How Lutheran Hymns Train For Martyrdom: Meditation on Jesus’ Wounds
How Lutheran Hymns Train For Martyrdom: Meditation on Jesus’ Wounds
Fr. Karl Hess
The hymns of the Lutheran Church teach us how to be martyrs for Christ. Martyrs are witnesses. The most extreme form of witness is shedding our blood to seal our testimony to Christ, but before a Christian can do that, he must (usually) learn to be a faithful witness in smaller things.
We bear witness to Christ when we confess the Gospel, the pure, saving doctrine; and Lutheran hymns instill that doctrine in our hearts as we sing it. We also bear witness to Christ as we live faithful and hopeful lives in our daily work, and Lutheran hymns proclaim the means by which we are able to serve faithfully in the power of the Holy Spirit. And in addition to this we give our testimony to our Lord in our struggle against sin, a struggle in which our Lord calls us to engage, as He did, to the point of shedding our blood: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” (Heb. 12:4)
One way the hymns prepare us for the last kind of witness is by presenting to our eyes the battle of our Lord against sin in His Passion and death. The Lutheran hymns set Christ’s Passion before us as pattern and power, weapons and armor. As an example, let us consider Johann Heermann’s Lenten hymn, “Jesus, Grant that Balm and Healing” (TLH #144, LSB p. 421).
“1. Jesus, grant that balm and healing
In Thy holy wounds I find,
Ev’ry hour that I am feeling
Pains of body and of mind.
Should some evil tho’t within
Tempt my treach’rous heart to sin,
Show the peril, and from sinning
Keep me ere its first beginning. ”
The hymn begins by inviting us to find Jesus’ wounds and gather soothing balm out of them for our injuries. So we imagine parting the wound in Jesus’ side to look at His pierced heart; we imagine His back with the flesh torn away by whips; looking at His forehead gouged by thorns, cut and bruised by fists; we imagine putting our fingers into the holes made in His hands and feet by the nails.
What ointment are we supposed to gather out of the wounds of Christ? The stanza explains that when we feel “pains of body and mind” we are tempted to toy with sin as a means of pain relief. The medicine we gather from Jesus’ wounds during this kind of temptation from the flesh is that we see “the peril from sinning”. In the wounds of Jesus we see the end of sin—suffering, death, and God’s wrath. We see the truth about sin. Second, when our flesh is tempted to nurse resentment against God and justify sin on the basis of the pain we are experiencing, we see the truth of God’s love for us. He calls us to reject sin as the One who endured the agony of our sin and redeemed us from it.
“2. Should some lust or sharp temptation
Prove to strong for flesh and blood,
Let me think upon Thy Passion,
And the breach is soon made good.
Or should Satan press me hard,
Let me then be on my guard,
Saying, “Christ for me was wounded,”
That the Tempter flee confounded. ”
The first stanza dealt with temptation arising from the flesh. The second addresses temptation from the devil—a lust or sharp temptation to false belief, despair, or other great shame and vice—cast as a fiery dart into us from outside.
Here Heermann changes the imagery: instead of medicine for our wounds, Christ’s suffering is fortification against Satanic attack and weapons with which to drive him away. First, when we meditate on the suffering of Jesus, the breach made by Satanic attack is sealed up. When we are set on fire by the Satanic dart, we think on Jesus’ passion and the fire is extinguished.
How does meditation on Jesus’ suffering seal up the wall that fortifies us against the devil’s attacks? Jesus’ suffering and death has crucified our old man and crushed the head of the serpent. When we meditate on Jesus’ passion, the false appearances presented to us by the devil evaporate. He tries to charm us with the pleasure or relief defection from Christ will give us, but hides the truth that our Lord has delivered us from his power. Meditation on Jesus’ suffering extinguishes the pleasure of sin by replacing it with a new pleasure that comes from Jesus’ wounds—the pleasure of being justified before God.
The Passion of Jesus unmasks the deception of the devil, who comes as an angel of light and impersonates the voice of the Holy Spirit. He seeks to confuse us and tell us that we ought to surrender to the devil; resistance is futile, what God lays on us is too heavy, sin is inevitable. He whispers to us that unfaithfulness is actually a good work. This is how he tempts us individually, but also how he tempts the Church corporately through the ministers of the Word. To pastors Satan whispers: “Everyone else is giving way; are you the only faithful one? Won’t you bind people’s conscience and harm the whole church if you make no concessions here? Aren’t you risking stirring up schism?”
Before this temptation comes, pastors and congregational leaders need to have learned the art taught by Lutheran hymns; we need to know how to employ the passion of Jesus against the attacks of the devil. Meditating on Jesus agony on the cross and His justifying death quenches Satan’s fiery darts and seals the wall against his attempts to demand the trust and obedience the Church owes only to her Lord.
