36. Christ the Lord Is Risen Today

The Story Behind the Hymn

Charles Wesley originally titled this hymn simply 'Hymn for Easter Day' when he first published it in his 1739 collection 'Hymns and Sacred Poems,' and his original text, as printed, notably lacked the joyful repeated 'Alleluia' that now punctuates the end of every single line in the familiar modern version sung in churches today — an absence that would likely surprise many contemporary congregations who consider the repeated 'Alleluia' inseparable from the hymn's identity.

That now-essential repeated refrain was added considerably later by an unknown hymnal editor, who borrowed it directly from a much older Latin Easter hymn, 'Surrexit Christus hodie,' dating back at least to the fourteenth century and possibly earlier, itself part of a long medieval tradition of Latin Easter sequences built around exactly this kind of joyful repeated exclamation. The resulting combined hymn sung today — Charles Wesley's eighteenth-century English text spliced together with a much older medieval Latin exclamation of praise, added by someone whose name has been entirely lost to history — represents a small but genuinely telling example of how many of the hymns considered today's most 'classic' and fixed texts were in fact shaped collaboratively and anonymously across multiple generations and even multiple centuries, rather than fixed permanently and completely by any single original author at any single moment of composition.

Wesley wrote the hymn to walk deliberately and carefully through the full resurrection narrative in a clear theological sequence — first establishing the full reality and weight of Christ's actual death, then affirming the completeness of His victory over it through the resurrection, and finally drawing out its practical implications for the ongoing lives of believers who trust in that same resurrection — reflecting Wesley's characteristic instinct, found throughout much of his enormous hymn output, for using congregational song as a genuine vehicle for careful, structured theological teaching rather than only for emotional expression.

This careful theological structure, combined with its now-inseparable borrowed medieval refrain, has helped make the hymn, alongside relatively few others, one of the two or three pieces most closely and permanently identified with Easter worship across the entire English-speaking Christian world, sung in Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and countless other congregations each Easter Sunday by worshippers largely unaware that its most recognizable single musical feature was borrowed from a text already four centuries old by the time Wesley wrote his own contribution to it.