Christ Arose!
Empty tomb
I hope my listeners can accept the youthful exuberance of the final piece in Grand Creations, “Christ Arose.” After all, I was about 18 years old when I wrote it, and in my boyish enthusiasm I made sure to span a large dynamic range while encompassing the highest and lowest notes on the keyboard. It's all over the piano!
I remember the congregation sang this hymn in my church as I grew up. It begins as a kind of somber lullaby to the dead Christ in its first part, and then it explodes in a joyful outburst: “Up from the grave he arose!” Lyrics are here.
According to N. T. Wright, the resurrection of Christ was unexpected and unprecedented, in both the first century Jewish world and the pagan world. Among Jesus’s own people, the Jews, resurrection was understood to be a phenomenon to be expected of a whole people, not an individual. If it did occur to an individual, it was a kind of recycling of the dead person. Among the non-Jewish world, resurrection was simply nonsense. Everyone knows that once you’re dead, you stay dead!
The resurrection of Jesus fit neither model: he transformed into a new kind of person. And yet, according to Wright, this unexpected and utterly unprecedented perception of Jesus's resurrection was universally understood by Christian believers from the earliest times, according to any records to which we have access. This indicates to any historian, even a skeptical one, that something extraordinary happened well before 50CE. Even at the time I wrote “Christ Arose,” I understood from the story that his resurrection was unexpected, starting with those closest to him. I tried to convey some of this startling quality with the abrupt key changes near the end.
This piece also expresses the exuberant culmination of my teenage search about the truth of Christianity: if Jesus rose from the dead, then the faith, the Good News, the Way, as it's called in the New Testament, was largely true and to be believed. If he didn’t, then the faith was mostly nice thoughts for nice people wanting to be nice, or at its worst, a foolish delusion. In my research and reading, I decided the resurrection actually happened, in the same way that we can say that the assassination of Lincoln or the writing of the Declaration of Independence actually happened. It is a matter of history, not opinion, with the most profound, joyful implications!
Next week: Playing a Musical Instrument Benefits Your Brain
