There are people who dislike modern music because they find it untuneful. Admittedly, it can be difficult to find a tune in some avant-garde music. How many people, after all, walk around singing excerpts from the works of Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman, or Philip Glass? And if you haven’t heard of these composers, then I’ve demonstrated my point.
The presence of an identifiable tune is why many people gravitate towards the Classical period of music history. They want Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. All these so-called Classical composers made use of an established form of the time called sonata form.
If you’ve been to an orchestra concert and heard a Mozart piano concerto or a symphony, you are familiar with sonata form, even if you don’t know it. It’s straightforward and clearly structured. A piece begins with an opening section called the exposition, where two or three themes are presented. The tonic, or home, key of the piece is established, with the second theme usually modulating to the dominant key, a closely-related key to the home key.
Then, after a transition, the middle section, called the development, expands on the themes, wandering in different harmonic lands and creating a fair degree of harmonic instability and tension until, at the right moment, the final section begins. This final section is the recapitulation and does exactly what its name suggests. It re-presents the initial themes, usually stating all of them once again, but this time in the home key, so that everything is resolved and tied up.
Sonata form is, in many ways, neat and tidy. It offers harmonic resolution at the end, even if in between beginning and end, the most adventurous of composers can wander into strange lands. But everything is held together by the themes clearly stated at the beginning of the piece.
When Moses offers his extended speech to the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy, they are on the precipice of entering the Promised Land. Moses’s speech is like the grand recapitulation of a symphony. In this symphony, the initial themes were stated in the first four books of the Bible. Moses does not explicitly recapitulate them, but they are there. God created everything and called it good. When God’s people wandered astray, God called them back into relationship with him. God established his covenant with them, in various ways, and when they were enslaved in the land of Egypt, God freed them and guided them back to their ancestral home.
Moses picks up the story after God’s people have wandered for forty years in the wilderness and the first generation has died. He now addresses the second generation of people who will finally live to see their feet touch down in the Promised Land. But Moses himself will not make it.
The themes presented in the exposition of this grand symphony are God’s love for and mercy towards his chosen people and his commitment to covenant relationship. The development of this symphony consists of God’s people veering into sin, experiencing punishment perceived as God’s wrath, and the constant turning away from and returning back to God. And finally, on the verge of entering the long-awaited Promised Land, Moses must recapitulate the foundational themes. In spite of all they have done, God has guided his people through foreign lands. God has been faithful to his promises. God has brought them home.
Moses’s speech is a moral exhortation. Moses knows that when God’s people arrive in the land of milk and honey, they will be prone to forget God, as they have in the past. They will encounter valleys in their story with God, and they will turn from God. Or when they are on mountain peaks, they will also forget God because they don’t think they need him for anything. Moses’ advice is simple: sing the primal themes over and over again. And these are the themes of love. God loves his people, and this infinite love must summon a response of love. Love God alone. Everything springs from that.
Sing these themes to your children. Sing them at home, and when you are wandering along the sinuous paths of life. Sing them before bed and when you rise in the morning. Sing them as you enter and leave your homes. Never forget these beautiful themes.
But we know what will happen to God’s people after Moses’ parting speech. We know that after they have settled in their Promised Land, they will be invaded. Their home will be pillaged. They will go into exile, and they will not be able to sing those initial themes of God’s mercy and compassion. They will have no faith in a future recapitulation where everything is resolved.
And even when they return to the Holy City of Jerusalem and rebuild and regroup their lives and communities, they will once again forget the themes of their ancestral days. They will fail to sing the themes. They will become so distant from God as they forget his themes, that the grand symphony might threaten to fall apart.
We know what this is like, don’t we? On the mountaintops of our lives, we sing lustily these themes of God’s graciousness. When we feel favored, we sing heartily to God. Or perhaps when we feel favored, we forget to sing because we are complacent. Sometimes in our valleys of despair, the themes take on a minor key. But at our worst, we think we own the themes. We think we can morph these themes to our own needs and desires. We share the themes only with those we want to share them with. We dull their tunefulness because we often take God out of the themes.
Perhaps we, like God’s people of old, think that God is only on our side. We seek to conquer the lands around us in the name of our causes. We push anyone and ever yone out of the picture, perhaps at all costs, as God’s people destroyed the foreign nations on their way to the Promised Land. We give up the tuneful themes when we experience hardship, thinking that God has punished us. All this is proof that we have lost the foundational themes stated so beautifully at the beginning of this symphony. We are in desperate need of a recapitulation because we have lost our way in the strange harmonic lands of the development section of this piece.
But, almost as a surprise, in God’s grand symphony, we are offered an incredible recapitulation. Some scribes come to Jesus and ask him to remind them of the themes. And Jesus does. He sings the themes of God’s love for them and of the need for our unwavering commitment to love God in return. Jesus is the embodiment of the recapitulation. He brings everything back to the home, tonic key of love.
Don’t you remember, he says, the theme of loving God with every fiber of your being? In all your wanderings and tribulations, this theme has been there. But there is another theme. It’s not new, and I’m here to remind you of it. Remember when it was first presented, way back in the beginning of this grand symphony? Love your neighbor. It was back there in Leviticus, in the midst of the statement of so many commandments. It was there. Leave the boundaries of your harvest land for the poor and alien. Back in Deuteronomy it was stated so clearly: love your neighbor. This theme of love in action was in that long development section of this symphony: care for those who are oppressed. Do not forsake those in need. I say it again, love your neighbor.
Jesus came to express in living flesh this unifying theme of God’s grand symphony when people had forgotten the tunes. When people had given up on singing the themes of this piece because everything had become so distorted, Jesus came to sing the themes once again.
Jesus came to offer a dramatic recapitulation. And he knows that we will continue to forget the themes. We will allow them to be hijacked by others. We will neglect them. We will fail to sing them because we are stubborn, or lazy, or at times, cruel. But he has commanded us to continue to sing.
We do so today. We sing all the themes and development of this grand symphony over bread and wine in the Mass. We whistle them as we go into the world to love God and neighbor. But we have to keep coming back, again and again, because we can never let these themes die.
We are Christ’s living Body. We have been entrusted with these themes. Outside those doors, it’s a loud cacophony of dissonance and confusion, with every person singing their own themes. But we have the true themes to sing. Love God. Love your neighbor. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. And so we keep coming back, again and again and again, to remember and to sing.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
October 31, 2021