O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, Paul Gerhardt 1607-1676

O Sacred head, now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, your only crown,
O sacred head, what glory
And bliss did once combine
Though now despised and gory,
I joy to call you mine!

What language can I borrow
To thank you, dearest friend,
For this your dying sorrow,
Your mercy without end?
Bind me to you forever,
Give courage from above;
Let not my weakness sever,
Your bond of lasting love.

One of the great mysteries in this world of human interaction is how a person can focus on positive things in the midst or tragedy and trauma. Of course, this can be done inappropriately, as we tend to do it currently in the United States. On a daily basis, people are dying in large numbers in Iraq, largely because we started a war there that destroyed the infrastructure and the constraints that previously kept a semblance of order. No matter that a tyrant has been replaced, we naively replaced a dictator’s order by inviting insurgent chaos, and the way in which we deal we this on a daily basis is with avoidance tactics. We focus on where Anna Nicole Smith should be buried, on Britney Spear’s bald head, and on whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are having a spat. We pretend this is news, and it is not! It is a refusal to face the evil in our world of which we are a part.

One of the values of history is that it gives us some points of comparison. The poet and hymnwriter, Paul Gerhard, the 400th anniversary of whose birth we remember this year, had every reason to practice such superficial avoidance tactics, and even worse. He could have organized full-spirited revenge in his heart and mind. His life of 69 years included the 30 Year’s War (1618-1648), an atrocity foisted upon Europe largely because the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics could not agree on territorial matters, although the issues become much more complex as time went on. During this time, over 20% of the population of Germany was killed, Gerhardt’s village and ancestral home was destroyed, and plague ravished towns where Gerhardt served as pastor.

The mysterious thing in all this is that Gerhardt did not seek revenge, nor did he pretend all this was not happening, but he applied his positive Christian faith to the situations facing him. While he was pastor in Mittenwalde, a village close to Berlin, he penned a poem loosely based on a work by Bernard of Clairveaux. Known to us today as „O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,“ it celebrates the confidence Gerhardt had in God’s care for all humanity, especially in terms of his sharing his love in Jesus.

Gerhardt had a way of making his poetry personal. In this hymn, God’s act of love for sinners at Calvary is grasped and appreciated in a most intimate way: „Here will I stand beside you, Your death for me my plea, Let all the world deride you, I clasp you close to me.“ (v. 4). And then to convince the reader that no matter what tragedies and trauma life contains, God is with and for us, he exults, „Lord, be my consolation, my Constant source of cheer; Remind me of your Passion, My shield when death is near.“

Clearly, for Gerhardt, the anguish in the heart of God, the battle to conquer human inhumanity, was the greatest battle in the world. If the crucifixion with all its mayhem was dehumanizing and brutal, it was this because it sought, once and for all, to condemn that in us which believes that torture, brutality and revenge solve anything. At the cross, God cancels any hopes we have for achieving life on such self-destructive terms. In Jesus‘ death, God says „no“ to our attempt to deny a life of self-giving love and proves us wrong by giving the only life worth living back to Jesus and to us at Easter.

This, for Gerhardt, is a cause for consolation, „my constant source of cheer.“ When life goes down the tubes in terms of tragedies and troubles, Gerhardt looks to God who daily raises the baptized Christian from death to life. It is the focus for us in this Lenten season, and at any time, that when the going gets rough, God makes his people tough through his grace, a grace which points us beyond life’s struggles to the author of life himself. Christians do not seek to avoid their challenges or problems by focusing on irrelevant media presentations, masquerading as news, but on the biggest struggle ever through which God laid claim to us in Christ.

It is surprising what such love can do for and in us. Not long ago, we learned about an Afro-American man who threw himself on a young white man who had been wounded and was unable to climb off of the rails to avoid an approaching subway train. Forcing him flat between the rails under his body, the older man saved the young man’s life. When asked by countless interviewers in the day’s following why he had done this, his response was typically simple: „It seemed at the moment like the right thing to do.“ We love stories like this, because they seem so improbable. Paul Gerhardt, however, would tell us that there was nothing improbable about this story at all. It is the story of Jesus, letting us take his life at the cross so that he can give it back to us at the empty tomb. It is the story of the head become gory for us whom now we „joy to call mine.“ It is the story of our lives as we seek the right thing to do through his „bond of lasting love“.

David Zersen