Friend, Come Up Higher
The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity continues the long, green “Time of the Church,” and unites its readings around a single, sharply focused theme: humility before God and the great reversal by which He alone exalts the lowly. Solomon’s counsel not to seek the place of honor at the king’s table becomes, in Christ’s mouth, table talk at a Pharisee’s Sabbath feast and, in Paul’s exhortation, the very shape of a life worthy of the Christian calling.
Lectionary Primer PDF Hymn Supplement PDFThe shape of the service
The Theme. Unites the day’s propers and readings around humility before God and the reversal by which He alone exalts the lowly.
Introit. Drawn from Psalm 119:137, “Righteous are you, O Lord,” with verses 1–2 and 5–6 opening the psalmist’s meditation on God’s law.
Gradual and Verse. Psalm 33:12 and 6 sings of God’s creative power and gracious election, and Psalm 116:1 turns to thanksgiving, “I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice.”
Color and Preface. Green marks the season’s ongoing growth in Christ; the Common Proper Preface is used, as on every Sunday of Trinitytide.
The readings at a glance
Solomon opens with a warning against self-promotion in the king’s court, “do not put yourself forward” (the Hithpael of kabad, “to honor yourself,” used nowhere else in the Old Testament in this reflexive form): better to be summoned upward than publicly demoted before a noble. He then turns to speech: a quarrel rushed to court, a secret betrayed, a reputation (dibbah) that will not “turn away” once it takes hold, versus a word “fitly spoken” (dabar dabur), likened to golden apples in silver settings, and a wise reproof to a listening ear valued like a golden betrothal ring, the very gift given to Rebekah in Genesis 24.
The chapter closes contrasting the faithful messenger (ne’eman), refreshing as snow in harvest, with the boaster whose promised gift never arrives, like clouds that promise rain and pass on dry. Centuries later, Solomon’s court wisdom about waiting to be called “come up here” becomes, in Christ’s own mouth, the very shape of the Gospel: the humble are not merely polite, they are those who trust God alone to exalt them.
Writing as “the prisoner in the Lord” (ho desmios), Paul urges the church to walk axios, not to earn God’s calling but to live in a manner that corresponds to the grace already given, bearing with one another “in love” (en agape). He commands them to “hold fast” (terein) the unity of the Spirit in the “bond” (syndesmos) of peace, a deliberate echo of his own “bound” state in verse 1: the bound prisoner begging the free church to stay bound together. Unity itself, henotes, is not manufactured by human effort; it is the Spirit’s gift, already given, only to be guarded.
Paul then bursts into an early creedal hymn built on the word “one” (heis, mia, hen) seven times, the number of divine completeness, moving from the one Spirit to the one Lord to the one God and Father, all three genders of the Greek numeral employed in the single line “one Lord, one faith, one Baptism.” To confess Jesus as heis Kyrios, “one Lord,” is to apply to Him the very title of Yahweh; to confess “one Baptism” is to confess that every believer, whatever their history, has been washed in the same water, taught the same faith, and adopted by the same Father, who is “over all and through all and in all.”
Invited to a Sabbath meal in a Pharisee’s house, Jesus is “watched closely” (parateroumenoi) by hosts hoping to trap Him; He heals a man with dropsy anyway, and His accusers fall into a silence (hesuchasan) that, across Luke’s Gospel, marks the final defeat of their opposition. Watching the guests jostle for the best couches, Jesus tells a parable: take the lowest place at a “wedding feast” (gamous), Luke’s shorthand for the coming Kingdom, rather than risk the public “shame” (aischynes) of being sent down from a seat you claimed for yourself.
The wisdom is Solomon’s own, from this Sunday’s Old Testament reading, but Jesus presses it to its full, eschatological end: “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” both verbs theological passives in which God Himself, unnamed but unmistakable, is the one who acts. The parable finds its truest fulfillment not at any dinner table but at the cross, where the King’s own Son took the lowest, most shameful seat of all, so that the Father might exalt Him and give Him the name above every name.
