“Upon the Cross of Calvary”

Last updated on: March 9, 2026 at 10:33 am by Dan Peterson

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“Upon the Cross of Calvary” 2026-03-09T10:33:53-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The singing is often one of the best parts of our meetings — though sometimes it can be one of the worst. (Photo from LDS.org. Click to enlarge.)

Perhaps — indeed, most likely — this is true in other churches, but it’s certainly true in the denomination that I know best, which is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: One of the very best ways that we have of teaching and learning doctrine is through our hymns. Week after week, we sing songs that contain the essential elements of our “creed.” And, by dint of sheer repetition and the association of lyrics with memorable melodies that serve a clearly mnemonic function, we learn them by heart. If we think about it at all, I expect that most experienced Latter-day Saints of any length of time in the Church will be surprised at how many of the words of our hymns we’ve inadvertently, albeit painlessly, learned by heart (or, anyway, very near so). I suppose that our hymns (much more effectively) serve a function similar to that of stained glass in medieval Christian cathedrals.

On rare occasions, I’ve even used the words of our hymns as supporting evidence when confronted with the offensive claim that Latter-day Saints aren’t Christians. The hymns are, after all, the devotional heart of our Sunday worship. And I can use just about any Sunday’s hymn selections to make my case.

Today, for example, we led off with Parley Pratt’s majestic “The Morning Breaks,” a specifically Latter-day Saint song that is all about the Restoration but that isn’t explicitly Christian or about Christ (unless one understands that, for Latter-day Saints, Jehovah and Christ are one and the same person). And we closed with “Now Thank We All Our God,” which is likewise not expressly Christian even though it was written by the German Lutheran clergyman Martin Rinkhart (1586-1649) as “Nun danket alle Gott” and translated into English by the English hymnwriter and educator Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878), who is recognized in the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and for whom a memorial monument was erected in Bristol Cathedral.

The still relatively new official logo of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

However, we also sang the sacrament hymn, “We’ll Sing All Hail to Jesus’ Name,” the lyrics and music of which were written by, respectively, the English Latter-day Saint convert Richard Alldridge (1815-1896) and the Welsh convert Joseph Coslett or Cosslett (1850-1910), and which is about as expressly Christian as a hymn can be:

We’ll sing all hail to Jesus’ name,
And praise and honor give
To him who bled on Calvary’s hill
And died that we might live.
2.
He passed the portals of the grave;
Salvation was his song;
He called upon the sinbound soul
To join the heav’nly throng.
3.
He seized the keys of death and hell
And bruised the serpent’s head;
He bid the prison doors unfold,
The grave yield up her dead.
4.
The bread and water represent
His sacrifice for sin;
Ye Saints, partake and testify
Ye do remember him.

(Also at the devotional core of our Sunday worship services are our ancient Nephite sacrament prayers on the bread and the water [formerly wine], which are offered almost every Sunday of the year and which, unlike virtually any other prayer in the Church, must be delivered with verbal exactitude, in precisely the same way, every single time. They could scarcely be more expressly Christian than they are.)

We likewise sang one verse of a rest hymn between my remarks on the first two elements of Article of Faith 4 (“faith” and “repentance”) and my wife’s comments on the latter elements (“baptism” and “the gift of the Holy Ghost”). Alas, though, I no longer remember which song we sang as the rest hymn.

An aerial view of the Judean wilderness (near Masada), by Andrew Shiva (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

I say that we learn a lot of doctrine from the hymns, and we do. But sometimes we learn things — minor things, it must be said — that probably aren’t true. I’ve commented here before about the deservedly popular (and very Christian) Latter-day Saint Christmas carol “Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plains,” pointing out that its Scottish-born Latter-day Saint lyricist and composer, John Menzies Macfarlane (1833-1892), had obviously never been to Judea, which is rugged hill country with scarcely a flat place to be seen.

The eyes and the nose of General Gordon’s proposal for Calvary are plainly visible in the distance in this 1935 photo, just slightly to the right of center. Since that time, since the founding of the State of Israel and the massive Jewish immigration that ensued, this area has changed dramatically. And the hill has suffered significant erosion and collapse. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

But I want to point to a passage in the sacrament hymn that my ward sang today that is almost certainly in error:

We’ll sing all hail to Jesus’ name,
And praise and honor give
To him who bled on Calvary’s hill
And died that we might live.

Jesus was probably not crucified “on Calvary’s hill” but, rather, in front of it. From the site of the Garden Tomb, for example — which, although I disagree, many Latter-day Saints believe to be the actual place of the Savior’s burial and resurrection — a very clear view can be had of “Gordon’s Calvary,” a distinctly possible candidate for the New Testament’s Golgotha, “the place of the skull.” But the crucifixion of Christ was likely carried out below that hill, where today’s East Jerusalem Arab bus station is located, down near an ancient crossroads. (For both the Garden Tomb and the more traditional Holy Sepulcher that is venerated by most Christian denominations, the site of Christ’s crucifixion seems to be near intersections just outside of the ancient city walls.) In the hope of deterring future “criminals,” the Romans wanted their brutal executions to be seen up close and personal by as many passersby as possible — rather the way, during the Wars of the Roses, that the decaying heads of decapitated “traitors” were displayed at city gates. (Six thousand survivors of the famous first-century BC slave revolt led by Spartacus were captured by the legions of Marcus Licinius Crassus and crucified, lining the Appian Way from Rome to Capua, a distance of more than a hundred miles.)

Of course, whether Jesus died on the hill of Calvary or in front of it is, theologically and existentially, of no consequence. What matters is not where he died for us but that he died for us and, anyway, the distance in question is — at the very most — maybe a hundred yards. What is essential is captured in the words of the Latter-day Saint writer Mabel Jones Gabbott (1910–2004), from “In Humility, Our Savior”:

Let me not forget, O Savior,
Thou didst bleed and die for me
When thy heart was stilled and broken
On the cross at Calvary.

On the set for the Interpreter Foundation’s 2024 film Six Days in August, Brigham Young, played by John Donovan Wilson, rolls up his sleeves to go to work with some struggling oxen. Heber C. Kimball stands directly behind him, and Wilford Woodruff stands to his left (our right). Still photograph by Jason Allred.

Also important: The seventh installment of Becoming Brigham goes up tomorrow (Monday). Six episodes are already up, and they’re all available at becomingbrigham.com. Alas, though, I’m still running into people in my own ward — including today — who haven’t heard of the project, let alone watched any of the episodes. I suspect that most members of my ward, in fact — the ward in which not only I live but our producer lives — have no idea at all about Becoming Brigham. I literally don’t know what else to do to get the word out. I’m thinking, perhaps, of burning my neighbor’s house down and putting a sign on his lawn. Or perhaps lighting myself on fire . . .

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