Lynching Christ Jesus

 

"Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  first published in William Eleazar Barton's 1899 Old Plantation Hymns, It was the first African American spiritual to be included in The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America 1940. 

Interestingly enough the 1940 hymnal has it in E major not the e flat first was published in Old Plantation Hymns.  It has to do with the temperament of the organ’s tuning.

 

This tune transports the singer to the crucifixion scene as though it were a contemporaneous lynching, Were you there? Obviously the singers and target audience could not have been “there” some 1800 years earlier, but they could have witnessed lynching.

Lynching sends a message to subjugated people to protect the dominant culture’s status quo. Thus the crucifixion was a lynching.

The crowd that welcomed Jesus on Palm Sunday, cried Crucify him on Good Friday.