Our Love, Crucified
I've told my students that if they hear me singing a hymn in Welsh as I walk down the street, they are to consider it within the bounds of possibility, but if they see me walking into a museum of modern art, they should call for an ambulance, because something must be terribly wrong.
Yet I think there is something worse than modern art with all its obtuseness, ugliness, and offense to the human and the divine. It is the sacred, vandalized. Which would you find less tolerable? A gallery of Picasso's paintings in his cubist stage, or a modernized Sistine Chapel, with smiles painted in on all the faces of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, and the devils and the damned whited out?
Most current Christian hymnals are like that, alas. It is by no means easy to uncover exactly what a badly vandalized or abbreviated hymn once said. I understand editors are sometimes squeezed for space, so they choose to omit stanzas that can be left out without doing violence to the whole. Still, that should be a last resort. As for revision, everything that editors have done since 1965, almost without exception, has been stupid, ungrammatical, sloppy, vague, or treacherous. Thus, most Christians in English-speaking nations do not know what they are—and are not—singing.
Call to Calvary
Let me take for instance the powerful Passiontide hymn, "O Come and Mourn with Me Awhile," by Frederick Faber (1814–1863). Faber originally wrote twelve stanzas, and even my text, The English Hymnal with Tunes (1933), always generous, can squeeze only eight onto a single page. The hymn can be found in many a current hymnal, but much abbreviated and mangled, and with certain strikingly direct confessions of sin omitted.
Faber begins with a Calvary-call:
O come and mourn with me awhile;
See, Mary calls us to her side;
O come and let us mourn with her:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
The D-minor melody Saint Cross, with its stark four notes of unison that begin each final line for the name Jesus, our Love, is simple but subtly intricate, as each line is a variation on the others, always ending on three consecutive whole notes, which for each stanza will be the dread and solemn verb: cru-ci-fied.
Many Protestant hymnals alter that line about Mary, but I see no strong reason for it, since Mary does nothing but point to Jesus: "Do whatever he tells you to do," she says to the servants at Cana. Faber wants to make the Cross immediately present to us. We are at Calvary in one guise or another. Thus the second stanza:
Have we no tears to shed for him,
While soldiers scoff and Jews deride?
Ah, look how patiently he hangs:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
Hymnals now replace Jews with foes, and I understand the delicacy. But they were Jesus' own people who nailed him to the tree. The soldiers and the Jews thus comprehend mankind: Gentile and Jew.
Faber is not too shy to make us feel the bitterness of the Lord's death. The third stanza, omitted from most hymnals, is for its physical imagination like none I have ever seen:
How fast his hands and feet are nailed;
His blessed tongue with thirst is tied;
His failing eyes are blind with blood:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
Jesus cannot reach out a hand to touch; he can hardly utter a word; the blood clots up his eyes. The picture of his aloneness is almost unbearable. But Faber will not relent:
His Mother cannot reach his face;
She stands in helplessness beside;
Her heart is martyred with her Son's:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
This stanza, too, is mostly omitted. But think of the terrible drama. The mother longs to touch the face of her child, to clear the sweat and blood away, to give him that warm sign of love. But she cannot do it; and the words of Simeon come true, that a sword shall pierce her heart, here martyred with the heart of her Son, soon to be pierced with the
lance.
Words & Silence Both Speak
Yet Jesus has not set himself apart from mankind. They seek to put him away; he will not put them away. Even in his silence he pleads on behalf of his enemies:
Seven times he spoke, seven words of love;
And all three hours his silence cried
For mercy on the souls of men:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
Imagine singing this hymn on the afternoon of Good Friday, during the three-hour watch beneath the Cross, perhaps as you hear seven meditations on the seven last utterances of Jesus. And when he is not speaking? When you are kneeling, and the minister is silent? Think of that.
Why should Jesus be on that cross at all? Faber doesn't say the easy thing, that the crucifixion was a terrible mistake. No—it was an act at once of terrible human justice and divine love:
What was Thy crime, my dearest Lord?
By earth, by heaven, Thou hast been tried,
And guilty found of too much love:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.Found guilty of excess of love,
It was Thine own sweet will that tied
Thee tighter far than helpless nails:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
These stanzas, too, are usually omitted.
Sing Out the Drama
How shall we respond to this love? As David did in his great psalm of penitence:
O break, O break, hard heart of mine;
Thy weak self-love and guilty pride
His Pilate and his Judas were:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.A broken heart, a fount of tears,
Ask, and they will not be denied;
A broken heart love's cradle is:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
Who is the Roman soldier now, and who is the Jew? I am; we all are. Therefore we plead for the one good thing that man so rarely begs from God, who is ready to render it to us, the gift of tears, the broken and contrite heart he will not spurn. The broken heart is the cradle for the newborn babe—for us, newborn in love. At least one of these two stanzas (the first, usually) is omitted from most contemporary hymnals.
The poem ends with a fight to the death—a drama that most editors obliterate, replacing "sin of Man" with "sinful world" or "human sin":
O Love of God; O sin of Man!
In this dread act your strength is tried;
And victory remains with Love:
For He, our Love, is crucified.
It is essential to the drama that Man and his sin is at war against God, person against person, but the God made man, Jesus Christ, is victorious in love, and the final line with its slight alteration brings the whole poem to its quiet and sublime climax. It is not just that one kind of action, love, triumphs over another, namely sin. Love is Jesus: no more need be said.
Defy the vandals. Find the hymn in its dramatic entirety, and sing it out.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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