Silent Night, Holy Night

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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and tonight we’re talking about “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

I want to start with a confession: that this really feels like the wrong place to put this song in the lineup, because I associate it with that midnight Christmas Eve service where everybody lights a candle, and they always have to explain how to light a candle safely, right?

Hold yours upright, let the other person light yours. And then at the end of the service—oh wait, no, that’s wrong. I mean, the lit candle stays upright, and you light yours.

See? This is why we need instructions every year.

Anyway, at the end of the service, they turn the lights down, and they light all the candles, and you raise your hands, and it’s just a gorgeous, beautiful moment. And now—now it’s Christmas.

But thematically, it kind of belongs right where I’ve put it, which… is why I put it there.

We’re still setting the stage. It’s nighttime in Bethlehem. There are stars, angels, shepherds, the proclamation of good news. So here we are.

It’s not the most complicated song in the world when you really read the lyrics. It just kind of tells you what’s going on, and every verse gives you a little more scenery.

Verse one gives you a quiet night, a holy night, Mary and her newborn. Nothing flashy. Nothing complicated. It’s just peaceful.

This is the moment before the world changes.

Jesus is here, but we haven’t seen His ministry yet. We haven’t seen what’s going to happen. We haven’t seen [all those things that Mary knew][mary]. All we know is that it’s coming.

/out-loud/8-mary-did-you-know/

Outside the inn—or the house—where they’re staying, the shepherds are a little bit more freaked out. They are quaking at the sight of angels, which is reasonable, because as we’ve discussed, everywhere else in the Bible, one angel is enough to make people drop to their knees in fear.

The angels always start off with, “Be not afraid.”

But these shepherds are seeing a sky full of them—not just one.

That is terrifying.

And then it turns out it gets worse. They’re talking to you. No—they’re singing to you. They are bringing “glories streaming from heaven afar.”

This is heaven’s response to that tiny child.

And you’re just a shepherd, kind of freaking out, right? I mean, you’re not much older than Mary.

Now in verse three, the direction kind of flips.

In verse two, heaven is shining glory toward the manger. And then in verse three, Jesus shines glory back—”love’s pure light”—reminding us of what’s coming: the redeeming grace of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Not literal floodlights like Moses coming down off the mountain, but instead the hope-in-the-darkness imagery from John 1. Light in a world that doesn’t understand it, hasn’t earned it, can’t extinguish it.

And yet, here He is.

Then in verse four, it pulls us in.

Yesterday, in Away in a Manger, we were the shepherds. But here today, we’re invited to sing with the angels. And it turns out we’re not enough! We know it.

We ask the stars to lend their light.

We ask the angels to join the hymn.

And the song just widens the circle from the shepherds, to the angels, to the stars, to the entire human race, because that’s the glory Jesus deserves.

It’s a beautiful song, not a complicated one. It does have a cool history, though.

In 1818, a man named Joseph Mohr, a Catholic priest in Austria, wrote these words. Actually, it turns out he wrote them in 1816, but then in 1818, he was running this church, and the nearby river floods and it destroys their organ.

And he needs music for the Christmas Eve service.

So he goes to visit his friend Franz Gruber—not Hans Gruber of Die Hard fame. (Yes, it’s a Christmas movie.) Franz Gruber.

And he asks him to compose music for literally that night’s Christmas Eve mass, because apparently extreme last-minute hymn composition is a Christmas carol tradition.

Unfortunately, that church no longer exists. The river that flooded the organ eventually took down the entire church. But a new church was built, and that church is literally called the Silent Night Chapel because of this song—I mean, it’s called that in German, but close enough.

Anyway, a troupe of singers heard the song, and they started repeating it all over Austria. It turns out they actually presented it to the kings of Austria, and eventually it became this giant Christmas tradition.

In fact, UNESCO declared it intangible cultural heritage in 2011. That’s a heck of a song.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript by Joseph Mohr and his buddy, not-Hans-Gruber, was lost. And so, for a lot of years, people just kind of assumed that the music was written by famous people like Mozart or Beethoven or insert Central European composer here.

But in 1995, a manuscript resurfaced, written by Mohr, in his own handwriting—which is actually the only one we’ve got in his own handwriting—that confirms that he wrote it in 1816, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And it also confirms that Gruber wrote the music.

Many years later, the English version showed up, translated by John Freeman Young, an Episcopal priest living in New York. It turns out he took some liberties with the translation.

And I hate learning things like this, because I’ve sung this song my entire life, and I had no idea these aren’t the original words.

For example, the phrase “tender and mild,” which we all know in English, was originally “with curly hair” in German. I mean, obviously Young was trying to keep the rhyme scheme intact, but those are not the same words, buddy.

Here’s another one—and I don’t think this one matters too much either—”Round yon virgin, mother and child,” in German it turns out is ambiguous language. It could have been referring to either Mary and Joseph watching the baby, or to Mary and Jesus, as the English language has it.

This is the English translation I’ve been talking about, because that’s the language that I speak, but the song is now sung in three hundred-something languages, which is just beautiful.

And here’s the most important piece of trivia about this song:

It is canonically Shrek’s favorite Christmas carol.

There’s nothing structurally complex in this hymn. Every verse just paints one part of the nativity scene. But the power of the song is in the atmosphere.

The music and the words together bring us into that evening: calm, luminous, reverent. Exactly what you want during Advent.

The music and the words together bring us the glory of heaven. The radiance of redeeming grace. Terrified shepherds turned into joyful, singing witnesses. And then all of us joining with the angels and the stars themselves.

Together, we create a choir far bigger than our own voices.

And that’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.

We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.