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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about “O Holy Night,” a hymn that was, at one point, considered a French revolutionary anthem.

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

Today I want to do two big things with this hymn. First, I want to show you just how much Scripture is packed into it. And second, I want to highlight how the parts that we skip actually really matter.

Most recordings only sing verse one, or at most verses one and three. Verse two almost never shows up, which is a real shame. So today, we’re going to look at every verse.

Let’s dig in.

Verse one, as usual, is a lot of scene-setting—or at least it feels like it at first—with those stars brightly shining. You think it’s just going to be standard Luke 2 Christmas imagery, but as it goes on, you get much deeper theology than I really ever paid attention to.

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining” isn’t just original sin from the fall of Adam. It’s also Paul’s image of the earth groaning in anticipation of the coming Messiah.

And “a thrill of hope” reminds me of the disciples of John the Baptist, when they come to Jesus and they say, Hey, are you the guy that was prophesied, or should we wait for another?

Well, it turns out He is the guy who was prophesied, and “the weary world rejoices” at the “new and glorious morn.”

The right response from us to that is the next line: “fall on your knees.”

That’s the giant, soaring moment of vocal prowess—that part that every big-voice singer lives for. And it’s also exactly what we should be doing.

Verse two also starts off gently, talking about the light of faith and the guiding light of the star. But the most important lines in this verse—and the reason it upsets me so much that we leave it out sometimes—come all the way at the end, right after “the King of Kings in a manger.”

Here they are:

In all our trials, born to be our friend
He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger

These lines are critical for those of us who are human, and sinners, and weak, and tempted—which is all of us.

In Hebrews, we learn that Jesus is our great high priest, and that because He took on flesh and blood and felt our weakness, He’s able to help us when we’re tempted.

Maybe it’s just me, but I need that promise every day: a God who became one of us, and didn’t just stay up in heaven saying, Do this; don’t do that.

And finally, here’s verse three—why this song became part of a French revolution in the 1840s. Not the one you’re thinking of from 1789, but a later one.

Before we get there, we hear that “His law is love”—the greatest commandment—and “His gospel is peace.” But that’s also kind of weird, because actually Jesus says that He comes not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).

The peace, the promised peace, comes in His second coming, long after Christmas and wise men.

And then, finally, we get these lines that really became a problem in nineteenth-century France:

Chains shall break, for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease

It doens’t seem so weird today, but it was a problem back then.

The natural Bible connection is the tiny little book of Philemon, where Paul is writing to this slave owner and he says, Hey man, your escaped slave Onesimus has found his way here to Rome, and he’s been super-helpful to me, and he’s become a Christian, just the same way that you’re a Christian. So I’m sending him back to you, but I hope that you will welcome him as a brother, and not as a slave.

This is the ethic of the New Testament, where masters and slaves are no longer just masters and slaves, but instead now both brothers under Christ.

Obviously, oppression still exists. We don’t yet have the equality we look for. But this promise points forward toward Christ’s return.

And we’re going to get to those politics, but before that, I want to look at just a little bit of history of this poem.

It was written in the mid-1840s—1843 or 1847, I’ve seen both dates—by a French wine merchant named Placide Cappeau, allegedly in a single sitting on a six-hour stagecoach ride.

He called it Minuit, Chrétiens, meaning “Midnight, Christians.”

It was originally much more of a Charles Wesley type of poem, singing our theology. He wrote things like, “Man-God descended to erase original sin and cease the wrath of his Father.”

It got some music in 1847 by a guy named Adolphe Adam, who was mostly known at the time for writing secular operas. And then it was performed that year at Christmas Mass in Roquemaure, which is the church that Cappeau had originally written the poem for, in celebration of getting some new stained-glass windows.

It’s the next year, 1848, where things really go off the rails.

By that time, France is in the middle of a revolution, and the French poet Lamartine calls this nice Christmas carol “a religious Marseillaise.” And you might know that La Marseillaise is the somewhat bloody national anthem of France.

So here we have this Christmas hymn that also seems to call for revolution. It calls for liberty and equality and brotherhood—which is exactly the motto of France today: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

But it’s quite uncomfortable if you’re King Louis-Philippe I in 1848 and your people are in open revolt.

There’s so much French history bound up in this poem, I almost forgot to ask how we got an English version.

It turns out that story is also super-interesting, because the English text is not a translation at all. It’s actually a rewrite by the Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight in 1855.

He replaces these hardcore lines like “It is for us he was born; he suffered and died” with much more poetic phrases like “With all our hearts, we praise his holy name.”

He turns “The powerful await your deliverance,” which is a great scriptural instruction, into “Oh, hear the angel voices.”

I’m pretty happy we got the English version we have. I like it.

So we have this gorgeous hymn. But as I said at the beginning, almost no artists actually sing the whole thing.

In fact, I was looking for versions to include in the show notes, and I almost couldn’t find an artist who sang verse two. I tried a lot of the standard Christmas artists, and they all had these just beautiful recordings, but most of them only sing the first verse, and none at all used the second.

Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir skips verse two.

I finally found a version by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, so that we could listen to the second verse. And of course, that is linked in the show notes.

I want to remind you again how crucial verse two is.

Jesus was “born to be our friend.” “To our weakness, He’s no stranger.”

That’s really critical about who Jesus is to us. That He’s one of us. Flesh and blood with us. He knows our weaknesses, our trials, our temptations. He’s felt them.

And so He can help us when we feel them.

It turns out this song that I thought was just an epic vocal showcase is really this rich, biblical, theologically bold hymn—really the cinematic version of the incarnation, of hope breaking into a weary world.

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.

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