No doubt: Everyone's favorite St. Thomas hymn

The first Sunday after Easter is often called “low Sunday,” or sometimes as “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” Since the first English prayer book in 1549, the gospel reading has been from John 20:19-23, where Jesus greets the 11 and establishes auricular confession. More recently, that’s been extended toby adding verses 24-31, with the entire story of “Doubting” Thomas, appointed for all three years of the RCL and ACNA lectionaries. That was what we heard this morning at our 1928 BCP parish.

As I wrote in 2012, there is one hymn suitable for this date: “O sons and daughters let us sing!” set to the tune O Filii et Filiae. Here are excerpts from the Hymnal 1940 Companion (p. 73-74):

[The Latin original] was written by Jean Tisserand, a Franciscan monk, who died at Paris in 1949. It is first found in a small booklet without title printed between 1518 and 1536, probably at Paris.…The translation by John Mason Neale has been frequently altered since it was first published in his Mediævel Hymns and Sequences, 1851. 

The tune, O filli et filiae, is probably the original contemporary melody since none other has been used with the text. The earliest known form is a four-part setting … [from] 1623.

This hymn is #99 in my favorite hymnal (H40), with nine verses. The author notes that H40 drops three of the verses from Neale’s original, but it appears that the 1986 New English Hymnal adds a 10th verse after a very different adaptation of the same nine Neale verses.

All verses can be sung on Easter, but verses 1,5,6,7,8 are normally sung on low Sunday. The same hymn is #142 in Book of Common Praise 2017 (aka Magnify the Lord), the first hymnal published for ACNA usage, mainly as an update for H40 for traditional-language parishes.

As I noted earlier, Hymnal 1982 split this hymn into two separate hymns with the same tune: #203 with five Easter verses and #206 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

This month, I have been researching the second of my two-part review of Sing Unto the Lord, a 2023 hymnal published as a replacement for H82 for more contemporary language ACNA parishes. SUL replicates the H82 pattern (as it does in many other areas), with #170 with five Easter verses and #169 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

Since Covid, I've been monitoring the online bulletins for six Episcopal and ACNA parishes. Three sang the translated Tisserand text today: two H82 parishes sang #206, and one H40 parish sang #99, as we did at our Continuing parish.

Sadly, the Savannah, Georgia ACNA parish that is the home of Sing Unto the Lord did read John 20:19-31, but did not schedule hymn #169 from its hymnal. Instead, it had two regular Easter hymns (part of the overflow from Easter Sunday that often happens throughout early Eastertide).

Still, I think the message is clear: for those who focus on the Doubting Thomas story for low Sunday, there is one clear choice of a hymn — Neale’s opening verse, his five verses about John 20:19-31, plus (in some cases) three other verses from Neale’s longer original hymn — all set to the earliest known (if not only) tune used for this text.

Caravaggio, Incredulità di San Tommaso

The most famous C&E oratorio

Virtually all Anglicans know Handel’s most famous sacred work — which is probably the most famous long-form sacred work ever written in English. Most would know the three parts — first with OT prophesy of a Messiah and his birth in 1st century Judea, the second with Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and the third focusing on the second coming.

In a Friday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — in the weekly “Houses of Worship” feature — assistant WSJ editorial page writer (and Hillsdale alumna) Nicole Ault laments the scarcity of Eastertide performances of what instead has become a staple of the Christmas season. The work was originally performed April 13, 1742 during Eastertide, and its librettist thought it ideally suited for Holy Week.

She spotlights the enduring power of the text by English librettist Charles Jennens:

A devout Anglican, Jennens wrote “Messiah” in part to battle the deists of his age, who posited a distant God but not a Savior. As rationalists, they put no stock in things of faith like resurrection from the dead. “ ‘Messiah,’ with its insistence on God’s free . . . gift of his Son, on the historical fact of the Incarnation and the supernatural fact of Redemption, was an assertion of everything that the Deists sought to deny,” writes Richard Luckett in his 1992 book, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration.

Ault closes her column with a tribute to the witness the final part that this libretto offers to the promise of the Resurrection:

But besides testifying to facts that require faith, “Messiah” also bears witness to a hope that results from that faith. The feeling is personal: “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” sings the soprano in one of the work’s sweetest solos, “yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

It is also unassailable. Easter seals the promise of eternal life, revealed at Christmas but unfulfilled except through death and resurrection. Thus, quoting the apostle Paul, “Messiah” can say what is ours to proclaim as well: “O death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”