A Thinking Reed

Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed

Written by

Lee M.

in

Sang this one at church yesterday. (Although, for the record, I’m not crazy about this newfangled practice of conflating Palm Sunday and “Passion Sunday.” People can go to church on Good Friday, dammit! UPDATE: I realize that in one sense it makes perfect sense to observe Passion Sunday as inagurating Holy Week. Though until, I believe, Vatican II “Passion Sunday” marked the beginning of Passiontide – i.e. two weeks leading up to Easter. In any event, what annoys me is cramming the Passion reading into the Palm Sunday service so people don’t need to come to Good Friday services. End of gripe.)

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
and did my Sovereign die!
Would he devote that sacred head
for sinners such as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,
he groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide,
and shut its glories in,
when God, the mighty maker,
died for his own creature’s sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
while his dear cross appears;
dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes to tears.

But drops of tears can ne’er repay
the debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away;
’tis all that I can do.

—Isaac Watts

Comments

8 responses to “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed”

  1. Jennifer

    I was also wondering when the day become known as Palm/Passion Sunday. In the United Methodist Church, I seem to remember the switch somewhere in the early or mid 90’s. To play the devil’s advocate, while people can go to church on Good Friday, they often don’t or can’t. So rather than, hey let’s add Passion to Palm so people don’t have to go on Friday, I think it was a recognition that people weren’t attending Good Friday services. Thus, they went from the triumphant Palm Sunday to Easter without experiencing the Passion, and in order to rectify this Palm/Passion Sunday came into being.

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  2. Lee

    You’re probably right. And it’s no doubt uncharitable for me to be such a grouch about it. 🙂

    Though I still chafe at the church confining itself within the bounds of the weekend. A similar dynamic is a work when we move feast days (e.g. All Saints) to the closest Sunday. Maybe one way the church could resist the mindset that relegates faith to a harmless passtime would be to start re-colonizing the work week?

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  3. Joshie

    I’m with you lee. Palm Sunday is its own deal and should not be conflated with Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.

    Many churches have evening tenebrae services on Good Friday in addition to daytime ones to accomidate people (our church being one). The footwashing service as practiced in many christian traditions is one that is getting the short shrift as well.

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  4. Jennifer

    I agree about re-colonizing the work week! I wonder if that is a mainline Protestant problem. Don’t many Baptists and non-denominational churches have Wednesday night church? Of course, these are mostly also non-liturgical churches. The new weekly Evening Eucharist service we’ve started is on Sunday nights; I wonder in light of what you said if a weekday would have been better.

    Part of my devil’s advocacy came from wondering, what do I do with my baby next Good Friday? Do we bring the baby? Who stays home with the baby? (First time mom questions, what can I say?) We have one evening Tenebrae service at our church, which is kinda scary. In a good way – lots of darkness, etc. I’ve never noticed how many children are present, and what age – this year I’ll be looking.

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  5. Lee

    Our church has a mid-week communion on Wednesdays (though it’s almost always pitched as “If you’re too busy to come to church on Sunday…”). The church we went to in Berkeley used to do a Taize service on Wednesdays, followed by a supper, which was nice.

    Jennifer, your logistical baby concerns are a good reminder that it’s all too easy to float at the level of lofty theological abstraction in thinking about this stuff! Maybe the question is: How do you seek to meet people’s concrete needs without falling into a consumer mentality (e.g. with innumerable services aimed at every different “market niche”)?

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  6. Camassia

    Some Baptist churches do have Wednesday services (such as the one in the book I’ve been blogging), but I suspect that the sort of problem you’re talking about has actually been led by low churches because of their disinterest in a liturgical calendar. Christian Assembly had zero weekday services, even during Holy Week. In fact, in order to accommodate the crowds they have an Easter service on Saturday evening, which at the time I didn’t think much of but now seems just wrong.

    When I was there two years ago, all that really marked Palm Sunday was that the sermon was on subsitutionary atonement. Which caused Telford to pull me aside afterward and attempt damage control, because he knew how I felt about that theory. So it seemed they were doing Good Friday on Palm Sunday also.

    By the by, the Mennonite church I’m going to apparently has a tradition of making a great big to-do out of the Good Friday service. To the point where this year they’re actually making an effort to focus more on Easter. So they’re kind of the opposite of everyone else, but that’s very like them somehow…

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  7. Jennifer

    Well, there is a Saturday night Easter Vigil service which has a long tradition (our church has a bonfire outside, then we go inside the sanctuary which is still dark from Good Friday, and the lights are only turned on halfway through the service. All of our catechumens are baptized at this service). But it’s not the same thing as what Camassia is talking about.

    I agree about the “market niche” problem, which is why, on the other hand, I question “family friendly” designed services or services geared towards young adults or whatever. Why segregate generations from one another?

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  8. Joshie

    Rock on Jennifer!! That is one of my pet peeves. Having a youth service, a “traditional” (read “old geezer”) service, a family service, blah blah blah. Makes you wonder if there was a Christ who died for youth, one who died for older folks, one who died for families, etc.

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