Listen to the CarolPermalink
TranscriptPermalink
Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. My name is Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at a doubleheader starring angels.
Many, many angels.
Because heaven runs the biggest choir the universe has ever seen.
Today’s songs are “Angels We Have Heard on High” and “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” Both take us straight into Luke 2, but with very different vibes.
Let’s talk about it.
Angels We Have Heard on High is basically the Gloria in Excelsis Deo in four-part harmony.
Yes, the chorus is in Latin—but no, the angels weren’t speaking Latin. Luke was writing in Greek, and the angels probably weren’t constrained to human languages anyway.
But that extended Gloria refrain pulls you right into the actual angelic hymn of Luke 2:14.
And that opening image—mountains echoing the angels—always makes me think of one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 19: creation itself answering back, declaring the glory of God.
And there’s even more.
Psalm 103:20–22, says:
Praise the Lord, you his angels.
Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts.
Praise the Lord, all his works.
And then, much later, Jesus says in Luke 19:
If these people, this crowd, were silent, the very stones would cry out.
This hymn makes it sound like they’ve been rehearsing.
Verse two asks the shepherds:
Why this jubilee?
Which raises a fun question: who’s asking this?
I think it can only be us—the stunned bystanders, the Greek chorus, the neighbors watching a pack of teenage shepherds sprint through town, whooping it up and singing a cosmic anthem instead of, I don’t know, a shepherding song, or, much more likely, a drinking song.
This hymn pulls us into the story not as the shepherds, but as those trying to understand the shepherds’ joy, which I think is a brilliant narrative turn.
And then, mercifully, it answers its own question with an invitation:
Why this jubilee?
Come to Bethlehem and see.
And that’s interesting, because Christianity is a go-and-tell religion. Judaism is much more of a come-and-see religion.
But here we are, as Christians, invited to come and see—right at the manger, where both worlds collide.
The angels go and tell.
The shepherds come and see.
And the world is transformed.
And best yet, we’re invited to join in the worship of this newborn king, lying in a feeding trough.
The fourth verse intensifies the contrast even more: a baby in a manger praised by angels.
And if you zoom out a little bit, this hymn starts to echo across Scripture. It helps me see three—or maybe even four—major angelic scenes all at once.
First, Luke 2, as we’ve already seen: the angels announcing Jesus to the shepherds.
Second, Gethsemane, which is interesting—because when the priests come to take Jesus, He doesn’t call down legions of angels to rescue him, even though they’re obviously available.
Third, Revelation 5, with hundreds of millions singing around the Lamb—angels and saints together in one thunderous chorus.
And the fourth scene is just a couple of angels at the empty tomb, announcing what feels like a second birth: the risen life of Christ breaking into the world.
For me, singing this carol is like standing at the intersection of all those moments at once.
Historically, this song traces back to an eighteenth-century French poem called Les Anges dans nos campagnes—basically, the angels in the countryside.
The English version is what’s called a free imitation, a polite way of saying creative paraphrase.
And it’s kind of amusing to me that this is one of those rare moments when Protestant churches cheerfully sing Latin without blinking.
(There’ll be another one in a couple of days.)
Let’s pivot to the second hymn: Angels from the Realms of Glory.
It’s much less commonly sung—or at least in my experience—which might be because it’s somewhat trickier to sing. But it also might be because choir directors just love those overlapping glorias from Angels We Have Heard on High… maybe a little too much.
This hymn was written in 1816 by a man named James Montgomery, but weirdly, it’s connected to the same French poem as the first song. Both hymns come from the same French source.
This week is a Christmas multiverse.
What I love about this hymn is that it starts even earlier than Luke 2.
Much, much earlier.
You who sang creation’s story…
That points, most obviously, to Genesis 1 and to John 1. But in my head, it really echoes Job 38, where God basically says:
Where were you when I was laying the foundations of the world?
The angels were there. You, Job, were not.
Sometimes we forget how often angels show up in Scripture. They’re everywhere when you start paying attention.
Sometimes they’re singing, sometimes they’re smiting—Sodom, Gomorrah, Egypt, all that.
But the author threads all of that into Christmas.
The angels present at creation are the same angels present here at Bethlehem. For them, it’s all one story.
And, honestly, that’s a reminder that it should be one story for us, too.
Moving on, verse two mirrors Luke 2 yet again: shepherds in the field.
And then this wonderful line:
God with us is now residing.
That’s Emmanuel language—straight out of Advent.
Verse three moves us to the Magi—sages in this hymn, which is a great word for their… whatever their job title is. Scientist, alchemist, astronomer, something.
And then it closes by reaching toward all the nations:
The great desire of nations.
Charles Wesley goes to Haggai 2:7, for that phrase. For me, as you’ve heard, it’s Isaiah 2, where the nations stream toward the mountain of the Lord.
But once again, in just a few lines, you get creation and Bethlehem and all the nations—a cosmic sweep compressed into a hymn you can sing in just a couple of minutes.
And then there’s that repeated refrain:
Come and worship.
Come and worship.
It’s simple, but mighty.
It invites every group addressed in this song—and there are a bunch of them. Angels, shepherds, sages, saints, sinners—there are four S’s and an A, I don’t know—to come and worship.
Basically, if you’re breathing, you’re invited.
So these two hymns give us one angelic announcement, refracted through two different lenses.
And they both remind us that we’re part of a story much bigger than just one night in Bethlehem.
We’re invited to join the song the angels have been singing since before the beginning.
We can just jump right in.
Gloria.
We should.
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.