“When You Ask Now What Truth Is”
This month we continue our Hymn of the Month series in which one or more hymns drawn from collections published by Leupold Editions will be posted on the opening page of the website for consideration by pastors and musicians who may wish to introduce the hymn to their congregations the following month. The Hymn of the Month will often be thematically appropriate for a particular season of the church year or it may be related to a more general theme about the church’s mission in contemporary society. Thus, pastors and/or musicians may wish to have the choir introduce the hymn on the first Sunday of the month or season and then invite the congregation to join with the choir in singing the hymn on each of the remaining Sundays. Additional hymns will occasionally be suggested for a particular Sunday in the church year or for annual commemorations, such as the liturgies of Holy Week; such hymns may only be appropriate on the designated day, or they might be used as a Hymn of the Month in anticipation of or in response to the particular day observed on the church calendar.
Text: “When You Ask Now What Truth Is,” John Core, Through the Ceaseless Web, p. 69. Suggested Tune: SONG OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
This text, “When You Ask Now What Truth Is”, is based on one verse of Scripture (John18.38) drawn from the Passion of Our Lord According to Saint John as appointed for Good Friday every year in the Revised Common Lectionary. In the first three stanzas, author John Core (1951-2017) may have penned the first hymn ever to address Pontius Pilate directly, and he does so with a sarcastic tone while combining an very improbable rhyme scheme (abcbddede) with a very peculiar meter (76 76 887 87). The hymn then concludes with a prayer asking for God to “forgive us . . . in seeking to follow Pilate’s course, where justice slips from wet hands and right gives way to force.”
Core was born at Camp (now Fort) Rucker, Alabama, and earned a B.A. in Speech Communication from West Virginia University in Morgantown, where he served as a Library Associate cataloging music from 1975 until his death in 2017. Core was a member of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada and published four collections of texts with Leupold Edition.
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