This is the edited text of the homily for the the Jubilate Deo programme Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral on the Memorial of St Anthony of Padua, 13 June 2025.
Human beings have been described as “rational animals,” “joking animals,” “linguistic animals” and “religious animals.” But we are also “musical animals,” with compositions more diverse and complex than any bird, cricket or whale. We use music to express, entertain, educate, connect, heal.
Music also aids prayer and worship, articulating beliefs and glorifying God. All religions have their chants or music, but the most elaborate is surely our Judeo-Christian tradition. Genesis records that, four generations after Adam, Jubal was the father of music.
After Israel passed through the Red Sea, Moses intoned Let us sing to the Lord: He has covered Himself in glory. Before he died, he sang a last song, praising God’s faithfulness despite Israel’s fickleness. The ancient Jews used music in the cult for praise and lament, in civic life for coronations and celebrations, and in private life for festivity and prayer.
When David the shepherd boy was chosen as future king, he joined King Saul as a court musician and played his harp to calm Saul down. After he beat the Philistine champion Goliath, he grew in renown, rose to general, became best friends with the king’s son and husband to the king’s daughter, and was eventually king himself. Amidst all this, he did not forget his music. On several occasions he led Israel in praising God with voices and castanets, lyres and harps, tambourines and cymbals. When the Ark of the Covenant was brought to Jerusalem, he danced to trumpets and song. When Saul and Jonathan died, he sang his lament How the Mighty Have Fallen. He even wrote the first ‘rock’ song, The Lord is My Rock.
Chronicles records David and his son Solomon planning and building the first Temple in Jerusalem, then staffing it with clergy and ministers. Foremost of these were the director of music, music tutors and student musicians with voices, strings and percussion. There were 24 choral groups in all, with 288 musicians for the 21 weekly services. Much of Israel’s liturgical music is attributed to David, “the sweet psalmist of Israel”, including half the 150 songs in the Book of Psalms. His son Solomon composed more than a thousand songs. Some psalms themselves exhort us to compose and sing sacred music. Ethan, one of David’s music chiefs, wrote the lyrics of today’s psalm, Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord (Ps 88(89)). There are also Isaiah’s servant songs and various laments. The hymnody of Israel makes up a good proportion of the Old Testament and was an important inheritance for Christians.
The New Testament also has plenty of music. Jesus’ coming is carolled by Gabriel and Elizabeth’s Ave Maria, Mary’s Magnificat, Zechariah’s Benedictus, the angels’ Gloria in excelsis, and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis—which together with the psalms are still the stuff of the Church’s daily prayer. Jesus and His disciples joined the Jewish liturgies. When He made His triumphal entry to Jerusalem, Jesus was greeted with the Sanctus, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” After He instituted the Eucharist, Jesus sang a hymn, and even sang psalms from the cross.
St Paul was another enthusiast for sacred music: he sang hymns from his prison cell, recorded early Christian canticles in his epistles, and told his disciples to “sing psalms, hymns and spirituals.” The Book of Revelations prophesies a heaven in which the just will sing hymns to God, and it even gives us the lyrics so we can practice now!
Subsequent generations of Christians took forward the Temple chants, developing them in new ways, adding congregational hymnody, polyphony, orchestral Masses and more.
Why is music so important for religion? Do God, angels and saints really sing? How is it music so elevates our spirit? Part of the answer is surely beauty. Good music—not just any music—attracts and delights, and so it is important that you guys really work at it, perfecting your art, so it’s genuinely beautiful. Some of your peers might think it quirky for you to be singing “olde mouldy” church music. They probably only know music of the last decade or two. But you are much more adventurous, stretching back two or three thousand years, to the music of Moses and David, of Jesus, Mary and Paul, all the way forward to today. It’s timeless music yours, a beautiful art form.
But there’s more to sacred music than its aesthetic appeal, artistic skill or emotional impact, important as these are. Those things are about the body of the music; but what makes it sacred is its soul. And the soul of sacred music is that in some way it reflects, even participates in, the nature of God. We say that from all eternity God spoke His Son, the Word of God, but another way of thinking of it is that He sang His Son, the Song of God. As musical animals, beings that glorify God through worship, we are made in the image of that Song of God.
Sacred music draws us beyond ourselves, as all good music should, but towards the otherworldly, transcendent, divine, as only sacred music can. It moves our entire being towards God, to contemplating His beauty, truth, goodness, to experiencing His love, our communion with Him and each other. You might glimpse what that communion means when your different voices join, blend and support one another to make a sound better than any of you could make alone, more even than the sum of your parts. That should impel you toward a greater love for God and your fellows, and thus a desire to praise God and share your music with all the world.
And so my young friends, in participating in the Jubilate Deo programme, you are gaining a skill and hopefully having some fun, you are giving glory to God and evangelising through beauty. Through your music, you can bring about what Isaiah said are the signs of the Good News: healing for broken hearts, liberty for captive wills, freedom for imprisoned souls, jubilee favour for all, but especially for those who are suffering in any way (Isa 61:1-3). Answering Christ’s call in today’s Gospel, go out as “labourers to the harvest” and announce the nearness of God’s Kingdom through your music (Lk 10:1-9).