HYMN FOR PENTECOST 11 O, Heal Me Lord
- Gracia Grindal
- 13 hours ago
- 4 min read
Text: John Quincy Adams Tune: Most CMD tunes
1 O HEAL me, Lord, for I am weak;
My bones are vexed with pain;
Let not thy hot displeasure speak;
Thy burning wrath restrain.
My soul what sore vexations try!
How long shall they assail?
Return, and listen to my cry;
Let mercy, Lord, prevail.
2 Of thee no memory remains
In death's relentless cave;
To thee ascend no grateful strains
Of glory from the grave:
With ceaseless pain I groan and weep,
So cruel are my foes;
My very couch in tears I steep,
My bed with grief o'erflows.
3 Depart from me, all who rejoice
Iniquity to share
The Lord hath heard my moaning voice,
And listened to my prayer;
What though my foes despise the Lord,
And my destruction plot?
Vexation shall be their reward,
And sudden shame their lot.
REFLECTION
The woman bent over double probably has ankylosing spondylytis, a disease of the vertebrae that causes the spine to fuse together. What it must have been for her to suddenly be able to stand up straight! The miracle, like all miracles, cannot be explained. What interests me just now in this account is not the miracle so much as the voices of the religious around her and Jesus. Unable to criticize the actual healing, they criticize our Lord for violating the rules for the Sabbath!
Using religious rules to criticize the miracle looks awful from this distance. Can’t they see they are in the presence of the holy, of a power that transcends anything they can do? Apparently not, but we should not be surprised. We have all observed moments when we see the obvious answer to our dilemma and want it enacted, but the bureaucrats in the way with their noses in their book of procedures keep us from solving the problem and only make matters worse.
Jesus has just told his disciples how easily they can observe and predict the weather by observation accurately. Their lore is filled with knowledge of the weather, i. e., red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky at morning sailor’s take warning—that helps them predict the weather, but standing there in front of the miracle, they seem deaf and blind to it.
Maybe for this we need a prophet, someone who can see to see. We all know good preachers and pious people who can tell us what is going on, and we need to listen to them. These are those who seem tuned in to the heavenly reality around us, who keep their ear cocked to what is going on in the other dimension, where heaven is. It is the prophets who saw in the present how things would turn out. When they said what they were seeing, people didn’t always listen. They even ridiculed them. The gift of prophecy maybe even comes with age. The elderly can see how things will turn out because we have seen the play before. Younger people and those without experience may think one is a seer, but actually, it is simply having the eyes to see and predict what is going to happen because you’ve seen it before.
The hymn by John Quincy Adams is something of a rebuke to those who don’t see what is going on, rather like Job’s comforters. “Depart from me, all who rejoice/Iniquity to share…” the opposite of those who can see the Lord’s work. In whichever case, we should be listening to those who can see the miracles happening around us every day and hear them out. They are a gift to us. The young should learn to listen to them. It will keep them intimately connected to the work of our Lord in their daily lives.
HYMN INFO
Adams, the 6th president of the USA, son of the John Adams, the second, was extremely well educated and served his country (and father) as an effective diplomat before his presidency, the author of the Monroe Doctrine, and later a memberof the House of Representatives where he opposed slavery. His reputation as a hymn writer is largely unknown, but he did write an entire book of hymns on the psalms, Poems of Religion and Society, New York, 1848, after his presidency. While it was well regarded, the texts in it have not survived much except for three or four. This hymn is maybe unique in adopting the imprecatory language of the psalms against one's enemies, but Adams language is a frank rebuke of those who do not believe the Lord can heal. The tune is CMD and can be sung to many tunes. None has been closely wed to it.
LINKS
There are no tunes associated with this text. There are numberless such tunes. Here is my hymn text on the lesson.
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NB:
For those planning for Bible study through the next year, you might consider the book Jesus the Harmony. It has a poem for every day of the year and Bible references on each poem that put Jesus in what has been called "the red thread of salvation." Many have been using it for daily devotions; others in group Bible studies.
Click here to check it out. https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Harmony-Gospel-Sonnets-Days-ebook/dp/B08L9S4Z1T/ref=sr_1_3_nodl?dchild=1&keywords=Grindal&qid=16145