The hymns and their stories
Christopher Wordsworth (1807–85), nephew of the poet William Wordsworth, was vicar of the delightfully named Stanford in the Vale cum Goosey and later Bishop of Lincoln. He held it “the first duty of a hymn-writer to teach sound doctrine, and thus to save souls,” and he drew his hymns straight from Scripture. This one opened his collection The Holy Year (1862) under the heading “Sunday.” It takes its theme from Psalm 118:24, “This is the day that the LORD has made,” and its second stanza counts three gifts of light, one from each Person of the Trinity: light at creation, Christ risen from the depths of the earth, and the Spirit sent from heaven, all on the first day of the week.
The text we sing only partly resembles Wordsworth’s. His original blurred the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday, and later editors reworked it; the Episcopal Hymnal 1982 changed his “On thee,” which addressed the day itself, to “This day,” so that praise goes to the Creator and not to His creation, and it replaced his last stanzas with two new ones. LSB follows that version. The LSB companion notes that since the “day of rest” is Sunday, Sunday is the only day on which the hymn is properly sung. The tune ELLACOMBE is a German melody first printed at Stuttgart in 1784.
Georg Weissel (1590–1635), the pastor who also gave us “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates,” wrote this hymn in 1623 for his own installation as the first pastor of the new church in the Rossgarten district of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad in Russia. The occasion explains its opening. The LSB companion paraphrases Weissel’s point: build whatever buildings you like in this life; in the end they will crumble, and the eternal Church stands on Christ alone. The second stanza presses the same claim: seek where you may, salvation is found in no one but Christ, the one foundation that remains when every other has failed (John 14:6; 1 Corinthians 3:11).
No copy printed in Weissel’s lifetime survives; the earliest is in the Prussian Festival Songs of 1642, compiled by the Königsberg musicians Johann Eccard and Johann Stobäus. The tune has an unexpected origin. Stobäus, cantor of the cathedral at Königsberg, first wrote it in 1613 as a five-voice wedding song for a local couple, set to the words “Wie Gott bestellt, mir wol gefällt” (“As God ordains, it pleases me well”). Arthur P. Voss translated the hymn in 1938 for The Lutheran Hymnal. LSB appoints it as the Hymn of the Day for this Sunday, the Seventeenth after Trinity.
Early in the twentieth century Luther D. Reed, a leader of the General Council of the Lutheran Church in North America, challenged his colleagues to remedy the scarcity of English hymns that confessed the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar without hedging. His fellow professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, Henry Eyster Jacobs (1844–1932), answered in 1910 with this hymn. It first appeared in the Common Service Book of 1917, which Reed compiled, and it passed into The Lutheran Hymnal, Lutheran Book of Worship, and Lutheran Worship, which revised the text substantially; LSB keeps that revision.
Lawrence Rast calls it “a theology of the Sacrament in sung form,” and its five stanzas move through the true presence of Christ’s body and blood, the forgiveness the Sacrament gives, the faith that clings to His Word, the unity of those who proclaim His death until He comes, and the heavenly feast to which it points. Since 1910 it has become a favorite for singing during the distribution. The tune is the seventeenth-century German melody of “Lord Jesus Christ, Be Present Now” (LSB 902).
Erdmann Neumeister (1671–1756) was chief pastor of St. James’s Church in Hamburg for forty years and a fierce opponent of Pietism, which in his view rested faith on the feelings of the heart instead of God’s work in Word and Sacrament. In 1736, when an anonymous play mocking Pietist teaching appeared in Leipzig, enraged Pietists assumed he had written it and smashed the windows of his house. Yet some orthodox Lutherans distrusted him too, for allowing operatic music in church. Neumeister adapted madrigal verse to create the modern cantata libretto, and Bach and Telemann set his texts.
He often closed his sermons with a hymn of his own on the day’s Gospel. This one, “Ich weiss, an wen ich glaube” (2 Timothy 1:12), was written for Quasimodogeniti, the Sunday of Thomas’s doubt (John 20:19–31), and published in 1718 in his Evangelischer Nachklang. Oddly, that book holds two hymns with the same first line, meter and length; the other is for Saints Peter and Paul. The hymn confesses that faith stands on Christ’s sure Word where human reason cannot reach. Neumeister himself chose the tune, NUN LOB, MEIN SEEL, probably by Johann Kugelmann (1540). The English is a composite from The Lutheran Hymnal (1941).