Feb 22, 2023

Samuel Crossman

John Ireland was having lunch with a friend who asked him if he would compose a tune for the poem, “My Song is Love Unknown.” John reached for the menu and sketched out a tune in fifteen minutes. His friend published the poem as a hymn in 1918 and rescued it from obscurity.
The originator of the poem, Samuel Crossman (1629-1683) was an Anglican minister with Puritan sympathies. He attended a conference in 1661 to revise the Book of Common Prayer so Anglicans and Puritans alike could use it. The conference failed to reach a consensus and a year later, Crossman and two thousand other Puritan ministers were expelled from their churches. While Crossman was in exile in 1664, he wrote the poem that is the focus of today’s prayer. He later returned to the Anglican fold and served Cathedral Church in Bristol, England, where he was buried (under the side aisle in the sanctuary!) The poem is written as if the author is an innocent bystander to Jesus’ death. Samuel walks his readers through the events from Palm Sunday to the crucifixion in seven stanzas. He employs extensive irony throughout the song. In the first stanza, he references “love to the loveless shown.” When he asks in stanza four, “What hath my Lord done?” He answers that his only crime is enabling “the lame to run” and “the blind their sight.” In stanza five, he speaks of the incongruity that the Lord, the Prince of Life, would die a powerless victim’s death. The repeated allusions to Jesus as Friend highlight the beginning and end of the poem. He writes in stanza two, “But O, my Friend, my Friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend” and again in the last stanza, “This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend.”

Today begins Ash Wednesday, a forty-day season in the church year called Lent when Christians contemplate the enormity of Jesus’ sacrifice and death. Why not walk through this poem in an attitude of prayer to draw closer to Jesus as Lord and Friend:

My song is love unknown, my Saviour’s love to me;
love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
that for my sake
my Lord should take
frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne
salvation to bestow;
but men made strange, and none
the longed-for Christ would know,
But O, my Friend,
my Friend indeed,
who at my need
his life did spend!

Sometimes they strew His way,
and His sweet praises sing,
Resounding all the day
hosannas to their King,
Then ‘Crucify!’
is all their breath
and for His death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
yet they at these
themselves displease,
and ‘gainst them rise.

They rise, and needs will have
my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save,
the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet cheerful He
to suffering goes,
that He His foes
from thence might free.

In life, no house, no home,
my Lord on earth might have;
in death no friendly tomb
but what a stranger gave.
What may I say?
Heav’n was his home;
but mine the tomb
wherein he lay.

Here might I stay and sing;
no story so divine;
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like Thine!
This is my Friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.