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What Easter hymn calls us to awaken from wintery despair to new life and love?

April 3, 2019 By Pam McAllister

Spring at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

At Eastertide, we are reminded that the long stretches when everything seems dead and bare are part of a cycle — for the planet and for our lives. The earth is hard and dry; our hearts ache; the night of weeping is long. 

We yearn for tender green leaves, daffodils, love. Enough with cold winds and winter blues. Where is beauty? kindness? life? We wait, sometimes not sure what we are waiting for. But look, here comes the sun!

NOW THE GREEN BLADE RISETH from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

“Demeter Welcomes Persephone’s Return” by Wendy Andrew

How bewildering it must have been for early people to make sense of the seasons. In their myths, they often equated the bleak winter landscape with death and loss. 

Demeter, the grieving mother, followed her abducted daughter to the underworld. For six months, the earth was barren, wrapped in bitter cold. Spring returned with flowers and new crops when Persephone came up to walk the earth with her mother.

Millennia later, children in Sunday school delight in rediscovering signs of nature’s replenishment and renewal: a cocoon sheaths the butterfly, an egg cradles the chick, a bare branch will be transformed by budding leaves, a seed hides the green shoot, an empty tomb holds the promise of resurrection.

In the grave they laid him, Love who had been slain,
Thinking that he never would awake again.
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

John Macleod Campbell Crum (1872-1958), an English Anglican priest, wrote this favorite Easter hymn in 1928, the same year he became the Canon of Canterbury. He had written plays, pageants, hymns, and books for children. In this hymn, he likened the crucified Jesus to sprouting grain and celebrated the promise of spring wheat and the resurrection of Love itself, our risen Jesus, our bread of life. Believe it. 

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
Jesus who for three days in the grave had lain.
Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

The God of our Good Fridays is the God of our Easter Sundays. Believe it! We are pulled toward life, even when all seems lost and hopeless. Set to a French carol tune NOËL NOUVELET, this song lifts our spirits just singing it and calls us to awaken from wintery despair to new life and love. Believe it!

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green. 

A glimpse of Daffodil Hill at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

We are not good at trusting or waiting alone in the dark. Hope is complicated. Doubt is a constant. This is a hard lesson. Believe this, too.

Singing our songs of faith, ancient and new, we can almost feel our wintry hearts thawing, our energies renewed. We are astonished to be called back to life. Love lives again and again and again. We sing “hallelujah” to a birthing God and risen savior. Believe it! Hallelujah! 

TO GO DEEPER

“History of Hymns: ‘Now the Green Blade Riseth’” by C. Michael Hawn, UMC Discipleship website

Goddess of a Thousand Names, Art by Wendy Andrew:

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Pam McAllister info@AskHerAboutHymn.com

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