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Sunday, September 13, 2026

by Joshua L. Mazur, Director of Music

Hymn 671: Amazing Grace

There are few hymns that need less introduction than Amazing Grace. It is sung across denominational lines, at funerals and memorial services, at public ceremonies, and sometimes in settings far removed from the Church. Its familiarity can make it easy to forget that it began as a fairly specific piece of Christian teaching.

The text was written by the English priest John Newton in late 1772, probably for use with his sermon on New Year's Day 1773 at the parish church in Olney, England. The sermon was based on 1 Chronicles 17, where King David responds to God's promises by asking, “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” Newton called the hymn “Faith's Review and Expectation.” It was later published in 1779 in Olney Hymns, the collection Newton prepared with his friend, the poet William Cowper.

That original title tells us quite a lot about the hymn. Newton is looking backward at what God's grace has already done and forward in confidence to what God has promised still to do.

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,

that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

was blind, but now I see.

A Wretch Like Me

That word wretch has become difficult for some. People sometimes tell me that they dislike singing Amazing Grace because they do not see themselves as wretches. And if Newton were asking us to believe that human beings are worthless, I would understand the objection. Christianity teaches something quite different. We are creatures made in the image of God and loved by God.

But Newton is not talking about our worth. He is talking about our need. The comparison here is not between me and my neighbor. Newton is not dividing the world into respectable people and wretches and asking us to place ourselves in the second category. The comparison is between sinful humanity and the holy God whose grace he finds so astonishing. Before God, all of us are wholly in need of His grace, His mercy, and His love.

That is what makes the grace amazing. If I basically deserve it, there is nothing particularly amazing about receiving it. Grace becomes astonishing when I understand that I cannot earn it, manufacture it, or make myself worthy of it, and that God gives it freely anyway.

Newton had particular reason to know this. As a young man he lived a notoriously unsettled life and eventually became involved in the transatlantic slave trade, including service aboard slave ships. His conversion and his rejection of slavery did not happen all at once, and we should be careful not to make his biography tidier than it was. He eventually became an Anglican priest and, later in life, an outspoken opponent of the slave trade.

Newton knew there were things in his own life for which he desperately needed mercy. We may have different histories, but we sing the same confession. Calling ourselves “wretches” is not a declaration that God regards us as worthless. It is an admission that we cannot save ourselves.

NEW BRITAIN

Newton would not have known the melody to which we sing his hymn today. In fact, the original 1779 Olney Hymns contained no music at all. This was common. Hymn texts were written in recognizable poetic meters so that congregations could sing them to any tune of the same meter. Amazing Grace is written in Common Meter, 8.6.8.6, one of the most useful and familiar meters in English hymnody.

The melody we know as NEW BRITAIN developed in the American shape-note tradition. An early form of the tune appeared under another name and with another hymn text before William Walker paired a version of it with Newton's words in his enormously successful 1835 collection The Southern Harmony. That pairing helped establish the hymn in the form we recognize today.

NEW BRITAIN is built largely from a five-note, or pentatonic, scale. That simplicity is one reason the tune is so immediately singable. It also works unusually well without accompaniment. A congregation can simply begin singing it, which surely accounts for at least part of the hymn's remarkable life beyond the pages of a hymnal.

The history of Amazing Grace is therefore also a particularly good example of how hymnody works. An English clergyman wrote a text in the eighteenth century. An American musical tradition supplied the tune decades later. The combination became so familiar that it now seems almost impossible to separate them.

“Forgive Your Brother or Sister from Your Heart”

This Sunday, Peter asks Jesus a question that sounds perfectly reasonable: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

Jesus answers and then tells the parable of a servant whose master forgives an enormous debt. The same servant immediately encounters someone who owes him a much smaller amount and refuses to extend the mercy he has just received.

The servant's failure is not that he does not understand mercy. He has just experienced it himself. His failure is that the mercy shown to him has not changed the way he treats someone else. That is a useful setting in which to sing Amazing Grace.

Newton's hymn keeps returning to what has been received. Grace saved. Grace taught. Grace relieved. Grace has brought us this far, and grace will lead us home. The Christian begins from the knowledge that everything rests upon the mercy of God.

And this is where that uncomfortable word wretch becomes important again. The servant in Jesus' parable has forgotten his own position. He behaves toward his fellow servant as though he were the creditor rather than someone whose own enormous debt has just been forgiven. It is difficult to stand very far above another sinner when I remember that I am one too.

We do not forgive because the wrong suddenly becomes insignificant, or because forgiveness is easy. We forgive as people who know ourselves to be forgiven. Newton's original title, Faith's Review and Expectation, is useful here. We look backward at grace already received and forward in confidence to the grace that will lead us home. In the meantime, that grace is supposed to affect the way we live with one another.

As you sing Amazing Grace this Sunday, don't hurry past the word wretch. It may be one of the most important words we sing. It puts us in the right place to understand both Newton's hymn and Jesus' parable: among those who have received a mercy greater than anything we could have claimed for ourselves.

As you sing, consider this question:

Whose debt am I still holding after God has forgiven mine?