Good News in Song - O Sacred Head Now Wounded

O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How pale Thou art with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish, which once was bright as morn!

What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered, was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior! ’Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor, vouchsafe to me Thy grace.

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,

For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.

My earliest memory of this song is from middle school. We played it in band as a warm-up chorale. Our band director usually called it "O Wounded Head" by accident, and I don't remember it being one of my favorites. It was very difficult to play in tune and, as a result, we could not play it beautifully. Last summer, however, my whole relationship to this jewel of hymnody changed.

There I was, in our last-of-the-day, two-hour choir rehearsal at the Indiana University Summer Kodaly Institute. By this point in the middle of the second week, all of us were in that "I'm starting to solfege the accompaniment to my dreams" kind of state. Although we had sung through the song a number of times, our conductor sensed that we were just going through the motions. It was then that she told us about Bach and his love for this seventeenth-century text based on a medieval Latin poem. He harmonized the melody throughout the St. Matthew Passion and that harmonization remains the standard to this day. Our conductor told us that Bach connected with this piece not just as a musician, but as a man of God. His life was so wrought with pain and loss, having lost his parents at a young age and later his first wife and a number of children, that he identified with the suffering of Christ, his "dearest friend," in a way many of us cannot. As we began to sing the song, the Holy Spirit stirred my soul, and the tears streamed freely.

The last verse is my favorite, particularly the last two lines. I have been grappling with those powerful words since that day last summer. What does it mean to outlive your love for God? I can feel in my spirit what it means, and although I have a hard time articulating that meaning, I want to try here...

Jesus, I want to grow in my love for you each day, each week, each month, each year, each decade, of my life. I would rather enter into your presence early than to live so long that I wake up one morning and cannot find yet another part of you to love.

Amen.

Image from http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=6127&picture=john-316">John 3:16 by Kevin Gardner