Common Ground Song 37 ‘Forty days and forty nights’
Words: Jean Holloway © Kevin Mayhew Ltd / Music: N/A *
Facebook recording: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1153811912634238 *
Featured image: Christ in the Wilderness by Ivan Kramskoy

When I first saw the title of this hymn, I assumed it was the well known hymn that starts with the same words and is about Jesus’ temptations in the desert, so I had planned it for the start of Lent. But this is a different, modern one, that is (as the editors point out) mainly about his experiences in Holy Week, other than the first verse, which does reference the desert temptations.

The common theme of the first four verses is the way Jesus was betrayed by different people, and asking that we might be more faithful than them. In the first, the betrayal is, in a sense, by all of us, because he had to face up to the Devil who leads us all astray.  We ask Jesus when we are tempted to ‘meet [us] in the desert, strong in faith and unafraid’.

In the second verse, the betrayers are the disciples who fell asleep while Jesus was praying in Gethsemane and then fled when he was arrested. We ask instead to be kept ‘constant in your service, keeping watch both night and day’. In the third, the betrayer is Peter who denied his master three times in one night. We ask for ‘courage and conviction to proclaim my Lord anew’.

Verses four and five remember the crucifixion, when Jesus felt that even God the Father had abandoned him, and then his burial by Jospeh of Arimathea. We ask for ‘such as love as his [Joseph], such a faith as his’.

In the course of singing this hymn, then, we are reminded of how Jesus suffered both at the start and end of his years of ministry, faithful to his disciples even to death. And we ask for courage: courage to resist temptation, to devote all our available time to his service, to confidently witness to him, and to have the love and faith that can deal even with death. Not just in Holy Week, but after Easter and beyond.

* The only performance of this hymn that I found on YouTube is as part of a full-length church service. It does not include the words on screen. The Facebook video does include the words, but both churches used different tunes from the one in Common Ground.