Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 363 · December 29
A New Song
“O sing unto the LORD a new song; for he hath done marvellous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory.”
A torn scrap of papyrus came out of the rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt with musical notation above the words, dated to around the third century, and it is the oldest Christian hymn anyone has found with its tune attached. What survives is a doxology, the singers naming Father, Son and Spirit, and then the papyrus tears and the melody stops. Somebody wrote that as a new song.
We do not have one, and that is worth admitting plainly. The command here is to sing something new, and most of us are still singing what we sang at nineteen. The reason has less to do with laziness than with material. A new song needs something to be new about: for he hath done marvellous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory. Asked what God has done in the last twelve months that we did not already know about him in the first year we believed, most of us would go quiet.
The psalm does not wait for our answer. It widens. Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth. The harp, the trumpets, the cornet, then things with no voice at all: Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof. Let the floods clap their hands. The singing happens at that scale because of what the right hand and the holy arm have already done, and the psalm ends by saying he is coming to judge the earth, which the sea appears to find good news.
The victory in that verse was not won by anybody who sings about it, and it will not be taken back off you. New material will reach your life this year, from him, and not out of your effort at feeling more, and you will not have to compose anything when it does. The song is older than the papyrus, and it has run a long time without needing your voice and is glad of it anyway.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 363 is Death Swallowed in Victory (Isaiah 25:8).