Text: Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) Tune: Lizzie Shove Tourjee Estabrook 1858-1913
1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.
2 There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior,
there is healing in his blood.
3 But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.
4 For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternalis
most wonderfully kind.
5 If our love were but more simple,
we should rest upon God’s word,
and our lives would be illumined
by the presence of our Lord.
REFLECTION
The encounter here of Jesus with his critics is direct and at the same time mysterious. The tower of Siloam story next to the tree that is not producing fruit might seem to be so different they cannot be be in the same sermon. On the one hand Jesus is saying those who died when the tower fell on them were not being punished for their sins, it just happened. On the other, he is saying that the tree that did not produce fruit, and almost dead, except for the promise of the vinedresser to care for it..
Jesus is speaking to people who knew agriculture intimately. They are aware of how dependent they are on the weather, God’s providence, to raise their crops, enough to feed themselves and their families for the year. They know disasters can come simply because not enough rain has fallen or too much. Although the farmer prays and knows everything comes from God, there are times where the rain doesn’t come or there is too much, so the crops fail and hunger, even starvation looms. Rather like those who died at Siloam.
Still a good farmer works to cultivate the crops, to dress the vines and assure that things are optimal for growing. So an unproductive plant or tree cannot be tolerated. My great uncle sounded like this farmer once when he told me about a fruit tree on the family farm. Though it flowered beautifully it didn’t produce fruit one year. "If it doesn’t next year, I am going to cut it down.” It seemed brutal, but he as a good farmer wanted to see growth and flourishing crops. Another version of this is Jesus talk of the vineyard in John 15 and the Father who cuts out the dead vines so that the vine produces more and better fruit.
Repentance and death are the subject of both vignettes. Death and repentance are not unlike each other. To be converted is to repent and turn around. There is a death there. One has to die to one’s self and one’s sin in order to find life in Christ. Death and tragedy are not the last words in the life of the Christian. Jesus is. One needs to be deeply grafted into his life in order to live. The tree needs to repent, and die to his sin, to be raised back into life.
What we also see here is the care of the farmer for the dying plant, digging and fertilizing it, and loving it. As any of us with house plants know, the simple act of loving a plant by one’s attitude and thus deeds can bring back life to many a seemingly dead branch. For life, one must be pruned and cleansed of sin by our Savior. He does it out of love and mercy so we might flourish. As our hymn has it “For the love of God is broader/than the measures of the mind,/and the heart of the Eternal/is most wonderfully kind.”
HYMN INFO
Frederick Faber came from a French Huguenot family that had fled from France to England where they became strict Calvinists. Faber studied for the priesthood at Balliol College in Oxford, and ordained as an Anglican priest in 1839. He was moved by the Oxford Movement led by John Henry Cardinal Newman who had left the Anglican church to join the Roman Catholic church. Faber was of a similar mind and became a Catholic priest in 1845. A lover of the hymns by Charles Wesley, William Cowper and John Newton, which he had grown up singing in his Protestant past, he wanted to write hymns for Catholics to sing, like them. He wrote over 150 hymns collected in Hymns (1862). His most famous hymn is the well-loved Faith of our Fathers. There are several tunes for this text, among the more popular are Beecher and Wellesly. The writer of Wellesly. Tourjee was the daughter of the head of the new England Conservatory of Music, who encouraged his daughter as a composer. She wrote this tune when she was seventeen and he included it in the Methodist hymnal of 1878, naming the tune for Wellesly, the college she attended.
For another take on this hymn and text see
LINKS
Goodchappy
Orchard Enterprises
Andrew Remillard for the tune Wellesly
Hymns and more Beecher tune
A bonus: this was my hymn on the Luke text.
