slavery and its presumption of its right and righteousness to use power of force to exert its will.

 

The Present Crisis

by James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of the century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.

So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Though its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame; —
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide;
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly;
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s page but record
One death- grapple in the darkness ‘twist old system and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, —
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within, —
“They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.”

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.

‘Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father’s graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make Plymouth Rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s;
But we make their truth our falsehood thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed our jailor? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of today?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.




Alphabet & PTL
TW+

Image: "going fishing" from 7H looking over StAndrewsBay, PanamaCityFL DateTimeGroup 202103130659CST

I'm thinking on, after Lowell, selectively, in my own Time. For example, perhaps in Lowell's theology "God's new Messiah" in response to The Holocaust was our Allied Forces? But one must take great care, be mindful that perspective and perception varies from person to person, nation to nation, &c. Was, for further example, Hiroshima/Nagasaki "God's new Messiah" against Pearl Harbor and the rapacious Japanese Empire? Perhaps a horrifying thought, but then look at Joshua ravishing The Promised Land as "God's new Messiah" for that endeavor (I mean, it is incontestable that Joshua was anointed/ordained to that, so "messiah"). One must be very careful, because the danger is great of what Jesus warned would be "false christs". James Russell Lowell was specific, and we might all agree with him today; but in his Time his thinking was divisive and not necessarily even the majority. Good Sunday School topic for the right class.

T+