Lyrics
Up Calvary's mountain one dreadful morn
Walked Christ, my Savior, weary and worn;
Facing for sinners death on the cross,
That He might save them from endless loss.
Blessed Redeemer! Precious Redeemer!
Seems now I see Him on Calvary's tree;
Wounded and bleeding, for sinners pleading —
Blind and unheeding — dying for me!
"Father, forgive them!" thus did He pray,
E'en while His lifeblood flowed fast away;
Praying for sinners while in such woe —
No one but Jesus ever loved so.
O how I love Him, Savior and Friend,
How can my praises ever find end?
Through years unnumbered on heaven's shore,
My tongue shall praise Him forevermore.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1920). Words by Avis B. Christiansen; music by Harry Dixon Loes.
The Story Behind the Hymn
"Blessed Redeemer" came together in an order most hymns do not follow: the tune first, the words after. Harry Dixon Loes, a young music student in Chicago in 1920, heard a sermon titled "Blessed Redeemer" on the meaning of Christ's atonement and, moved by it, sat down and composed a melody meant to carry that same feeling — before a single line of text existed to go with it.
Loes then sent the finished tune, along with the title, to Avis B. Christiansen, a twenty-five-year-old poet from Chicago who attended Moody Church under the pastoral ministry of Dr. Harry Ironside and had already published a handful of hymn texts. Working from Loes's melody and the phrase he had given her, Christiansen wrote the three verses and chorus that became "Blessed Redeemer," published that same year, 1920, in the hymnal Songs of Redemption.
The chorus, built almost entirely from short, stacked exclamations — "Wounded and bleeding, for sinners pleading" — reads less like a doctrinal statement than like someone standing at the foot of the cross in real time, watching the scene described in the verse before it. That immediacy, joined to Loes's tune, gave the hymn its lasting emotional weight.
Christiansen went on to become one of the most widely published woman hymn writers of the early twentieth century, her texts appearing regularly throughout the Tabernacle Hymns series and remaining well known in Southern gospel circles to this day — a career that began, in this instance, with someone else's tune and a sermon title handed to her as a starting point.
