230. Man of Sorrows! What a Name

The Story Behind the Hymn

Philip P. Bliss spent his early career as a singing-school teacher and music editor before D. L. Moody persuaded him, in his mid-thirties, to give up that settled work and become a traveling evangelist and song leader instead. "Man of Sorrows! What a Name" came out of that new chapter, written in 1875, not long after Bliss made the change. He gave both the words and the tune to a Sunday School periodical, International Lessons Monthly, under the plainer title "Redemption." The following year, when Bliss and Ira Sankey included it in their collection Gospel Hymns No. 2, it appeared under the title it carries today, headed by the verse it was built on, Isaiah 53:3 — "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

Each verse follows the same pattern: a stark statement of Christ's suffering on the sinner's behalf, answered every time by the same triumphant line, "Hallelujah, what a Savior!" — grief and praise held together in a single breath, verse after verse.

The hymn carries an unusually poignant history because of what followed. Ira Sankey later recalled that this was the last hymn he ever heard Bliss sing, at a meeting in Chicago's Farwell Hall, and that only weeks before his death Bliss had sung it with great effect during a visit to the state prison in Jackson, Michigan. On December 29, 1876 — barely a year after writing the hymn — Bliss and his wife were killed when the train they were riding plunged from a collapsed trestle bridge into the Ashtabula River in Ohio.

Knowing that history, the hymn's closing hallelujah reads differently: a young evangelist, writing at the height of a new calling, put to song a confidence in Christ's finished work that he would not live to see the century out to test — and it has been sung by grieving and grateful congregations alike ever since.