Common Ground Song 86 ‘Meekness and Majesty’ Words / Music: Graham Kendrick © Kingsway
YouTube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtt52JEW_Zo  
Featured image: source. Copyright unknown.

I chose this song for this weekend, before knowing that I would be asked to preach this morning, or that we would be marking World Environment Day (last Friday). But the theme of my sermon, ‘Acting at a Human Scale’, ties in well with the words and music of Graham Kendrick’s song. The Christ, the ‘Lord of Eternity’, comes to ‘dwell in humanity’.

The song became incredibly popular in the 1980s and 1990s with churches of all traditions, though less sung now as a new generation has found its own ‘go-to’ worship songs. Its appeal, I think, is precisely in that it makes Jesus relatable. Yes, Christ is eternal, but Jesus was a human being with all our emotions. Yes, he sometimes showed supernatural powers and knowledge, but he also spoke the common language of people of his day, ate and prayed with them. Yes, he lives for ever, but for those few years on earth he fed, taught and healed those who were within his reach, his neighbours and friends.

To quote from another Kendrick song, the one whose ‘hands flung starts into space’ became the one ‘to cruel nails surrendered’. By this, Jesus not only achieved redemption, restoration, atonement, salvation or whatever other theological term you prefer. He also, in Graham’s words, ‘lifted our humanity to the heights of his throne’. To be human is to be made in God’s image, and God has experienced the human scale of being in order that we my, at the last day, experience his scale of being.