Among the greatest hymns of Danish theologian, educator, and statesman N.F.S. Grundtvig (pronounced GROONT-fee) is “O Day Full of Grace.” It’s a lovely hymn for congregational singing most any Sunday, but when combined with the choral setting written by F. Melius Christiansen, “O Day Full of Grace” becomes the best possible sermon. It’s perfect for these weeks between All Saints’ Day, when we remember the faithful come now into the church victorious, and Christ the King Sunday, when we hear again of the coming of Jesus crucified and risen on the Youngest Day.
Christiansen (1871–1955) was the renowned choir director and composer at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Because Christiansen’s arrangements of beloved hymns, including this one, are so rich and glorious, we might at first think that’s what the hymn is all about. But Christiansen is both more clever and more faithful than to just give you full-blown glory. Instead, this choir director, who is square one of the Lutheran choral tradition, tends to the content of Grundtvig’s Danish hymn. He casts it not as a hymn sung from the glory of the heavenly heights, but one that creeps up slowly from the deepest depths of sorrow and loss, death and the grave.
The hymn is in keeping with Reformation theology that puts forward a claim called “the theology of the cross,” that our salvation cannot be found in the visible triumphs of our personal glory, religious activity, or pious platitudes. Instead, God comes to us most fully in our crosses, for where we have become nothing, Christ becomes everything. Ultimately, when we are dead, then Christ can indeed be the way, the truth, and the life. Truth be told, our lives are lived under a cross. Our imperfections get in the way. Our good intentions fail us. And death, no matter how we attempt to deny it, will hold sway and bring us finally to a seven-by-four-foot plot of land.
In his memoir of widowhood following his wife’s death, church historian Martin Marty1 compares “Summer Christians” who are absolutely sure of God’s hand visible in their glory and success with “Winter Christians” who live under the cross in the darkness of our final enemy’s hand, waiting for God’s reign in the New Jerusalem to begin. “O Day Full of Grace” is a song for and by those Winter Christians. In the midst of grief and loss, we hope for the fullness of the promised day of grace, but we see through a glass dimly and, at best, find only mere glimpses of it. We hope against hope that the promise of baptism and the good news of the resurrection will be ours. But for now, it remains a rumor of a far off victory.
Christiansen’s arrangement of “O Day Full of Grace” begins at that point: The saints, those who have gone to sleep in Christ, lie in their graves. No longer do they have an ounce of power to accomplish any good. The only thing left for them is the utterly passive game of waiting for the day to come. Christiansen opens quietly with the basses moving from a pickup F sharp to the whole note on B, as if to say, “Your grave is the pickup note to the true new day of eternity.” As each voice comes in, it’s like rays of dawning light rising above the horizon. That far-off victory? It’s here for you now.
In the second verse, the rising dead who can hardly believe that resurrected bodies and eternal mercy are theirs hear the promise again. God has come into the same crucifiable flesh, and his victory over the darkness of the tomb is the rising sun they now see. Pulled from their graves, their mouths open with all the company of heaven — and with even trees endowed with speech — to sing the traveling song of praise that comes with a homeward departure.
Now the alto and soprano lines become the dance steps of resurrected arms and feet, yearning, leaning forward toward the light, pulling the tenors and basses with them, just as the women on the first Easter brought the band of disciples into the good news of the resurrection. By the end of the song, sinners who prayed with hope in spite of the darkness in their lives as sojourners in this world are now on their way and departing for their homeland. There they will live not with rumors or the merest glimpses of Christ’s light, but they now bask “in endless light.”
This, of course, is exactly what the time between All Saints’ and Christ the King point us toward. Christiansen’s “O Day Full of Grace” works to give this good news in a way that it becomes anchored in you and provides you hope on the day when the darkness drops and life seems to stop. Then, because this word has been proclaimed, you can know and trust that Christ, who is your light, will dawn, will come, will raise the broken, sinful, utterly human beings he has claimed. When the last line is sung, both by the choir and in your life, can you not also picture the Son’s first rays shining on you at the most distant horizon? Advent is coming, and you’ll be ready.
1 Martin Marty, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).
Ken, this is wonderful! Your attention to and exegesis of musical detail shone a ray of warm summer light upon this Winter Christian!