188. Go to Dark Gethsemane

The Story Behind the Hymn

James Montgomery is already discussed elsewhere in this collection as author of ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’, ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed’, and ‘In the Hour of Trial’. He wrote this hymn’s text in 1820.

He structured it as a sequential meditation, walking through several distinct scenes of Christ’s passion in order — His agony in the garden of Gethsemane, His trial and crucifixion, and finally His resurrection. Each of the hymn’s several verses directs the singer’s attention to a different specific location or moment.

The hymn’s repeated opening command instructs the singer to actively ‘go’ to each successive scene, rather than simply reading or hearing about it passively. That reflects a devotional technique with roots in older traditions of guided meditation on the events of Christ’s passion.

It invites the singer to imaginatively place themselves at each specific location in turn, rather than observing the crucifixion narrative only as distant historical information.

Montgomery had his own well-documented personal history of imprisonment for his political convictions, discussed at greater length elsewhere in this collection.

Given that, his repeated instruction throughout this hymn to actively ‘learn’ specific spiritual lessons from each scene of Christ’s suffering — to pray from Gethsemane, to endure from the trial, to triumph from the resurrection — reflects a consistent theme found across much of Montgomery’s hymn writing: a conviction that suffering, rightly approached, becomes genuinely instructive rather than merely painful.

Richard Redhead, an English organist and composer, wrote the tune most commonly associated with the hymn considerably later.

The completed hymn has remained a standard piece of Holy Week worship, particularly favored for Maundy Thursday services specifically commemorating the events in the Garden of Gethsemane — the very events the hymn’s opening verse directly addresses.