Break Of Day
(Audio Sample - 1 MB)
An Easterday Carol
We gathered there at break of day
to see the place where Jesus lay;
the great stone had been rolled away.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Who could believe what we saw there!
An empty grave, a rock so bare!
A young man who did declare:
Why seek the living with the dead?
He is not here, but lives instead;
For he has risen as he said.
Had he not spoken of the tomb:
one decked in white, yet inside gloom;
one overturned, where life would bloom?'
On this great day, this happy morn,
our future, free from death, is born;
new life comes to us this grace-filled dawn.
A Reflection on Luke 24:1-8
It was daybreak, on the first day of the week.
The women who had come from Galilee with him
took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.
And they found the stone had been rolled away from the tomb.
Two men in dazzling garments appeared to them.
"Why do you seek the living one among the dead?" they asked.
"He is not here. He has been raised,
and has gone ahead of you to Galilee."
Composer's Reflection
This is a light-hearted carol. To begin with, I have written a Jewish modal melody to sing about resurrection. And then I pile on the Alleluias - four of them! And aren't these Alleluia accents a bit unusual? Then that's good! This song is a small enigma. Rather than singing of the triumph of resurrection, it's more about people's hopes and expectations; an empty grave suggests something about a future - but as we haven't lived this yet, we still have to look back in time to see where perhaps we ought to go next.
The Gospels speak of two kinds of tombs. The first was all white and pretty on the outside, but corrupt within. This was the description Jesus used about the Pharisees. The second was not as pretty, roughly hewn into the rock of the earth. But it was empty. And it was around this empty tomb the apostles gathered. And when they looked inside, they understood Jesus' words, that they should empty themselves so that they too could be filled with something even greater. Around this empty tomb the Church was born. The Church, which draws us into the secrets of our past, the
Church which nourishes our vision for the future. Belief gives us the courage to look beyond.
Why four Alleluias? Alleluia is the song of an Easter People. It is a Hebrew word, found at the end of Psalm 150, which means let every breath in my body be a song of praise to the God who made me. It is made up of two Hebrew names for God. El is a shortened form of Elohim, which means God of the Powers. This is the infinitely distant, remote God, who is God of the desert. Ia or Yah
is a shortened form of Yahweh, which means I Who am with you, I Who am for you at all times, I Who am there in times of your deepest needs. This is the intimate, immediately-present God of the Temple, the One whose earthly tent was pitched on Mt. Zion, the heart of Jerusalem. Alleluia! What a perfect word! Why sing it only four times? Why not a hundred?
A secret about singing this song well is found in this word Alleluia. Play with the consonants, the letter L. In Hebrew the word consists only of consonants, equivalent to 'L'L'L'Y. There are no vowels in Hebrew, only breath sounds to separate the consonants, breathed in to make the word pronounceable. I suggest that the choir should trip along each of these Ls in a dance of joy, almost forgetting that there are vowels. As for that top E - is it too high for an assembly refrain? It's amazing where people can find the breath in our breathless excitement during that Easter night and on that Easter morn!