If ye love me
‘If ye love me’
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Thursday 2 April 2026
Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14;1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17,31b-35 (split with foot washing in the middle)
Thomas Tallis’ exquisite anthem If ye love me, which we just heard sung during the foot washing, has got to be one of the most famous and frequently performed of Tallis’ anthems today. It’s familiar to many of us, especially if we grew up singing in a church choir, and comforting and easy to sing, and just as rewarding in its own way as Tallis’ more complex works. Yet its simplicity represented a fresh start in English choral music. In the 1540s, when it was composed, it was one of the first choral anthems written in the vernacular, to go with the new Book of Common Prayer. The old, familiar music was abandoned in the floodgates of change, and composers had to adapt to a new Protestant musical language.
With its opening block chords on the crucial words “If ye love me, keep my commandments” that then give way to imitation between the voices, the elegant, pared down style of If ye love me exemplifies Archbishop Cranmer’s well-known desire to have one note for each syllable. The English text with its message about loving service is abundantly clear and easy to understand, easily intelligible to a wide range of churchgoers and utterly different from what had gone before. The religious upheavals of the years in which it as written may have been deeply unsettling for a person in Tallis’s position, but this anthem shows no external signs of turmoil, a work of serene and confident beauty (see Kerry McCarthy, Tallis, OUP, 2020).
As a musician of the Chapel Royal, Tallis’s fortunes were helped by the various monarchs under which he served, and none more so than Queen Elizabeth the First. Elizabeth was a musically gifted monarch. She played the virginals, the lute, and similar plucked stringed instruments; she sang, danced, and on one occasion claimed to have composed dance music. Her court became renowned for its church music, which was of the highest standard and more complex than would have been tolerated elsewhere. In a set of injunctions published in 1559, she made room before or after services for anthems to be sung in her words “in the best sort of melody and music that may be conveniently devised” and declared that professional choirs in large churches should not have their funding taken away or numbers reduced.
In our Holy Week addresses over the next few days, we’ll be considering the role of historic female composers and patrons of Church music, especially as they relate to the music and themes of Passiontide. Elizabeth was an active promoter of music and patron of musicians. She famously granted a printing monopoly to Tallis and Byrd and promoted affordable sacred music publishing that caused works like If ye love me become available not just to a handful of well-placed professionals but to a much broader range of musicians in church and at home.
She also used music to challenge traditional power dynamics in which men led and women served. Needing, in this age, to defend her female rule against hostile critics who thought she couldn’t lead, she used her image as a musical queen to justify her female political authority. On the one hand, music was considered sensual, feminine, and frivolous, inciting amorous passions or inspiring contemplation of heaven. On the other, it could evoke masculine attributes of rationality and order through the belief that musical harmony governed the heavens, the political world and the human soul. Elizabeth used her image as a highly musical queen to combine her female gender with her masculine position of political authority. When Tallis and Bryd dedicated their printed works to her, they not only praised “the refinement of [her] voice or the nimbleness of [her] fingers” but also claimed that her practical skill made her able to judge their work. Musical judgement was more highly esteemed than practical skill in music because it involved reason and intellect; Tallis and Byrd therefore associated Elizabeth with the highest form of musicianship, where music is no longer merely sensual but responded to rationally and intellectually (see Katherine Butler, ‘“By Instruments her Powers Appeare”: Music and Authority in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I’ Renaissance Quarterly 65, 2012, pp.353-84).
But if Elizabeth portrayed herself as a powerful monarch, she also belonged to a time when leadership was about service. We’re all familiar with the connection between Maundy Thursday and royalty. The Royal Maundy money is an ancient ceremony held on this day each year in a different Cathedral or Church in which the monarch gifts both specially struck coins and actual money to men and women chosen because of the Christian service they have given to the Church and the community, the number of recipients matching the current age of the monarch.
But in Elizabeth’s time, the tradition was that the king or queen actually washed the feet of the poor, like the clergy do now. Following the practice of her father, Elizabeth would don a white apron and then wash the feet of poor women, one of each year of her life, albeit that her lowly subjects had already been well scrubbed by actual servants and freshened up with sweet herbs before her Majesty appeared! When we think of powerful world leaders now, royal or otherwise, it’s incredibly difficult to imagine them stooping so low as to perform the servile and somewhat degrading act of washing someone’s feet. But the revolutionary humility and service this represents is still the established religion of our nation. This week we have seen the first female installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, the most powerful position in the Anglican Church, and yet Sarah Mullaly claims that she first found her vocation to ministry whilst washing the feet of one of her patients, when she worked as a nurse.
In Jesus’ time, the menial task of washing dirty feet was often done by women. The Last Supper normally makes us think of all the male characters, seated behind a long table with Jesus in the middle- in John’s version, Judas, Peter, and the unnamed disciple all make an entrance. But it’s Mary, at this stage, who, in the previous chapter, is portrayed as the true female disciple, in contrast with the unfaithful and uncomprehending male ones. In the previous chapter, it is she who prophetically anointed Jesus’ feet, just as Jesus in stooping now to wash the disciples’ feet symbolises and prefigures the service he will shortly render in giving his life for others.
We only have to leaf through the hymn book to find plenty of examples of Victorian women hymn-writers who wrote passionately and from experience about the Christian life of service. With less power or agency than a female Tudor monarch, and in a male-led church, these women were to be found mostly not in the pulpit but confined to the Sunday School or bazaars for the missionaries. Many of their lyrics don’t sound very feminist, speaking instead of submitting at the feet of a male Christ, like Catherine Noel’s setting of Philippians 2, “at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow”. Yet their words are perhaps more subversive than they seem, given that these hymns have been loved and cherished for generations and sung by everyone, men as well as women (see Valentine Cunningham, “The hymns were hers: How Victorian women gave the Anglican church its greatest hits”, The Guardian, Sat 30 March 2022).
The foot washing in this service is no random, one-off act, an overly literal, slightly embarrassing gesture to remind us once a year that Christians should wash the feet of others, before the priest dons their fine clothes again. In the context of the Last Supper, the hour of Jesus’ return to the Father through his exaltation on the cross, in an act of radical and self-giving love, Jesus does for us what none of us are naturally prepared to do for each other, in a reversal of the natural order. To have a foot washed by a person of great estate or who is in authority or our leader makes us contemplate our own unworthiness, but also it also demands of us an equal response of service.