Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Old Testament reading from Exodus continues the theme of God’s glory from last week. In this case, God is telling Moses that “no one may see my face and live” and thus, he would place Moses in the cleft of the rock and pass by, allowing his to see God passing by “from behind.”

This notion that God could not be seen directly, face to face, by Moses has gotten me thinking about our artistic expressions of God.

How would we try to depict the living God in a work of art, in music? The visual answer, of course, is that to do so iconographically, one must paint the likeness of Jesus, God made flesh.

When thinking of music, it is also difficult to think of material that strives to communicate a sense of God’s presence, at least, not directly. We have hymns like “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” and the “Trisagion,” among other texts, to describe an experience of God’s presence; but the reality seems to be just that: human experience.

All this is to say, what music might describe what God is like?

On the one hand, who knows this for certain? But on the other, perhaps an answer is found in music about God in the flesh. Music that tells us something essential about God-in-the-flesh.

Let me offer one possibility. In Bach’s Mass in B Minor, one of the choruses in the Nicene Creed portion focuses on the phrase “And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man.” The music of Bach’s setting is somber, yet ecstatic, with falling lines in the violins (falling in “cross” shapes evocative of the crucifixion) and falling vocal lines (depicting the idea of God coming down to become man). Somehow, this symbolic material manages to communicate a deep theological truth, yet to deliver it straight to the heart, all with a sort of “bowing” gesture that reminds us of the bow made during this part of the Creed on Sunday mornings. The chorus leads straight into the “Crucifixus” movement, suggesting that one of the central things about God that we know is that God became man in Jesus to suffer and die in order to obtain victory over death and sin.

We think that the Et incarnatus est movement may be the last thing Bach wrote, which seems wonderfully apt.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin