Fairest Savior

As I prepared to write this, I struggled with the meaning of the word "fairest". The second stanza helped me a little because it says:

Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer 

Fairer and purer are used here for emphasis. Similar words are used in poetry to give impact.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary solidified my understanding. It defines fair as, "pleasing to the eye or mind especially because of fresh, charming, or flawless quality."

Think of the "fairest of the fair". The beauty queen. The best of all of the beautiful women. Fresh, charming, flawless. The second stanza reads:

Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer  who makes the woeful heart to sing. 

That's what the hymn's author chose to call Jesus. He is flawless, our perfect Savior.

1 Peter 1:18-20 says:
¹⁸ For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, ¹⁹ but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

At Passover, the Jewish people were required to slaughter a perfect lamb, one "without defect" (Exodus 12:5), and sprinkle that blood on their doorposts. Then the Angel of Death wouldn't visit them. They would be saved from certain death.

That's what our Perfect Sacrifice did for us. Jesus, the fairest, offered Himself as our sacrifice and saved us from certain death. If He wasn't the fairest, the perfect one, His sacrifice wouldn't have been acceptable to God. The Passover in Exodus foreshadowed our Fairest Savior's death on the cross.

Verse four gives a wonderful response to this news:

Beautiful Savior!  Lord of all the nations!  
Son of God and Son of Man!  
Glory and honor, praise, adoration, 
now and forevermore be thine.

Amen and amen.

The Story Behind Fairest Lord Jesus

I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how old this hymn is. For some reason, I thought it was rather new, perhaps late 19th century or even early 20th century, but some traditions say it's as old as the 12th century, sung when Crusaders made their way to the Holy Land. Originally, some believe, it was sung to a Gregorian chant. None of that can be substantiated.

Others attribute the hymn to around 1620, when the followers of the reformer John Hus were driven from Bohemia in a bloody purge. They settled in Silesia, now part of Poland. This is said to have been a Bohemian folk song.

The first known appearance of the hymn was in the Roman Catholic Munster Gesangbuch of 1677. Hoffman Fallersleben heard a group of Silesians singing this hymn, wrote down what they sang, and published it in his Schlesische Volkslieder in 1842. This is the version of the hymn we know.

The hymn appeared in English in Richard Storrs Willis' Church Chorals and Choir Studies in 1850.
A notation about this hymn in that collection stated that it was, "sung by the German knights on the way to Jerusalem." That may well be where the Crusader legend began. Willis was also the composer of It Came upon a Midnight Clear.

Fairest Lord Jesus

A beautiful, classic hymn this week...Fairest Lord Jesus. Please enjoy.