Last Sunday our principal reading in church was from John 3. For that reason the subject of this week’s post has been echoing round my head for the last few days: the setting of John 3.16-17 which forms the 9th movement of Stainer’s Crucifixion. 

Often dismissed as among the less fortunate outputs of a Victorian sensibility that can tend towards the sentimental, if not saccharine, the Crucifixion represented an attempt to modernise (for a given value of modern!) the same form and idea that had gifted the world the Passions of JS Bach. The Crucifixion has been called vulgar, though at least one other thinker has suggested this can be taken in a positive sense, as accessible to the common person, rather than with automatically negative connotations.

God so loved the world, in particular, has entered repertoire as a stand-alone anthem, even though the oratorio as a whole is less commonly performed. The movement’s text is straightforwardly biblical, with none of the dilution by banality that some of the libretto’s original text reveals at points. Indeed, it sets two verses that are not only well-known but well-loved. Stainer’s chromatic but never jarring setting has worked it’s way into my mind so much that I struggle to hear these words without starting to hum.

The word painting is present, but gentle: both ‘perish’ and ‘condemn’ are more dissonant than their surroundings; the loudest marked dynamic, on the other hand is reserved for the positive reward rather than the threatened punishment: ‘everlasting life’ is also both repeated and extended in the recapitulation, not to the point of lasting forever, of course, but enough to make the point.

What then of any take-away? Is there an anagogical reading of the text and setting as a whole? As we continue through Lent, are we embodying God’s non-condemnation? Are we dispelling the myth (too common within as well as outside the Church) that to be Christian is to be judgemental? Are we speaking more loudly and for longer of everlasting life?