Greater Our Transport

I came down to London yesterday for my annual week in the capital. Apart from making the decreasingly funny jokes about requiring a stab vest, it was the whiteboards at King’s Cross Station advising about the week’s Tube strikes that caused me to groan. London’s transport is busy and bursting at the best of times; disruption on the underground causes the buses and overground to carry additional passengers. There may be good reasons for the strike but the drivers’ remuneration of £65,000-£80,000 per annum is surely not one of them. When provincial bumpkins like me come to London and marvel at its wonderful array of transportational options available accompanied by those rather delightful maps with interconnecting, coloured lines, we might be tempted to envy. Noting the disruption caused by strikes, one might realise that London’s underground is certainly not tracked with gold. The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that the one-day Tube strike held in November 2022 was estimated to have cost the economy £14 million.

A favourite hymn for many is Fanny Crosby’s 1875 To God be the Glory. It is an upbeat little number, appropriate for chapel anniversaries and overtly Christian funerals, if the occasion allows and the mood is not too sombre. Its third and final verse goes:

Great things He hath taught us, great things He hath done,

and great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son;

but purer, and higher, and greater will be

our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.

‘Transport’ tends to be removed in modern usage and replaced with ‘rapture’, though I sang a second alternative recently (I forget where), as though there is concerted effort to remove the word and replace it with something more appropriate. Poor Fanny Crosby; she may have tried her best but I guess her choice of lyric was simply not good enough. Thankfully, modern adapters exist to improve it. Yet ‘transport’ is an appropriate word. Every saint who now beholds the glorious face of the Lord Jesus has departed from earth and arrived at heaven. There will be one generation, perhaps our own, for which He shall come back in person, but even they will ‘meet Him in the air’. Transport comes from the Latin transportāre, which means to carry over, or take across, or remove something. Unlike many of the good burghers of London and me, for whom carrying, taking and removing shall prove more troublesome this week, we are certain to one day leave behind this life, our possessions and our bodies. For the forgiven sinner, this means transportation to the very presence of Jesus; to the unforgiven sinner, exile to the place of separation and confinement.

A. D