Symphony of Pain
THE STORY
For every one of us there comes a time when we’re given things to carry absolutely alone. Regardless of the dear ones that love us deeply and gather close, there are moments when we must walk into the Garden unaccompanied and drink the cup with Him and hear Him weep and know that His heart is the only one who truly breaks with ours. The company of us who have walked those hushed furrows and knelt at that cold rock and drank from that bitter cup know the loneliness and isolation of it, as our friends slumber and sleep in the shadows, unable to understand the significance of the death we are living.
Like you, I remember a time when many sorrows that I was privy to came weighing heavily upon me. Many of the griefs weren’t necessarily my own — just stories that I was aware of or situations that touched my own in some way. I became overwhelmed with all of it and knew there was no one I could turn to to help me sort through it and make sense of it and put it away.
A few simple lines started running through my head while I reflected on these unspeakable stories, “Sorrow upon sorrow/ Blow on crushing blow/ Stories left unspoken/ Griefs that no one knows.”
Later in the week, when I should have been studying Hebrew, I kept writing… “Carried by my Savior/ In the Garden still/ All alone He prays and/ Drinks His Father’s will.” The song was finished in about two 45-minute segments that Saturday in February 2018. Its words surprised me because I didn’t expect for it to be about Christ’s sufferings at all. It was meant as a reflection on the place I was currently coming to terms with, but when I walked into the Garden and saw Him kneeling alone and carrying every grief that I was weighed down with, my perspective on my own unspoken stories changed.
The poet Robinson Jeffers once said, “Pain is worse to the strong.” If this is true, then the suffering Christ carried in the Garden, and in Pilate’s hall, and on that Hill, was the greatest suffering anyone ever felt. I am stirred by the realization of the depths of pain that Christ endured, not only because they were truly horrifying tortures: His pain was deeper than any man’s pain before or since because of the greatness of His divine strength. I am well aware that He was fully human, able to feel our slightest discomforts and simplest pleasures. But only He Who once had reigned in majesty in a glorious Heaven could know the plummets of our fallen humanity in its fallenness and degradation. And Jeffers’ words have a strange beauty, “Pain is worse to the strong.”
The other inspiration for the song “Symphony of Pain” came from this piece of writing I read for an Apologetics class I took in 2017. An article on ChristianAnswers.net entitled, “How did Jesus Christ die?” states:
“Frederick Farrar described the intended, torturous effect: ‘For indeed a death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and death can have of horrible and ghastly—dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, shame, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds—all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just short of the point which would give to the suffer the relief of unconsciousness.’
One doctor has called it ‘a symphony of pain’ produced by every movement, with every breath; even a slight breeze on his skin could bring screaming pain at this point.” (1)
May we slow again in the Garden where He carries the weight of the world — the weight of our unspoken stories. Let us stop with Him in the Hall and feel the scourge of His stripes and the sting of His humiliation. Let us stoop at the empty tomb and know that the end of the story remains the same — Jesus is Victor!
THE SONG
Sorrow upon sorrow
Blow on crushing blow
Stories left unspoken
Griefs that no one knows
Carried by my Savior
In the Garden still
All alone He prays and
Drinks His Father’s will
Stripe on scorching stripe
Bruise on welting bruise
Plucked and cut and stricken
Spit now mixed with blood
No friend to defend Him
All have Him betrayed
Thus begins the strains of
Christ’s Symphony of Pain
Step on painful step
Fall on stumbling fall
Bearing our transgressions
He cannot bear His cross
Through the streets He stumbles
Now He nears the mound
Soldiers force Him forward
He lays His body down
Nail on pounding nail
Breath on searing breath
Drinking bitter gall and
For us tasting death
People still surround Him
See His open shame
Never has been played such
A Symphony of Pain
“Finished, it is finished”
Death, oh welcome death
Drooping head and open arms
Now the mound is red
Blood and water flow so
Freely to the ground
Friends with solemn reverence
Take His body down
Empty, it is empty
Death, defeated death
Angels sit in victory
Cloth lays as a pledge
Come, stoop at the entrance
See where He once lay
Finished now the score of
Christ’s Symphony of Pain
Words & music by Merilee Barnard © February 24, 2018