HARK THE HERALDS ANGELS SING
By Sandro Botticelli - National Gallery, London, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39054778.
On everyone's favorite nominally Methodist Christmas hymn and the end of the world.
The night I first decided to convert to Christianity was cold, at least by the standards one uses to judge the American South. It was Christmas Eve 2023, and I had gone to midnight mass alone, filled with confused reverence and tired from getting off work at a retail job, bustling with last minute gift purchases. I am Jewish, and had grown up loosely raised in the reform tradition, harboring in my adolescence only a secret penchant for reading the New Testament, so most of what was going on at and around the altar was foreign to me. One thing I did understand, and felt deeply in my heart however, was the presence of God in the singing of Christmas carols. I remember walking home humming the refrain to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” — a song whose words I already knew, a stranger to the Christian faith proper — and feeling sure that I had only just begun to understand that something quite big and important had happened both this specific Christmas day, and all other Christmases before it. In the Jewish faith there is a saying often repeated during the holiday of Passover — “In every generation one is obligated to view himself as though he came out of Egypt, as it says: ‘Tell your son on that day saying, “Because of this God acted for me when I came out of Egypt.”’” This atemporal and recurrent view of God’s covenant and grace now feels very Christian to me. The long foretold Christ is not only born to us in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago, but every winter in the hearts and souls of His faithful. I find hymns like “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” to be a testament of this ancient faith, easily communicable and emphatically true.
The simple beauty of this hymn is how seamlessly it transcends denominations. Originally written for the Church of England, but with notable contributions from Methodist forerunners Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, you will find this song equally at home in Roman Catholic hymnals, Evangelical worship services, and the Charlie Brown Christmas Special soundtrack. Indeed the most popular musical setting of Wesley’s verse is Mendelssohn’s Festgesang, originally written to be performed in Leipzig at a celebration to mark the putative 400th anniversary of the invention of printing with movable type by Johannes Gutenberg. In this sense, it should be considered the pinnacle of classical Protestant contribution to the wider church hymnal, near universal in its acceptance by all branches of the church. It dramatizes a piece of scripture, Luke’s account of God’s angels heralding the birth of our lord to nearby farmhands (2:10). Thus from its inception the hymn’s central subject has been the joint lauding of God by both heavenly and earthly powers. I am reminded of the uniquely moving preface to the Sanctus in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer — “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name.” The idea that human worship not only directs itself one-sidedly towards the transcendent, but exists in reciprocal concert with that realm is one of the most compelling implications of the Mass taking place “out of time.” In this sense, the hymn is both a song of the incarnation, and by the incarnation, for it represents and reflects the union and synchronicity between heaven and earth epitomized and made possible through God taking on earthy flesh in Jesus Christ.
Saint Athanasius describes the metaphysical nature of Christ incomparably in “On the Incarnation” — “The body of the Word… being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed from a virgin, was of itself mortal and, like other bodies, liable to death. But the indwelling of the Word loosed it from this natural liability, so that corruption could not touch it. Thus it happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.” By this sound logic, the incarnation contains within itself a perfect prefiguration and mirror of the Crucifixion. Christ’s inextricable Godly nature is itself brought to death in His body — decisively of this decaying world — yet liberates us all from our slavery to this very same death in its ritual debasement and subsequent ascension (“Risen with healing in His wings”). Mary’s womb was both a tomb and a field of blush pink wildflowers in the spring, the precise temporal and spatial site at which the entirety of existence’s purpose was fulfilled. The end of the world is contained within its beginning, the death of the son of man echoes His birth, God’s plan for our salvation is both wonderfully and fearfully made. When the herald angels sing, they sing so we may “veiled in flesh the Godhead see / Hail the incarnate deity!”
The hymn invites us, by the power of Jesus’s birth, to celebrate this occasion alongside the angels who were made by him and lovingly long for our company. Wesley writes: “Joyful all ye nations rise / Join the triumph of the skies.” Just as Moses receives God’s covenant on Sinai, theophany is always met with song. As we receive the new covenant from the mother of God, we too mix the thrill of His promises with the somber blood of lambs described in Exodus 24:6-8, and sprinkle it sacramentally on His people Israel. The birth of our lord is both a joyous and a fearful occasion. The king of kings is here present as a vulnerable child, the sheer implications of God sleeping level the faculties of reason. There are two verses Charles Wesley originally included in the 1739 edition of the song, often left out of subsequent adaptations given their eschatological nature. He describes Christ’s hypostatic union, singing “in Mystic Union join / Thine to ours, and ours to Thine.” He goes on to mirror Genesis, as Paul did (1 Corinthians 15:45, Romans 5:19), proclaiming Christ the new Adam, and Mary new Eve. Wesley foretells the very end of time, when the second coming of Christ finishes what the incarnation started, and unifies earth and heaven just as man has become one with God. This is a lot to think about when Macy’s is still running their holiday doorbuster sales, but this is also the reality of the penitential anticipatory liturgical season of advent coinciding with perhaps the most superficially pretty time of year.
A year ago, when I understood no Christology and very little about my own beliefs, the melody of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” was still able to guide my heart to the angels around me, celebrating the miraculous birth of our lord alongside those apathetically learned and enthusiastically ignorant alike. I love that this song appeals to people from all walks of life, I love that it has the capacity for theological close reading, and can still be sloppily belted by twelve year olds at a Christmas pageant. It’s been recorded by Mariah Carey, the Choir of King’s College, Sufjan Stevens, and Nat King Cole. It’s a song that feels at once ceremonial, doctrinal, and fun. In this sense, I feel it perfectly embodies the contradictory existential tones of Christmastide, and deserves to be sung, shouted, spoken, and laughed alongside from the rooftops of every Christian home. I think of Wesley writing “mild He lays His glory by,” detailing the self-emptying kenosis of Christ’s birth, God making Himself nothing (Philippians 2:7), so that He may dutifully inhabit mortality. This very God from God, light from light, is that which glows in the sleeping infant Jesus, and that which summarily blots out its shine so that we might burn brightly forever. It’s a promise I hope will keep me in the pews at midnight mass for the rest of my life: God so loved the world that, in Athanasius’ pithy expression, he made God man, so that man might become God (On the Incarnation 54:3).
