Hymn of the Week: March 14
by Mark R. Scholtz,
Director of Music & Organist
St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, Creve Coeur
4 Lent B, Laetare, March 14, 2021
Imagery is everything this Fourth Sunday in Lent: Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness (Numbers 21); we being raised with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2); and, in Jesus’ own words, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” (John 3).
There are few better musical illustrations of this theme of lifting-up than the raising high of the symbol of the love of Jesus in the words of the hymn Lift high the cross (The Hymnal 1982 #473).
Written in 1887 for a festival service in Winchester Cathedral, under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the original version of George Kitchin’s text had 11 stanzas plus refrain. Canadian theologian Stanley L. Osborne wrote that the hymn’s “images are biblical, its mood expectant, its promise courageous, and its demands costly.” The message is one of action and outreach. It calls us to proclaim the love of Christ so that the whole world will hear of Jesus’ sacrifice.
It wasn’t until the 1916 supplement to the venerable Hymns Ancient and Modern that the text was married to the tune Crucifer composed by Sydney Nicholson (one time organist at Westminster Abbey and founder of the Royal School of Church Music). British hymnologist J. R. Watson writes that Nicholson “showed a fine sense of the potential of the words, the relatively subdued melody of the verses contrasting with the spectacular refrain.”
Here is a link to splendid singing of Lift high the cross by the choir and congregation of First-Plymouth Church, Lincoln, Nebraska:
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