Jesus Paid It All
Composer: arr. Marianne Forman (Beckenhorst Press)
Text: Elvina M. Hall (1865); tune by John T. Grape
Season: Sung March 9, 2025, the first Sunday in Lent, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir
The words were written in a choir loft. In 1865 Elvina Hall was sitting with the choir of Monumental Methodist Church in Baltimore during a long pastoral prayer, and the lines came to her so insistently that she wrote them on the flyleaf of the hymnal in her lap. Her pastor, George Schrick, already had a tune on his desk: the church’s organist, John Grape, had written one and called it “All to Christ I Owe,” and nobody knew what to do with it. Schrick put the two together. The hymn was in print within three years.
It is a Lenten hymn in the Reformed sense: not a meditation on our sorrow but a statement of what was done for us. “Sin had left a crimson stain; he washed it white as snow.” Marianne Forman’s arrangement lets the choir sing it the way a congregation does, straight and without ornament, and the choir sang it on the first Sunday of Lent in 2025. It was also sung the previous spring, on April 21, 2024.
Scripture: Isaiah 1:18; Colossians 2:13 and 14