Graham Kendrick's Servant King song is one that will outlast most of the trite and trashy splurge of pop-gospel music the church tastes and spits out in short order as unpalatable, not to say downright indigestible. Here is the Incarnation of God's Son in all its grandeur and yet all its humanness and intimacy, and Christians everywhere, young and old, sing the words with profound conviction that this is biblical truth to be believed and lived out.
From heaven you came, helpless babe,
entered our world, your glory veiled,
not to be served but to serve,
and give your life that we might live.
In his constant focus on the Incarnation and the Cross in his song-writing, Kendrick is rare in his genre. The myriad writers who never get beyond a touchyfeely expression of their own subjective yearnings after God who is there simply to cater to their every felt need are light years away from this kind of objectivity:
The song reflects the seamless transition of the gospels from absorption with the Saviour's virginal conception and the events of the Nativity to the major portions of gospel writing which are neither more nor less than obituary notices for Jesus of Nazareth, concluding with eye-popping recitations of his resurrection appearances.
The same conjunction of Bethlehem with Calvary in the church's celebration of the birthday of Jesus is likewise noteworthy. On December 25th vast numbers of Christians will receive bread and wine in remembrance of Good Friday, the day of his death. At your birthday party or mine, to raise the question of our demise would be to dispel any whiff of celebration instantly but again this Christmas we will joyfully recognise that the Saviour's birth is ultimately meaningless, and worse, powerless, without the saving activity of the Cross.
There in the garden of tears, my heavy load he chose to bear; his heart with sorrow was torn, `Yet not my will but yours,' he said.
Kendrick's focus on Gethsemane reveals deft theological instinct, for there the Lord Jesus came face to face with his death as a holocaust, totally exposed to God's abhorrence of sin, a death without God and without protection, deprived in those hours of the one solace and resource which had always been there. The sparse wording of the Nicene Creed pinpoints what was happening: "I believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven . . ." It was not a heroic nor an exemplary death, much less a martyr's death, for in Gethsemane and on Calvary, as Martin Luther commented, the Son became Sin, "the greatest thief, murderer, adulterer, robber, desecrator, blasphemer there has ever been anywhere in the world". Believers are immune from the curse (Letter to the Galatians 3:13) and the condemnation of God (Letter to the Romans 8:3) precisely because Christ took them upon himself and went, in our place, into the outer darkness.
Come see his hands and his feet, the scars that speak of sacrifice, hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered."
By following the biblical trajectory and seeing the humiliation of our Lord as a line, rather than a point, Kendrick nowhere has to force the otherwise unpleasant, off-putting truth at Christmas that the babe in the manger was born to die. His whole life on earth, indeed, was a realisation of the obedience and humility he had shown in eternity past when at the ultimate summit conference Father, Son and Holy Spirit devised a rescue plan for humankind. "We love because he first loved us," as St John precis-ed that conference agenda (First Letter of John 4:19), identifying the source of all Christian worship and devotion. Likewise Kendrick encourages us to make a life-affecting response to the love that drew salvation's plan, as at Christmas again we bow low in adoration and wonder before the Servant King.
So let us learn how to serve and in our lives enthrone him, each other's needs to prefer, for it is Christ we're serving.
This is our God, the Servant King, He calls us now to follow him, to bring our lives as a daily offering of worship to the Servant King."
G.F.