Lyrics
Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand,
The shadow of a mighty rock
Within a weary land;
A home within the wilderness,
A rest upon the way,
From the burning of the noontide heat,
And the burden of the day.
Upon that cross of Jesus
Mine eye at times can see
The very dying form of One
Who suffered there for me;
And from my stricken heart, with tears,
Two wonders I confess:
The wonders of redeeming love,
And my unworthiness.
O safe and happy shelter!
O refuge tried and sweet!
O trysting place where Heaven's love
And Heaven's justice meet!
As to the exiled patriarch
That wondrous dream was given,
So seems my Savior's cross to me,
A ladder up to heaven.
I take, O cross, thy shadow
For my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than
The sunshine of His face;
Content to let the world go by,
To know no gain or loss,
My sinful self my only shame,
My glory all the cross.
Public domain hymn text (1868). Words by Elizabeth C. Clephane.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Elizabeth C. Clephane is already discussed elsewhere in this collection as author of ‘The Ninety and Nine’. She wrote this hymn’s text sometime before her early death from tuberculosis in 1869, at only thirty-eight.
It was part of the same small body of poetry, mostly published only posthumously in a religious periodical, that also produced her better-known hymn about the lost sheep.
The hymn’s central image describes the cross as ‘the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.’ That draws directly on Isaiah 32:2, which describes a coming righteous king as being like ‘the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’
Clephane applied that ancient prophetic image of shelter and relief from harsh desert conditions specifically to the cross of Christ — treating it as an ongoing source of rest and protection, rather than only as a historical site of past suffering.
Clephane suffered from lifelong frail health, and would eventually be claimed by tuberculosis at a young age. Given that, the hymn’s repeated emphasis on rest, shelter, and relief ‘from the burning of the noontide heat, and the burden of the day’ carries a plausible personal resonance, connected to her own experience of chronic physical weakness and fatigue.
As with much of her sparse surviving biographical record, though, this connection remains inference, rather than something Clephane explicitly documented in her own writing.
Frederick C. Maker, an English organist, composed the tune considerably later, after Clephane’s own death.
The completed hymn has remained a favored choice specifically for services of quiet reflection and personal devotion. Its imagery of finding literal physical rest and shade beneath the cross offers a gentler, more restful tone than the more dramatic, triumphant hymns of the crucifixion found elsewhere throughout this collection.
