Music notes: III. Sunday of Easter

2020.04.26

The melody on which this week’s anthem, prelude, and postlude are based originally set a secular song, ‘Innsbruck, I must leave thee’. It, like many other secular melodies throughout Christian history, was reused for sacred texts, including the German text translated as ‘The duteous day now closeth’ [46] and the 17th-century Latin Eucharistic hymn translated as ‘O Food to pilgrims given’ [309]. We have chosen it this week to echo the Gospel reading in which some disciples, walking along the road to Emmaus, encounter the risen Christ, but – though their ‘hearts burn within them’ as he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures – do not recognize him until, having been bidden to stay the evening with them, he breaks bread with them.

The connection is even closer in the Latin, whose opening line, ‘O esca viatorum’, is more closely translated ‘O food of wayfarers’, and thus relates to the term viaticum, ‘food for the journey’, used for the Communion given to the dying. In these days when the Eucharist is unavailable and death looms larger in our minds and lives than usual, we pray with the writer of this hymn, ‘We hunger; Lord, supply us...whose hearts to thee draw nigh...We faint with thirst; revive us...and all we need, provide’. But in company with those first disciples, we can also pray – and believe in an answer to – this prayer at Evensong:

Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.