Now Thank We All Our God

It’s Wednesday tea time, when some gals in the church and I gather together to pray and talk and study.  Today we’re looking at hymns, considering favorites, looking at back stories.

Angelika comes with Now Thank We All Our God.  What Angelika shared from the life of Martin Rinkart, who wrote the words to the hymn, is of a godly man living in a time of great suffering: The Thirty Years’ War was ravaging Europe; the plague had resurfaced and as the only surviving  pastor in his community, Martin buried 4,000 people; and a famine further wracked the already decimated population.

It was into that space of suffering and devastation that Martin Rinkart wrote, Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in whom His world rejoices.

How, in the midst of the crucible of suffering, are such words even possible?  We ponder the question together, one speaking of God’s grace emerging in ways discernible after the suffering has ended.  She speaks of the grace of hindsight, of what I think of as Joseph’s benediction upon his murderous brothers at the end of Genesis: what you intended for my evil, God used to the good.  It is the idea not that God visits suffering upon us, but rather that God transforms the suffering into something useful, something beautiful even, and in the transforming of the ‘thing’, God transforms us.

But Rinkart isn’t writing after the suffering is past.  He’s writing in the middle of the suffering, right from the heart of the spiritual and physical blast site.

And in the German, Angelika tells us, it’s even more obvious, this joy and faith-claim to God: [God], who from our childhood, has given us too much. . . 

“Too much”.  The phrase stands out so much more than the English Hath blessed us.  Even when it seems as if we have nothing, God has given us “too much”, so great is the divine blessing of relationship.

Martin Rinkart was speaking hope from suffering to suffering.  It was the benediction not of the fool, but of the experienced.  And from the experience, Rinkart does not celebrate suffering; rather, he sees through the suffering to the reality of God standing there.  And what Rinkart sees is bounty.  And peace.  And divine nearness.  And grace.  And guidance.  And perplexity.

What Rinkart ‘sees’ is God.