“Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.”
For nearly two millennia, Christians have been singing that every week, often without a second thought about the radical claims embedded in the hymn.
In Isaiah 6, the song shakes the temple, but Christians sing it outside the temple. The Sanctus is a claim that the church is the new temple.
In Isaiah 6 and Revelation, the song is sung by angels. The Sanctus claims that the church’s liturgy is interwoven with the liturgy of Yahweh’s hosts.
In Revelation, the Santus is sung in heaven. When we take up the heavenly hymn, we are acknowledging that our worship joins with the eternal worship in heavenly places. Heaven and earth join in worship; the new temple is the true, the heavenly one.
In most liturgies, the Sanctus from Isaiah and Revelation is combined with the acclamations of Palm Sunday: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.” That is an addition to the temple Sanctus and the heavenly Sanctus. In singing the Sanctus, we are claiming that heaven and earth are joined because heaven has come to earth. The one whose coming we acclaim in the Sanctus is the holy Lord whose glory fills all the earth.
The Sanctus proclaims the incarnation, Yahweh’s arrival as Lord and Savior, the fulfillment of Israel in the church, the union of heaven and earth, the exaltation of the faithful to heavenly places; it gives liturgical form of a political theology – identifying the church as the cult of no earthly city – because it elaborates an ecclesiology. Sung by the church, the Sanctus is the gospel in hymnic form.
(These musings inspired by Erik Peterson’s Das Buch von den Engeln .)
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