137. Low in the Grave He Lay

The Story Behind the Hymn

Robert Lowry, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the Baptist pastor and composer responsible for 'Shall We Gather at the River' (hymn 23) and the tune of 'Marching to Zion' (hymn 74), wrote both the words and the music of this hymn together in 1874, continuing the pattern of the earlier hymn in personally composing an entire piece, text and tune together, rather than working with a separate collaborator.

The hymn's verses deliberately dwell, at some length and in unusually stark, plain language, on the period of Christ's actual burial and apparent defeat — 'low in the grave He lay,' 'vainly they watch His bed, vainly they seal the dead' — before the chorus breaks in each time with an abrupt, triumphant reversal, 'up from the grave He arose,' a structural contrast between quiet verse and explosive chorus that gives the hymn considerable dramatic and musical power in performance.

The reference to sealing and watching the tomb draws directly on Matthew 27:62-66, in which the Jewish authorities, remembering Jesus's own prediction that He would rise after three days, specifically request that Pilate post a Roman guard and seal the tomb with a stone specifically to prevent any possibility of the body being removed or the resurrection being falsely claimed — security measures the hymn's chorus treats as having proven entirely 'vain' against the actual resurrection.

The hymn's musically distinctive shift from a slow, minor-key verse into a fast, major-key, repeatedly shouted chorus made it, alongside relatively few other Easter hymns, particularly well suited to large congregational singing on Easter morning specifically, and it remains, alongside 'Christ the Lord Is Risen Today' (hymn 36 elsewhere in this collection), one of the two or three hymns most closely and consistently associated with Easter Sunday worship across American Protestant churches specifically.