Comfortable Words
The King James Bible of 1611, a model of straightforward English made for reading aloud.
The King James Bible of 1611, a model of straightforward English made for reading aloud.
The most famous of all Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymns celebrates the birth of Christ, in company with the shepherds of Bethlehem.
‘Hark how all the welkin rings’ was the first line of this famous hymn, when Charles Wesley first composed it in 1739 — welkin being a word of Anglo-Saxon origin meaning the vault of heaven. The subsequent change was Charles’s own; the decision to omit the last two verses from most hymn books was not, and it has sadly diminished the poem as a whole.
A hymn for Christmas, wondering at the mystery of the infinity of God contained within the tiny frame of a new-born child.
In the eighth century, monk John of the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem wrote a hymn to Mary, in which he remembered in wonder how the infinite God became a tiny child, making her narrow womb ‘wider than the heavens’. The same paradox struck Charles Wesley, and it prompted him to write a hymn of his own.
Charles Wesley finds comfort in the knowledge that nothing can separate him from the love of Jesus Christ.
“I am persuaded,” St Paul told the Christians of Rome, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It was a just such a secure serenity that filled Charles Wesley, as he records in this hymn.
Charles Wesley is bursting with the good news of salvation, but for a moment finds himself at a loss for words.
On May 21st, 1738, Church of England clergyman Charles Wesley felt for the first time that the message of the gospel was really ‘for me’ — a message addressed not only to all mankind, but to Charles Wesley. His overpowering ‘conversion’ (as he called it) momentarily bewildered him, but fortunately for us he was not at a loss for words for long.
A short poem about the transformation of the communion bread and wine by the action of God’s Spirit.
In Charles Wesley’s day, the change effected to the bread and wine in the eucharist was a matter of bitter and often ill-informed dispute. Here, he echoes the wise words of eighth-century monk St John Damascene, and simply asks the Holy Spirit to be present and to do those things which surpass reason and thought.
A short poem about the irresistible power of the Name of Jesus Christ, and its source in that mildest of images, the helpless lamb.
‘Behold the lamb of God’ was the cry of John the Baptist when he saw Jesus walking towards him as John baptised repentant sinners in the River Jordan. Few can have understood what he meant; that became a little clearer when Jesus was put to death just as the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Temple.