O Sacred Head, Now Wounded

Let us worship God.

Welcome to our Hymn Festival! Today our Hymn Festival falls on Reformation Day, and so we are celebrating the Lutheran tradition of hymn singing.

Lutheran hymns are known as chorales, and they spring directly out of the ideals of the Reformation.

You could probably write a good history of the Protestant Reformation purely through the lens of music.

Prior to the Reformation, most of the music during the Catholic Mass was sung by the clergy or the choir or played by organists.

The reformers believed that just as every person had the right to read and interpret the Bible, every member of the congregation had the right and the duty to sing in worship.

and sing they did, visitors to the German-speaking lands were frequently impressed by the power and the sheer length of the hymn singing in Lutheran churches.

To meet this desire for congregational participation, there was a huge outpouring of new composition in the 16th century.

It is a mercy of God if he kills one of his children, taking them out of this life to preserve them for eternal life.

And we often sing in our church, O Sacred Head Now Wounded, which is a poem originally written by Bernard of Clairvaux, who helped to lead that Second Crusade.

Very interesting man, but wrote a great, that great poem, wrote the great work on loving God.

And one of the lines in that poem is, it's a prayer, O Lord, never let me outlive my love for you.

Paul Simon based the melody for American tune on a German song composed around 1600.

A hymn writer named Paul Gerhardt reworked this tune 50 years later into the Lutheran hymn, O Hauptfall Blut und Wunden, usually known in English as O Sacred Head Now Wounded.

It is a famous hymn meant to be sung on Good Friday when Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ on the cross, hence the title.

Now, how would a 20th century Jewish songwriter in the USA know about this hymn? Well, Simon probably heard it in its most famous setting, Johann Sebastian Bach's St.