But the Passion of Jesus is not only fortification against Satan, but also a weapon that drives him away. When Satan presses hard, Heermann counsels us to say to him, “Christ for me was wounded.” Heermann is echoing the famous line from Luther’s hymn:
“This world’s prince may still
Scowl fierce as he will,
He can harm us none,
He’s judged, the deed is done;
One little word can fell him. ”
“Now is the judgment of this world; now will the prince of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:30-31) Jesus’ crucifixion casts Satan out of men’s consciences and draws them to Jesus. Confessing Christ’s suffering on our behalf is a spiritual weapon against which the devil cannot stand.
As the first two stanzas dealt with our struggle against sin arising from the flesh and the temptation of the devil, the third deals with our fight with the world.
“ 3. If the world my heart entices
On the broad and easy road
With its mirth and luring vices,
Let me think upon the load
Thou didst carry and endure
That I flee all tho’ts impure,
Banishing each wild emotion,
Calm and blest in my devotion. ”
The world’s temptation, in Heermann’s telling, is to the “broad and easy road,” where salvation is easy, we laugh all the time and take nothing too seriously. In reality, the baptismal life is a life of suffering and death with Jesus. Jesus comforts us under the cross, but the true pleasure is to be found at the end of our passion, when we commend our souls into the hands of our Father in heaven. Heermann pictures the suffering of Jesus as a means of escape and flight from the temptations of the world, which seek to stir up our “wild emotions” which desire our pleasure and reward here and now. Meditation on the heavy load Jesus endured as He carried the cross to Golgotha paradoxically enables us to be “calm and blest”. Instead of insisting on pleasure and honor right now, the passion of Jesus teaches us to find contentment in our cross and in the hope of eternal pleasure that Jesus’ passion has won for us. The light and momentary affliction we endure is actually no burden at all, because in the midst of it we enjoy the grace of God and have the certain hope of eternal life.
“4. Ev’ry wound that pains or grieves me,
By Thy stripes, Lord, is made whole;
When I’m faint, Thy Cross revives me,
Granting new life to my soul.
Yea, Thy comfort renders sweet
Ev’ry bitter cup I meet;
For Thy all-atoning Passion
Has procured my soul’s salvation. ”
Luther writes in the Church Postil for the first Sunday in Advent: “It is the nature of the palm tree that when used as a beam it yields to no weight but rises against the weight. These branches are the words of divine wisdom; the more they are suppressed, the higher they rise. This is true if you firmly believe in those words. There is an invincible power in them, so that they may well be called palm branches . . . . Death, sin, hell, and all evil must bend before the divine Word, or only rise when it sets itself against them.”
The Word of Jesus’ suffering and death is a palm tree that resists every weight placed upon it. When we meditate on it, it gives life to us in death and comfort to us in bitterness. It doesn’t take away the bitter cups we drink in life or the pain of persecution, but sweetens them by declaring our sins forgiven and our salvation accomplished.
At bottom, all of our unfaithfulness as Christians amounts to forgetfulness of Jesus’ suffering, which is why the Lord mandated that we remember and proclaim His death by eating and drinking His body and blood in the Sacrament.
“ 5. O my God, my Rock and Tower,
Grant that in Thy death I trust,
Knowing Death has lost his power
Since Thou trodd’st him in the dust.
Savior, let Thine agony
Ever help and comfort me;
When I die, be my Protection,
Light and Life and Resurrection. ”
The last stanza describes the final conflict all Christians face after the flesh, the devil, and the world—the conflict with death.
Death, as the stanza points out, is a defeated enemy. Jesus trod it down in the dust. He took the sting of death away by atoning for sin, and openly showed His victory over death on our behalf in His resurrection. But Christ calls every Christian to take hold of this victory over death, just as He called the Israelites to take hold of the promise given to Abraham by invading the land of Canaan.
Every Christian is not given to confess Christ before rulers and kings or to shed his blood for Christ’s name, but every Christian has to conquer death through faith in Christ. This is the Goliath each one of us has to face and slay, and we do it by entering the jaws of death in faith that Christ has conquered it. In the early Church Christians understood that they might very well have a great contest in the arena before spectators, wherein they would be given to fight beasts or endure torture. Every Christian has a similar struggle to undergo with death, even if it is less heroic and noteworthy. When we face this contest, Jesus’ agony is the means by which we overcome. Because Jesus has trodden death into the dust by His suffering and resurrection, no matter how much our last pains hurt, we have the certainty of victory and life in His wounds and our Baptism into His death.
The letter to the Hebrews says, “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” (Heb. 12:4) Lutheran hymns show the way Christians mount this resistance: we meditate on Christ’s suffering, pain and death. Jesus’ wounds are an antidote and balm against our flesh, weapons and armor against the devil, means of escape from the world, sweetener for every bitter cup we have to drink, and the guarantee that we will overcome in our last struggle with death.
We live in a time where many voices tempt us to believe that submission to the devil and the world is actually the way of Christian faithfulness. In this wilderness where many voices invite us to the broad and easy road, the old Lutheran hymns teach us joyful resistance and victory through meditation on Christ’s suffering.