Love’s redeeming work is done  

Like last week’s “Jesus Christ is risen today,” this hymn by Charles Wesley is ultimately derived from the medieval Latin hymn Surrexit Christus Hodie.  Wesley seems to have known the German translation of the Latin, “Erstanden ist der heilige Christ.” Although his brother John knew German better than Charles did, both of the brothers were profoundly influenced by Moravian Brethren in both theology and hymnology.  He also knew “Jesus Christ is risen today,” published almost 30 years earlier,” and his first line, “Christ the Lord is risen today,” originally printed within quotation marks, may be meant to allude to that hymn.  Keeping the rhyming couplets of the Latin hymn, Wesley organizes them into eleven quatrains with no repetition of rhymes.  He used the title “Hymn for Easterday.”  The hymn was printed in 1739 in Hymns and Sacred Poems, which contained Charles’ first printed works, for he had begun writing soon after his conversion experience.  

 

Where earlier Wesleyan collections had always contained the word “Psalms” in their titles, this volume substitutes “Poems,” perhaps signifying a change of focus from Anglican formality to Methodist devotional worship.  The hymn was printed again in A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, As They Are Commonly Sung at the Foundery (1742), now paired with a tune John Wesley named “Salisbury”; it is the tune used in Lyra Davidica in 1908 for “Jesus Christ is risen today,” and is an early version of the tune we know as “Easter Hymn.”  Later compilers of hymn books have usually reduced the number of Wesley’s stanzas.  Notably, especially in English hymnals, the first stanza is omitted.  Thus the five-stanza version we sing contains Wesley’s second, third, fourth, fifth and tenth stanzas.

 

In the Foundry collection, John Wesley included a tune named “Hernhuth,” the name of a German village where he had visited Nicholas Zinzendorf’s Moravian community, and the name of that community’s hymn book.   It was composed by Tobias Friedrich, the community’s music director.  But Wesley might have heard the tune first among the Moravians whom he met on the ship Simmonds, sailing for Georgia and whom he later knew in Savannah. Wesley used the tune with the words “Holy Lamb, who thee receive,” and it is on the page facing “Christ the Lord is risen today.”   He named the tune “Savannah” in Sacred Harmony (1781) and that is the name by which we know it now as the setting for Charles’ Easter hymn.