Friday 27th March
My Song is Love Unknown (R&S) 207
Samuel Crossman (1624 – 84)
My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh, and die?
He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But oh, my Friend,
My Friend indeed,
Who at my need
His life did spend.
Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
Is all their breath,
And for His death
They thirst and cry.
Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they, at these,
themselves displease and ‘gainst him rise.
They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
The Prince of life they slay.
Yet cheerful He
To suffering goes,
That He His foes
From thence might free.
In life, no house, no home,
my Lord on earth might have;
in death, no friendly tomb,
but what a stranger gave.
What may I say?
Heaven was his home;
but mind the tomb
wherein he lay.
Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King,
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Could gladly spend
You can hear, and see, this hymn be sung here.
Isaiah 53
Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days;
through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
Out of his anguish he shall see light;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out himself to death,
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
Reflection
It is hardly original to observe that a great poet can capture a thought in a few words that might take much longer to express in prose. I’ve long thought that Crossman captured something simple and striking not only about Christ’s ministry on earth, but about our Christian calling in the phrase “Love to the loveless shown / That they might lovely be.” But to turn great poetry into a great hymn (or even bad poetry into a good hymn – lots of scope for discussion there) you need a talented musician, and I suspect Crossman’s verses would have been unknown not only to me, but many readers of this Devotion, had it not been for the twentieth century composer John Ireland. His tune ‘Love Unknown’ seems to me to capture the melancholy and loneliness of Christ’s passion so well, with the flexibility to respond to the changing mood of the poetry as it is sung.
I wonder what drew John Ireland to these verses. Did the loneliness of the Passion had a particular resonance for him? His brief marriage was annulled unconsummated, and his private papers and biographers suggest he was a gay man at a time it wasn’t possible for him to form a relationship with someone he loved.
Our Scripture reading is the fourth ‘Servant Song’ from Isaiah, which is variously interpreted as a prophecy about Israel, or the Messiah. It picks up key themes of the Passion, and is at once both familiar and troubling – do we agree with Isaiah that God would want to crush anyone with pain? And I’m not happy with a ‘jam tomorrow’ theology that those who suffer in this world will be rewarded in the next. This is a reading to wrestle with, rather than gloss over due to its familiarity.
Prayer
Lord,
we give thanks for the poets and musicians who help us explore,
by looking at our faith through different eyes.
We pray that they may be inspired by your Gospel
to strengthen us in faith and service,
and to challenge us to see familiar texts anew.
Help us to step out of our comfort zones of familiar words and music,
and open ourselves to new possibilities in our Christian lives.
Amen